For the rain it raineth every day

It's not an ascot, it's a shawl collar.

I've had a hard week. Migraine City. Population: this guy. A storm blew in--this still being Texas, and thus impermeable to moisture, it didn't rain, of course--but the barometric pressure went haywire. Then so did all the vascular niceties in my brain. So it's been an interesting few days watching my body try to decide which is the better option: to panic and bully me into constant motion as I, like some poor Charlie Chaplin, frantically disgorge myself of adrenaline; or, to throw up and be immobile on the couch, like some guy on the couch. The compromise? A bit of both.

But as I dragged myself out this evening to buy some cat food for that cat I don't own, I caught the late stages on Beethoven's fifth symphony broadcast on public radio. I never found out who conducted, or what orchestra, but it was a rousing performance, and, driving to the store in the non-rain, feeling inside like blended vegetable, I remembered those lines from Byron's Don Juan,

And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep.

(The remainder of that stanza we'll omit for its counterproductive lust for oblivion and all things gloomy.) Beethoven has long been a hero of mine, for reasons that are probably both obvious to everyone and refused by no one. But it occurred to me only tonight that everything I admire in Beethoven, I despise in Byron, even though I do admire Byron selectively (and worship him indiscriminately), and despite the embarrassing truth that the men were very much alike. Beethoven was a bursting-from-his-skin, emotional conscience who destroyed more precious, careful, or articulate patterns in order to restore them more fully; he was, despite his extraordinary temper and fondness for plants and other growing things, a rationalist, a man who created works of apparent chaos whose authentic structures are more planned, provided, and programmed than any you'll hear in his elders. They are orders built on a new metaphor, true, but they are superlatively ordered. Passion is the purpose; control is the means. Also, Beethoven had a sense of humor. Not a lot of people get that.

Byron too was an impostor. Like Beethoven, he was, essentially, a man of the past. He so successfully fabricated his own legend, and authenticated it in his own lifetime, that a case could be made for his inventing celebrity as a modern profession. He made a lot more money, and got a lot more lay, on the sell of his faux-gothic and oriental tales, which are mostly piss-awful, than he did from his satires, which, by their careful revision and design, he obviously valued. His romances, by contrast, he used to sop up spilled wine. Like Beethoven, he defrauded his public into believing him a Romantic: one of those tempestuous, tormented spirits, like the real damned--Schumann, for instance, or John Clare--who payed for their convictions with their sanities. Also like Beethoven, because he was, substantively, a man of reason, he enjoyed the spectacle of making art for people to consume. Let's remember that by the time Beethoven, and a bit later, Byron arrived to take hold of it, the arts industry had been only a few generations old. The notion of an arts marketplace was still novel. Not that I'm insinuating anything. Byron and Beethoven lived very different lives economically--one still subject to the whimsy of patrons and humbled into tutoring students for fees, the other bankrupt but rolling on credit. And their exploitations of a new market and its unexplored principles, although in itself an interesting contrast, isn't really the point.

What matters in this comparison, its functional load, as the linguists say (they don't anymore, actually, since functional load was discredited fifty years ago), is that both Beethoven and Byron deduced an inherent flaw, and danger, in the Romantic ideology (even as both men defined and defended it), which they managed to heal by not believing the very things they professed. Now, by that, I don't mean anything like "Beethoven didn't believe in the dignity of man and his feelings" or "loneliness didn't get Byron off" (boy, did it). What I mean is that Romanticism as we find it in, say, the Schumanns or Clares, the Romanticism as understood by those who codified its tenets into textbooks in the late nineteenth century, isn't remotely what either man practiced. Theirs was a reasonable, restrained, enlightened art, a very eighteenth-century art. (Byron's favorite poet was Alexander Pope.) Their innovation was to fuse powerful feelings with rational minds, and their saving grace, which, unfortunately, the Schumanns and Clares lacked and suffered greatly for not possessing, was a calculating man's restraint. They believed in passion, in individuality, in spontaneity, but they did not believe in these qualities separate from reason, inheritance, and determination. Byron pretended to because it sold his bad books (but not his good ones) and got women naked; Beethoven didn't so much pretend as promote half-truths, letting the complete and necessary fiction go unspoken and, mostly, unnoticed and unlearned.

