Sweet treats for the literary, the musical, the feminine, and the generally filthy.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Chronicle of Med-Deprived Madness

Author's Note
Isn't it fun to see what happens when you go cold-turkey on a life-supporting med? I never do this, out of disgust for general cultural acceptance of self-absorption, but here's a fun little snapshot of my brain narrative the last week as told in fragments:

Been working like a dog: 9-day week, 11-day week, w/o break, between two jobs. Ran out of C--, no more Rx, need another. Doc needs to fax pharm. Will he get memo? Will they fill? Will I have dough? Takes DAYS. Meanwhile, fight for one whole day off to have willing friends come over and begin organizing Dresden-esque apt. First touch in a year. Virginal dust. Startled dander. The vacuum cloud and catshit surprise.

Back spasms every morning for weeks/months. Bad sleep. So need memory foam topper, bullets biting, sucking up, stiffening upper. Have the $, the time/energy to clear out space to create space? Dash thru Ikea in last 10 min.  Grab such life-changing items as BEDFRAME (!!!), mattress topper and wonder of wonders WRITING DESK. Taken a whole year since move-in. Life in constant suspension, hold-off for faint illusion of travel. First time since leaving family home, know where I'll be in six months. Investments worthy. Friday night fluorescents twinkle on two young women struggling to fit mammoth boxes in tweedly Corolla already full, vestiges of last paid exploitation. Immigrant family's little girl swinging back and forth on dangerous machinery. Can't understand "be careful" in English.

Haul back to apt, pay $60 for delivery of Corolla un-friendly items. Arrives. Takes 4 hours, putting together, bruises, sweat, exhaustion, then to work, 4 hours, min. wage. Come home, bed MAGNIFICENT, sleep amazing but only tip of exhaustion iceberg. Next day, too exhausted for more building, wake up weeping, sore throat, eyes never not swollen. Do makeup in red to match. Is sad, is allergy, is punk, no?

Into shop again. Burst into new tears upon arrival, come to faulty irrational conclusions about life. Instigate text-fight with loved one (fifty points, back to Start, lose a turn). Sit in empty shop with bellyful of anxiety, sorrow, panic, drowning, bottom slid out, falling in dream, bottomless cavern. Allergies miserable. Reality clicking behind eyes, like refrigerator becoming self-aware and checking in, alive? sentient? shoddy slide transitions, disassociation, OBE dig that girl, face-in-hands, bangs need cut, posture/attitude need straighten. Should smile, should greet, should work...

Get in 20-min war w/ register tape, nearly rage-destroy entire machine. Forget to turn off air in shop, on all night, $$$ for owners, woops.

Off 1/2 of meds regimen: 2-3 days.

Home, have self-justified Chipotle and Ben & Jerry's most fattening flavor, the anxiety flavor, the hard day flavor, the I Still Have Rapid Metabolism flavor. Deserving. Distract self w/ most fugue-like episodes of realistic terror-drama. Nearly have fit. Feel worse. Feel danger. (Don't hurt yourself) Switch to Jay and Silent Bob, tend to dish mountain, wander aimlessly, burdened w/ relationship anxiety, bedtime anxiety (have to be at 9, leave by 8:30, wake up 7:30, wash one pair underwear in sink, cats fed and coffee made, so bed by 11, already 10:49, if in bed by 11 then have--on fingers--11-12-1-2-3-4-5-6-7:30 to sleep, plenty, IF successful)

Hear back, breakup tone. Cogent list of my failings laid out in plainview, none the least of which a dire creative standstill, cannot afford, but also cannot afford to have back spasms and rage-inducing clutter, need dough for items, need hours for dough, but need time for art, taken by hours for dough, but no art in level of clutter and physical pain and around and around and around we gooooo.

Already 11:30. Missing sleep, needing answers first or will dream of having stomach entrails ripped out by T-Rex, the monster not the band, lord haven't made a tune in weeks, not a sentence in days, 3rd or 4th night not taking crucial med. Losing track.

Harder to hear someone else notice one's failings. Self-loathing just at bay, thoughts of how my own shadows of peer abuse may be influencing my turnaround treatment of others. How lovely. The monsters linger. How will I ever exorcise? (Awareness, monitoring, foresight, get back on fucking meds, take--no--DEMAND days off...) But when to push on? When to let self-compassion (inner big sister) intervene, interest of self-preservation? Measure against others or only take stock of myself, MY limits, MY capacity, choose worthy struggle over un-worthy suffering? Which more/less worthy? How known? Done to self? IF self-induced then self-fulfilling, then self-solvable?? Seems to be so. Anxiety about creative rut useful/destructive? Probably latter, if too heated. Former if only tepid, passing acknowledgment or none at all.

Have felt this way. The old way. The family way. Before meds, when future seemed improbable, slave to suicide fantasies. The sinking, the fog lattice, watching myself, perma-disassociative fugue. But--remember also?

Remember? those nights wedded to the keys and world onscreen, ideas becoming thoughts shaped into sentences, beauty, strangeness, profundity, into story. A relief/disappointment to have to end or stop. Hours stretching limitless, unfathomable depths of loathing, re-purposed in scribbles, sketches, studies. Sense of lifeline, flotation device, rope descending into hell-canyon. That was grasping. That was life, just a glimpse. That was self-preservation.

