Dairy of a Madman

Looking back a few years, I realize how important inertia is in a life like mine. It’s incredibly hard to stop when you’ve got years of moving fast (and non-stop) at your back — to the extent that I’ve had friends gift me with physical reminders that I need to relax.

Like, a metal sign that sits atop my computer monitor, carved to say “RELAX.” And copious amounts of Xanax.

Not really.

A few months ago, I stopped, finally (though my wife might argue that point). I’ve not produced anything worth talking about in almost a year. No screenplays, no articles, no short or long fiction. No website redesigns, no films. Nothing. I’m still working 60+ hours a week between my day job as a web design guy and my night job as a provider of Cirrhosis, still playing in the band, but nothing else. I’ve been catching up on DVDs and books, playing lots of Scrabble and Tiger Woods Golf on the XBox. Relaxing, right?

Starting this week, I’m going to reestablish the progressive inertia. I don’t have anything concrete in mind yet, though (as always) I have a million ideas. Looking down the tunnel in front of me, it’s unnerving: you don’t realize how much progress you’ve made until you’ve let it slip away from you. When you’re climbing mountains, you don’t look down — it’s not important how far you’ve come as much as how much further you have to go. But stop climbing, return to the bottom (gravity never sleeps, you know), and look up to the last flag you spiked into the stone face before you quit.

Scary, yes, but invigorating. Good to know that you’ve not scaled to the summit yet, when there’s plenty more time to go.

Now listening to:
Just another mountain? Yes and no, in a world devoid of binary questions.

As we sit at our desks, programming our websites or writing our magazine articles or doing our homework, the world keeps turning, and 32 people are fatally shot at a school in West Virginia before the killer turns the gun on himself. We pick through every shred of evidence, tangential or not, trying to pinpoint what video games or music or law passed by the other side is to blame. We eat up media time with every new development, speculating without having the full picture, blaming anyone that seems to fit our idea of the bad guy. If he’s Korean, then by god all you Orientals are under the suspicious eye. And hey, aren’t most Koreans Muslim, anyway? Continue reading “Sensitivity gradient”

Sometimes, the signs of depressive episodes aren’t typical, or nearly as conscious as you (I) would expect.

I’ve had an increasing number of incidents over the past few years of 24-48 hour stints in bed, not interested at all in getting up to face the world. It’s not nearly as aware as that, though; I’m not pulling the covers up over my head, shutting out the world and horrified of what lies outside in the light. It’s much more casual, a shrug of the shoulders when faced with the choice of returning to sleep or rolling out of bed. A shrug of the shoulders means that the solution that requires the least effort wins, and very little in life requires more effort than falling back into unconsciousness.

I never really thought too much about those long sleeping periods (usually, a few days out of a month or two). Before, I wasn’t getting nearly as much sleep as I should, and so those long sleep periods seemed to me to be a catch up period. Now, though, it’s a lot easier to recognize as what it is — depression of some sort, whether seasonal affective or bipolar.

Something to look into, though — the source of the depression, and why it’s manifesting itself like this.