So as I drove to the store to buy cat food for the cat I don't own, with a rousing performance of Beethoven fifth symphony on the radio, the sky cloudy and not raining (this still being Texas), I felt a tremendous surge of good-natured nobility rush through me, and I shuddered with a simple happiness I haven't felt in a long time, and that I seldom feel when not listening to Beethoven, the dour metrosexual with the boa, or not reading, of all improbable dandies, Byron, the man who never means what he says because he only ever says what he means. And like a thunderclap it struck me: the fifth symphony's tortuous struggle from menace, though defiance, to revolutionary calm, like its progeny, the inimitable ninth, owes that journey to a common (ironic, given the author) sentiment:

And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep.

There are two options in life, presuming we discount the third, self-negating option, which is no-life. Either we can be born, learn the animal pleasures and pains of being creaturely, then learn to hate those animal truths and accede to more complex or aristocratic truths, find those truths to be false or insufficient or incomprehensible, conclude that the universe is mean, mankind is vulgar, and knowledge is illusion and weep. Or we can do all the very same things but laugh, because if we didn't, see Byron, Don Juan, canto four, stanza four, lines twenty-five and twenty-six.

As I weighed the relative appeals to the cat palate of "classic chicken dinner with greens" and "turkey casserole in gravy," I took a moment, thought about my horrid day, and my horrid yesterday, and then the horrid descent of unbroken horrid days back to the first amino acids bumbling their way toward self-replication, I wanted to cry, clutch the stupid cat food to my heart and cry for the vast, powerful nothing of it. The deficit of happiness for all creatures. The potentially egregious mistake of sensory awareness and the almost certainly deadly mistake of consciousness. I saw in my imagination, all the way back to the primordial black, a chain of causes, each driving the next into further difficulty and conflict until the only viable strategy for survival was to spawn the first burgeoning of sensation, which, instantaneously, translated the world's neutral material processes into pain or pleasure. Mostly pain. I saw a locked, serpentine logic growing its way from indifference toward anguish, the only algorithmic endgame.

I got back in my car, the symphony ongoing but nearing its end, and after a few minutes of dazed misery, without intending to, as the orchestra hurled its mass against everything with which life can oppose it, I laughed. A little, happy laugh. I wasn't even thinking of Byron. And when I got home and heard on another station Willie Nelson's ballad for Pancho and Lefty, I quietly sang along, no longer laughing but not scowling either. There in the void emptied by opposing but unreconciled ironies, I sensed something vague but luminous, a way out of the glib Byronic ultimatum. It's the reason Willie Nelson trumps Byron, though probably not Beethoven, who had the nuance to guess at a third option, however ineffectual, between celebration and despair. Whether you laugh at the world's cruelty or buckle from its strain, you can always know kindness, in yourself or in others. Not that kindness changes anything. Nature's still cruel and is going to kill you. But maybe it'll let you run a while, as the federales tell it.

Choose your own adventure

Thirty-two years ago yesterday, at one in the morning, I became operationally a person. Sixteen years ago, near the same hour, Ben Cruse introduced me to this song, and I became functionally a person. It was a raucous occasion, most of which I missed, unfortunately, being lured to the telephone in another room to mime adolescence to my girlfriend at the time; so, like a spectator at a Roman carnival, I saw little and knew less but presumed much. Through the void spaces of the hallway I heard two men repeatedly jumping over a couch. The logic then was as infallible as it is now. Stewart Copeland syncopates hard, Sting, wank rooster that he is, shouts "Yeah!" and Ben jumps over the couch. Or not. It mostly depended on our mutual friend's encouragement, and whether the concentration of caffeine in Ben's bloodstream rose or fell on the downbeat. Or so it sounded from the hall, as I, outcast, offender, sourpuss, like some homoerotic troubadour, cherished the night's delirium from a distance. Until, that is, I hung up the phone and committed my own legs to some couch-vaulting. Just in time for "Born in the Fifties" I sprang into action, my lithe Scandinavian lank coiling like cat's muscle, as my shoe caught the edge of the couch and I learned, all at once, the physics of being tall and falling hard. It was a lively denouement, hysterically, soul-stretchingly satisfying, and a true turning point in my old man's ordinary life. I knew instantly: trying and not succeeding at clearing the couch was a hero's task. Too simple, too animal, and too good to be anything but Napoleonic, it was virtue: tacit, universal, arcane. The kind of softness in your bones when, as a newborn child, you warp them to the world's curve.