A city wrapped in anxiety, resignation, depression. Progressive crashes at night, must be banana peel on street at intersection, the cries of the injured WAKE UP WAKE UP, laughter of gay flyboys and cackles/whoops of well-heeled women in sausage casings, a white couple fighting about their child-dog. The wailings of the homeless in the morning as I step out and almost on another human trying to stay warm behind outer doors, looking in the window at carpet and bed frames, memory foam and depressed women with girl-faces who don't have to pee in water bottles for modicum of animal modesty. The cats swipe apologetically at dingleberry drops. Obsessive. Shamed.

Art the only antidote. Remember, remember.

J is fine.
J is accomplished and capable.
J is intelligent.
J is an artist, a thinker.
J is doing her best.
J is strong and resilient (remember leaving the scene, throwing the roses on the sidewalk, ignoring the voice messages, living with parents, commuting to keep shitty job, enduring sexual harassment at said job, makeup on the eye and grace in the limp, leaving, leaving, leaving. Reinventing, loving again. Remember.)
J is good, seeks and strives for the good.
J is happy, healthy and youthful. (Feel it slipping away)
J is as J is NOW, is fine, feast and famine, ebb and flow. Recall love. Forget pain. Always forward, forward, forward pushing.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

The Devil On Your Chest

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare


Has this ever happened to you?

You're asleep one minute, dreaming or not, and suddenly you become aware that you can't move, can barely breathe, like something is sitting on your chest.

Ever opened your eyes and seen a guy like this sitting on you?
Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (v2)

It's terrifying, obviously. You feel helpless. I have a few friends who have once or regularly experience these, so I want to shed a little light on what this phenomenon may be. The following is taken from a letter I wrote to one of these friends:

Dear Traveler,

There's a lot of information out there about what exactly is going on physically with this experience. One interesting thing is that this seems to occur most frequently in people with narcolepsy as well as more prevalent in those of African descent. It also occurs in people with abnormal sleep habits, daily stress, or generalized anxiety disorder. In these cases, it's a physical symptom, and presumably not "real," in terms of something that could actually harm you. Basically, your REM is still going but you're awake. It's a disruption of sleep for the usual reasons, stress, weird schedules, etc.

That said, I think this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of explaining what those experiences are and how to avoid them.

 Early in college I was experimenting a lot with astral projection, the  experience of accessing the dream dimension while still awake. People have lucid dreams, and that's where this takes place. Your mind travels. There is really amazing evidence of the reality of this place as a literal dimension. It is believed that this is where you travel when you die. You can make plans to meet someone else (in waking life) in the astral, and you can find them, do stuff together there, and then in waking life discuss the events and you will have both experienced the same thing. Through minds. This is crazy shit, and I have totally experienced it. There's no expectation that anyone would believe this if you don't experience it firsthand, but there's my two cents. 

After doing some research around astral projection sites, I realized that your red devil is an archetype of what they call "evil entities." These are the evil things and people who you encounter in dreams, you try to run away from, they drag you down when you're trying to astral project, they threaten you, etc. You may even experience a superimposition of their physical image in the waking world if you open your eyes and yet you are still in the astral dimension. They may sit on your chest, preventing you from traveling back upward to your astral body. This is so common and recognizable that I think it may give you some answers about your experiences. Check it: http://astralprojectionguides.com/outer-body-experience-obe-symptoms/

What are these things? 

They are all around us, trying to intimidate and bully us out of attaining greater consciousness. They occur in the real world as well as the astral. The difference is, in the astral, you may see them as archetypical images of evil that we have absorbed from fairy tales, movies, and religion. Heres's some information from that same site: http://astralprojectionguides.com/dealing-with-evil-astral-beings/

That show you liked is back in style.
There's information that links them to the Dark Lodge, which if you're a fan of Twin Peaks, you may dismiss as Lynchian lore. But the dude did his research. On the fantastic revelatory tool known as Wikepedia I learned that he may have mined these terms Dark/Black/White Lodge from Bill Burrough's novel, Cities of the Red Night, part of which takes place in Tibet, where we know there is fathoms more knowledge un-mined by the majority of Western culture. So there's some good reading for you, and food for thought.

How do you get rid of them?

There are mantras you can recite, actions you can take like calling on your spirit guides, but the most important thing is to get in the habit of remembering that your astral body is eternal and cannot be harmed, and neither will your physical body. They're cheeky assholes, but full of baseness. Their weakness is light, love, and good humor. So one way is to imagine yourself full of blinding white light that radiates outward. This will immediately repel them. Or you can shoot a white laser beam out of your eyes or whatever, the important thing is to remember the glowing white light.

The most effective battle tactic for these jerks is to practice during your waking life. The habit of awareness on this level translates to your dream state. Like the dreams where you're doing something you do everyday, the pattern of repetition is fertile. So get in the habit of whenever someone seems threatening to you in waking life, think immediately of the ball of white light surrounding you and pulsing outward. If you can suspend disbelief and just do this over and over you'll be able to banish the devils.

Anyway, sorry for the long weird random email, but I think this shit's fascinating. You have a very complex and inventive mind which is what makes your art so awesome. Don't let shit like this make you worry about the state of your mind, don't let it produce more fear which ruins EVERYTHING. It's really lame, and you are a fucking machete wielding, gun slinging warrior with the intelligence and discipline to engage your consciousness on this level and defeat these guys. 

Peace,

JG