Here's to thirty-two more years of caffeine, even if I no longer drink it. Thirty-two couches. Thirty-two happy failures. Maybe less of The Police but plenty of stupid pleasure. Ben, with all my heart, I thank you for that night. Sting, fuck you, and a reluctant bravo. To all the rest, let's find some furniture to stack and abuse. This year, being quite crazy, I didn't enjoy my birthday. But until I'm dead, I have my chances. And besides, sixteen years ago, around one in the morning, which was the hour I first arrived anyway, I felt what pilgrims pray and ponder about, and I felt it not in eroded bones, or drab ineffability, or wily chant, but in a scuffled, juvenile scrap of grief, a neural misfire, a whack-and-tumble, and my best friends laughing at me as I lay on the floor, illuminated by having fucked it all up.

And the Billboard #1 from August 25 through October 6, 1979? "My Sharona" by The Knack. I would have preferred retching and jackhammers to commemorate my becoming a person. What a ghastly song.

You are what you eat and other tales of malabsorption

Deserve's got nothin' to do with it.

I don't know either. When I searched Google images for "Klonopin" and a handcuffed Santa Claus popped up, I elected not to ask questions. Other notable search results included portraits of military officers in full dress uniform; a myriad sexist dramatizations of women in distress being counseled by family and friends; a map of east Asia keyed according to the average street price of Klonopin per country; a cartoon featuring a man in a lab coat brewing his alchemical goods, with a caption below reading "I'd blow a pharmacist for 2mgs of Klonopin"; and, my personal favorite, although it didn't make the cut, a schematic of a Nintendo Gamecube controller. Ultimately I chose the Santa shot because it answered as many questions as it raised, whereas most of the competition, although cool, merely stumped me.

I realize it's been a few days since my last post. And there's a reason for that: feeling cracked. It's a common tactic played by the mentally ill, but often I find myself wondering, "wouldn't it be great if I didn't have this problem and instead had some other, more curable problem, like anything?" It's the crazy person version of swapping lunches in grade school. Everyone hates what he has and covets what he doesn't, because, let's face it, that banana you'll never eat inherently, in its inner banana, the Banana that Is, always looks vaguely more real and delicious than your emasculated plum.

Lately, for me, this bargaining has been about trading in time, not space; not this-for-that, but then-for-now. You see, there actually was a time, two months ago, when I had a problem to deal with. But problems are fecund like rabbits, which, on an unrelated note, can also be problems, and whenever they can, they multiply. What started in July as deep grief over Shuriken's death within weeks had mutated into a cat-and-mouse game of grief and panic, each exaggerating the other. As the panic grew more frequent, while the grief dug in, a floating melancholy arose, and like the rug in The Dude's apartment, it sort of tied the doom together. In themselves, grief, panic, and depression are godawful but treatable. Together they're a fucking hydra.

Or this: imagine a merry-go-round. You ride the horse as it revolves. But when you complete the first lap, a gorilla jumps out and "intimidates" you with delirious gestures. Well, that was frightening. Next time you'll be ready for it. But on the following lap, as you near the midpoint of the revolution, your horse dies. You decide to walk. It's the least can you do. It was a good horse. So you walk, feeling upset about your horse and also, in the back of your mind, anxious about the gorilla you know is lurking somewhere ahead of you, when, without warning, you get a migraine. There you are, circling an arbitrary pole at the center of fifty wooden horses (and one dead one) anticipating a savage ape-beating, with your whole physical body in revolt. Seconds before the gorilla clobbers you, you reminisce about the good old days when only your horse died, and before that, the golden age when only the steroid-gorilla inexplicably singled you out for destruction.

It's unreasonable, and unhelpful too, to think this way. I don't know that life actually was any easier after Shuriken died, or even before he died, for that matter. Even though it was "only" one thing, his death commanded one-hundred percent of my attention, life and body. When the panic arrived, healing became a noticeably more difficult task, or, if not more difficult, more complicated. But did it make life itself harder? I don't know. Before the panic, I thought about Shuriken almost constantly. After the panic, I thought about him only when I wasn't panicking, which wasn't much. Now that I'm depressed and sick and exhausted too (and still panicking), I find that the problems, although aggregate in some actuarial sense, whose total cost to my person exceeds the local costs of each trauma, usually don't cluster. As on the merry-go-round, they take turns. One beats on me, and then another, and then another, and then the first again. Occasionally they muster their forces and attack simultaneously, in an anti-heroic Light Brigade charge, but most of the time it's one or another, to be followed by any of its cohort.

Lately, as I've steadily decreased my imipramine, which, in addition to (supposedly) stopping panic, also (supposedly) prevents migraines and blocks neuralgic pain, it's the physical distress that most disturbs me. With less of it in my system to (supposedly) curb panic, migraine, and pain, I feel mostly panic, migraine, and pain, or, when they're huddling for the next score, their loathesome imminence. But even in their ascension, spots of doom and confusion can blot them out. In the mornings, for instance, before my body remembers how crippled it is, it's panic, and not exploding nerves in my eyes and jaw, that greets me good day; after exercise, in the evening, it's the black sun that shines. So who knows, except that the days persistently suck, if not in one way then in another, and occasionally in all ways.

But I'm ending this complaint with a word about the pills that special people prescribe for you when you're feeling low. They all are awful. Every single one. Klonopin, for example, which I have to take at least twice a day [author's note: now three times a day] or my nervous system physically turns into that guy's rant at the end of Network, either doesn't work at all or works just well enough to incapacitate me but not improve my life in any way. At its best, it turns down the noise; at its worst, it doesn't do anything or it turns the noise into horrid images, like of handcuffed men in Santa suits sitting on street corners. I hate, with every neuron and nerve and electrical signal in my body, the medications that I need to take if I want one day not to take them. I hate them. I hate taking them. For every grief they relax, they add a new one and clamp it like a vise. They clean the pipes while ruining the plumbing for any practical use. They turn every functional form into moot form. They rob you of your experience.

But some of us, sometimes, need them. Otherwise we'd be gone. The only people I've ever known to enjoy psychotropic drugs like tranquilizers and anticonvulsants and antidepressants, are the ones who never needed them. Maybe for recreation they're blithe and innocuous. But when you depend on them to keep you close to reality, to condition your body not to die, to remind you how and why and who you are, they fail, and they do so spectacularly. I would never blow a pharmacist for 2mgs of Klonopin. In fact, I would, right now, literally, blow a pharmacist not to need 2mgs of that poison. I would never don a holiday costume and commit some frivolous crime just to be mildly high for eight hours, only to spend my evening seated on the pavement, restrained, deplorably sober.

Almost eighty years ago, in a wonderful story about radios, Ernest Hemingway noted our great, unoriginal irony, an observation about human desire so cragged and perilous that I wrecked my life on it when, as a twenty-year-old, I hastily templed it into a Truth: the clear-minded want sorely to be confused; the bewildered want sorely to be plain; and believers want sorely to be unreal. For a long time I thought I belonged with the first kind. For as long a time I didn't understand what he meant with the third kind, although I assumed I did. But after thirty-two years of life tomorrow, after ten years of psychological flare-ups and cease-fires, after two nervous breakdowns, the death of my very best friend, an attraction and near-conversion to beliefs I know to be false, arbitrary sickness, necessary hurt, and a very thorough, very unwelcome disabling of my life, I think I finally figured it out: I count myself, and proudly, among the bewildered who sorely want to be plain.

Untitled wildlife #1: deer

Cleanliness is next to beastliness.

Two things to mention this morning.

First, I regret to inform myself (sorry, self) and everyone else too that I won't be attending the historic, er, atavistic pairing tomorrow night at the Frank Erwin Center. I may never again have the chance to see Journey and Foreigner live on the same stage on the same night in the same dimension--or maybe I will, every Thursday from now on forever, as the bands mature into their Traveling Wilburys phase--but I'm feeling too anxious lately even to imagine myself there, among all the spandex and denim jackets and women's hair grown sportive and frank like English gardens, let alone to be there. Hearing "Urgent" under these circumstances can only crush me like a worm.

Second, on our walk this morning, Seorin and I startled some deer--a whole herd of them. (There were four.) One was a fawn. Another was unmoved and tried to stare us down. I've seen deer plenty of times, but never all together. I was starting to believe they were like leprechauns, who are also lonely hunters, I gather. We stood there, in the middle of the street, gawking, as the haughty one, at the side of the road, flaunted its grace with aristocratic ease, its comeliness, like that of a courtier, effortless. The incident lasted probably two minutes, but in mind- and heart-wealth it was worth at least a couple of Foreigner concerts.

Good morning, everybody, and take care of each other and the deer.

If I ate fewer vegetables, would I panic less?



South American foam finger



To get this blog back on track, let me tell you about my day, which was Lowery-free and panic-fraught, and therefore relevant to this forum, whose purpose is to talk about anxiety, not David Lowery. (Unless I happen to panic about David Lowery, which so far hasn't happened, but I won't rule it out.) I'll keep the post short, though, because I have a lot of other work to do, you have a lot of better work to do than read this, and, god knows, eventually it would just end up being about David Lowery anyway.

I've had a bad day. Although it started as a good day. Which generally makes a bad day even worse.

Sometime early this morning, which means sometime around noon, probably, I had one of those very vivid dreams that, on reflection, makes you wonder how asleep you actually were when you dreamed it. Were you half-conscious and filling in details with bits of radio news filtering down from the apartment above yours? Often vivid dreams make a nasty impression; why else would they bother to be vivid? But this one was wholly charming, until two or three hours passed, at which point the bizarre mish-mash began to poke at my rational mind. Here's the fix: my son (I had a son), who was a baby and therefore incapable of walking, was walking: in the room, which was the park, which was a dozen other places as the dream-spider in my brain spun its dislocations. I was walking too and having a wonderful time at it. The rest I can't remember, because my son was a ten-inch monkey. Not a complete monkey, though. More like a try at one, a sketch of a draft of a monkey, from memory. So call it a son-monkey. In the dream, in real time, that detail didn't matter; I didn't even notice it. He was just my tiny son, and I loved him. To be honest, it was one of the best dreams I've had in months. I've since ruined it, of course, by refusing to let go of the reasoned demand that people be people and tiny monkeys be tiny monkeys. I should take a lesson from my dream-spider and let it be.

Every day I drink at least one pulverized hodgepodge of vegetables. Day to day the contents of the "shake" vary, but spinach, broccoli, collard greens, and kale are staples, as are a couple of scoops of a high-octane, raw, alkaline powder. To those I add rice milk and water, and chug. (As the flavor of blended greens, milk, water, and powder excites all the wrong taste buds, the ones that stipulate "food" and not "other," sipping the shake is not an option.) Then, as my body does its healthy best to make sense of what I've just put inside it, I feel, unpredictably, calm, unwell, frantic, or charged and happy. Sometimes, though, I feel damn anxious. Which makes me wonder, if I ate fewer vegetables, would I panic less? Perhaps the blender is the culprit and not the plants.

Finally, I've had a bad day. Woke up from my tiny monkey dream feeling fine, with a slight headache. Did about an hour of diligent deep-breathing and meditation, followed by some yoga poses. Then depression broke in. Fear soon followed, and restlessness. Tried to exorcise the discomfort but none of the standard palliatives helped. Anxiety grew into agitation, and then into low-grade panic, which, if you ever experienced it (I hope you haven't) is actually worse in some ways than full panic, because although the latter ends, the former can go on indefinitely. Took a tranquilizer and walked. Didn't help much. Plan to take another and breathe, and expect a better day tomorrow.

Nothing wry or sententious to write about it. Just looking forward to a break, if it comes.

David Lowery explains that thought I keep having about fairies

Frontman for the miscellany band Camper Van Beethoven, once wan and thin and Shelleyesque, now bearded, thick, and grungy, David Lowery roams the planet as a latter-day rhapsode, the sort Socrates hails as a magnet in the Ion, a book I read many years ago and about which I remember next to nothing, save that poets are magnets. (By consensus classicists date Ion as an early dialogue, mostly on the evidence that it sucks and ought to be better. If you've read any of Plato's works, you know that most of them climax, if at all, with a kind of mutual shrug and agreement to walk to the next grove or temple or flower shop to ask other loiterers to define Justice for them. But the poor stiffs in the Ion don't even get that far; like victims of some unthinkable inversion of an Outer Limits episode, they loop through the same argument, over and over, until Socrates, cracking, nearly falls to his knees and blames Jesus for poetry. I'm happy not to remember more of it, and I'm pretty sure that the only part I do recall, the part about magnets, brings more to my life with its sheer absurdity than it steals from it with gibberish.) Lowery's particular genius lies, like Ion's, in insisting on his humanness, when others would make him an oracle. Poor Ion suffers his Socrates, who calls him a vessel for the gods and therefore, technically, unskilled. Lowery, by contrast, has both his critics, who call him an ironist's marionette, and his fans, who believe them. And they have a reason to. Lowery's songs are miniature madhouses, where everything, even the humorless, gets joked at and mutilated. Through three decades, his records have kept a reliable tone, something like a doomsday nonchalance. Those captivated by it, usually the young and pompous, swoon to lines like these from the song "Jack Ruby":

I remember his hat tilted forward
His glasses are folded in his vest
And he seems like the kind of man who beats his horses
Or the dancers who work at a bar

Smug. Coy. Pissy. Almost clever (but not). Everyone clutching a copy of The Bell Jar, from Portland to that other Portland, adds him to the wonderlist where genuine killers like Nietzsche and Rimbaud contend with shitbirds like Jim Morrison. But irony, which the kids love, isn't the only trope operating there, and, on a closer listening, it isn't even the dominant one. Hence the cunundrum. It's an unfair fact of Lowery's career that his most widely disparaged trait--his aptitude for non-sequiturs, roundabouts, and aposiopeses--also makes him an honest-to-god heavyweight, despite the general smarminess of his fans, because, contrary to the conclusions of both his fans and his critics, he isn't an ironist; he's a realist who uses irony to make us feel fragile.

Consider again "Jack Ruby," which opens as an excuse for spinning nonsense and digging rhetorical holes for the listener to fall into; it's a joke song, a lark. But, imperceptibly, the song sheds the perspective of the hyperaware, Baudrillard-laden brain contemplating its own contemplation of history becoming history (smartass), and picks up the more material questions of what that kind of history looks and feels and hurts like, only, finally, to disappear under consequences, submerged beneath the liquid vacuum of disconnection and departure. Stranded there, a gratuitous conscience barraged by games and allusions and quips, the speaker suddenly knows that it's all very small and sordid, and that he craves closeness. The song unravels quietly into a dirge, whose stakes really are life and death:

Now do you feel that cold, icy presence?
In the morning with coffee and with bread
Do you feel it in the movement of traffic
And days are terrible, simply forget.

Echoes of Prufrock? The admonition to "simply forget" is abrupt, but correct, too, given the song's ludic beginnings and its transformation into dangerous self-knowledge. In fact, that very gruffness only intensifies the irreversibility: what's been learned can't be unlearned, and the cool ironies of the first lines reflect back to us like breath evaporating on glass. Unable to reconstruct the person from traces, or contact from memories of being close, or energy from intelligence, we end the song in a state of self-defeat. There's nothing to do but forget, when forgetting is just another useless tool in an ironist's toolkit. When appraised as a whole, and not sampled as an archive of catchphrases and throwaways, "Jack Ruby" looks less like a snide scavenging of scandal than a poignant warning against that very temptation.

But looking back, surveying the changes, it's difficult to find a hinge on which the argument turns. All seems to merge and divide like cells reproducing and then reabsorbing one another. The plunge from masturbatory cant to dreadful introspection is surprisingly subtle. And I think that's the quality that insulates David Lowery's songwriting from the over-familiar or the over-smart: subtlety. His irony is always aware of its cost: remoteness. In that respect, what distinguishes Lowery from other hot-penned pedants of his generation--I won't drop names, although I have a few in mind--is the candid auditing of his own method, which, like a grim ecclesiast, he administers deftly but also regretfully. His talent is the old actor's, who plays his part expertly--so expertly that he seems, to all but the keenest appreciator, to relish it--but who reveals to the quick-eyed and the caring, through the slightest twist of the lips, his disgust for the role that made him famous. 



Lowrey to friend: "I got some certain special feelings for you."

For his Janus-like penchant to practice the very technique he distrusts, to counterfeit its attitude and bait his fans with glibness and distraction only to challenge them with the real hardness of life, and of being human, Lowery more than earns his flippancy; he honors it. And for that reason, and also because I'm tired, I choose him as my representative today. "Ambiguity Song," frankly, isn't his best. But it does get at my mood this morning, when everything feels like a promise and therefore frail. Even at his most mediocre, like a true fucking magnet, Lowery channels my inner ghost for the world to witness. Or he fakes it, anyway. And that's nothing for Socrates or anyone else to sneer at.

Why armadillos don't have ulcers (but would if they had a prefrontal cortex)

That's real good wood there.

In his celebrated book on animals and stress, Robert Sapolsky, professor of brainiosity and brain serums at Stanford University, who looks perpetually like a feral he-moth, exposed a primary link between memory, which collectively we class as an asset, and stress-related diseases. According to Dr. Crazy Hair, when a zebra in the wild--or any other animal, it doesn't really matter--gets spooked, chased, walloped, nearly digested, it, like any thinking, feeling creature, goes a little berserk inside. Its endocrine system floods the body with stress hormones, causing the pupils to dilate, blood and oxygen to rush to the muscles and vital organs, and decisions to delegate to the faster, more obstinate sympathetic nervous system, which doesn't want to hear any of your dumbass, rational excuses for not running around in circles until you collapse. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes a lot more sense to flee first and not ask any questions now or later. Never. Just get your ass moving. If the threat is overestimated, no harm done but a few wasted calories; if underestimated, you dead. Better to take the first alternative and risk looking foolish.

This predilection to flee or fight before considering the options is the reason we survived our many, many predators to evolve into the shuffling, self-gratifying apes that we are. We owe our very lives to its no-thinking approach to problem-solving. In fact, it works so well that every mammal on earth exploits it. Why do my rabbits always assume it's a threat--every windblown leaf, every drip from the faucet--until much later, after copious, superfluous, ridiculous evidence and demonstration? (And even then, they're still skeptical.) Why do stray cats hiss at you and not lick your hand? Why do monstrous hippos gouge and trample a ton of people every year in Africa? Stress, man. The brain releases high levels of adrenaline and noradrenaline into the bloodstream, and for a few minutes the world goes Apocalypse Now. That's a good thing; that's what keeps animals alive.

Unlike other animals, however, for whatever reason we sprouted a squishy new part of the brain mass that, among other novelties, enables us to anticipate future events whose imminence is not indicated in any way in the present environment, as well as to return to past events whose relevance is not confirmed in any way in the present environment. It also allows us to infer thoughts and intentions in other animals, and even to populate inanimate objects with thoughts and intentions. In its tissue lies the origins of worship, or imagination, or art, and of delusion and psychosis. Call it the prefrontal cortex. It's a neat innovation.

Unfortunately, in addition to being prolific and potent, it's continuously online, and anyone who's stayed awake, either by choice or force, for a few days or weeks without rest, knows the endgame of uninterrupted vigilance: paranoia. You read patterns where there's only noise; chance looks more and more purposeful. Your higher mind goes haywire, which trips the alarms on your lower, reptilian mind, where the stress hormones percolate. The result is a sympathetic nervous response to no threat. And in the absence of a threat, the body, searching for a solution, encircles itself in ever-constricting psychic string. Now the tangles from the string become a danger, which triggers more stress, which rings the bell, which stimulates action with no plan, and, eventually, if this feedback loop runs long enough, the system breaks down. You get sick. Your immunity fails. You believe you're assailed. You've imagined yourself right out of living.

In its natural environment, which is the drab mammalian brain, with its bouncing limbic precocities, stress is a miracle-maker. By supercharging their little rodent legs (or thunderous equine powerlimbs), adrenaline and its cohort of hormones essentially triple the speed, strength, and fight of the threatened organism. Then, having served their purpose, the hormones linger in the bloodstream for a few minutes, as the animal trots and kicks and growls its way back to normalcy, before getting expelled through the glands or bladder. (This afterlife of adrenaline is the reason why attacked animals that survive will continue to "run off" their trauma once the threat passes.) With its body returned to a neutral, alert state, its hormones in equilibrium, the animal simply forgets what happened. It has no need to remember. If the threat returns, the same sympathetic response will occur and life will go on or it won't. Trauma is not something you learn from.

Except in people. Take me, for example. Panic and anxiety, which are the high-strung cousins to all the other stress-related diseases studied by Sapolsky in his hordes of baboons (he studies baboons), basically trap the brain in a chronically malfunctioning stress response. What new component closes the circuit? Why does this disorder seem to afflict only the socially ruthless, hypersexed, politically keen greater apes, and we the greatest of all? Because we plan. And plan and plan and plan. And scheme. And remember. And remember and remember. Our thoughts are gifts and guardians, but they are also blights and assassins. Thanks to our prefrontal cortex, we can remember that morning when our favorite rabbit jumped on our head, and we can inhabit in that moment as viscerally and truthfully as though it were now. Also due to the cortex we can compulsively re-experience the horror of nearly dying; we can degrade our lives into a shadowland of reticulated torments, torturing the present with false certainties of past pain and future fear. We have, with our battery of imaginings, the power, as did Boethius, to rot in prison while in our hearts we dwell in asylum; or, with our stomachs full, our desires sated, our ruin averted, to yield our bodies to the relief of fine beds or chairs, with contented conversation all about us, and good company in our grasp, while in our minds we writhe in terror of anticipation, or cower at remembrance.

Thinking is not necessarily a good thing. As speculating beasts, we pride ourselves on our intelligence, believing mental prowess to be the pinnacle of evolutionary tinkering. How could it not be? After all, it is we, homo sapiens sapiens, and not crickets or turtles that re-terraformed the planet, manufactured light from particles we can't even sense are there, invented speech, and walked on worlds other animals are not even aware exist. We also, to some extent, understand those worlds, which is, in my opinion, a far greater achievement than walking on them. But that estimation is a very human way of valuing. What makes a species successful? Bacteria outnumber us by numbers so large I don't even have the names for them; they also flourish in more diverse environments. We, on the other hand, teeter on the edge of destroying both ourselves and all our mammalian relatives, as well as most of the rest of life on earth. And it's our thinking that got us there.

Most of you know that I walk a lot lately. And a lot of my walking is at night, because after the sun goes down the temperature drops from burst-you-into-flames hot to uncomfortably okay. Also, in the late hours strange animals roam the city, and I like to look at them. Twice this week I've met armadillos. Both seemed blind as hell and mostly uninterested in anything except digging for insects. But the one I met last night, in addition to teaching me that armadillos can stand on two legs if they choose to, inspired this overlong tirade by catching sight of me, scrambling to a safe distance, and then completely forgetting about me. I, by contrast, after stumbling into a giant, staring, unclassified monster, would still be shivering in the corner, scanning for signs of it in the wallpaper, the toilet water, inside my pillow. Not everything about being smart is helpful. As I get older, and stranger, and more anxious, I catch myself thinking, Socrates was wrong. True, living ethically, wisely, and peacefully does require that you understand certain things and to remedy your ignorances. But it also requires that you know the secret life of knowledge: that too much of it is a hindrance; that life is not a schoolroom lesson to be mastered; that even if I could, like some Platonic Hercules, deduce Truth and in that instant transform myself into pure Mind, like a vat of dry ice, I would not find myself in another, better reality but just this one. And I'd still be wrong. Because what if the whole point of living, of being a creature, a creating thing, is not to know but to be? I've already done that. I'm doing it now. With all my intelligence over that armadillo, I'm the one suffering. He, on the other hand, tiny and well-measured for his world, delights in his pleasures and hurts in his hardships, but he does not suffer. I'm no more real or alive or authentic, in some misguided Sartrean sense, than he is. If anything, it's he who lives the more honest life. His brain simply isn't capable of being this wrong, or deluded, or contrary. So if I see him again, I'll ask him: "sensible beast, what must I not know to be wise?"

Go breathe yourself unconscious

Where did I park, dammit?

So. Routine settles a nervous mind. Or it's supposed to. Occasionally it just locks an arbitrary set of preferences into cosmic safekeeping. One of my chronic goofs has been forgetting the code that unlocks them. And when you stand there, knocking on the big invisible square that keeps, protects, and imprisons your choices, completely unclear about how they got contained there in the first place, as well as uncertain about how to break back in and liberate them from their imaginary Bastille--which, by the way, historically speaking, wasn't such a bad place to be--you can feel pretty impotent. And frustrated. And nervous. When the original purpose of gathering all those preferences and locking them in was to guard against anxiety. Clever how that happens.

To the point: since July, I've sculpted my daily routine into the kind of muscly, bulging, form-bursting, brain-barely-not-exploding brute that evokes those naked, wilding miniatures of a Rodin. I wake up and eat oatmeal and a banana, in that order. Then I focus on not focusing on how I feel for a while, until I consume a vegetable shake, harry the dishes and floor and sentient household creatures into some kind of tolerable order. Then I go to the gym, where usually I feel deliciously awful. Then to the store, where I buy my regular fruits and vegetables, grains, and, lately, medications; to the mailbox for no good reason other than to distract myself for three more minutes. Then I kill a bunch of time until I play some tennis, eat, walk, wait a while, walk again, take a tranquilizer, think, if I'm making mistakes, or not think, if I'm not, and finally go to bed, looking forward to the five minutes of comfort I feel, lying next to Seorin, exhausted enough not to be plagued by agitation, mentally blank, spiritually uncreative, and happily void. And although some details are flexible--whether I eat one or two Vega energy bars, or how long I pretend to use the cross-country machine, or which doctor interrupts my routine at what hour--everything has to happen, more than less, in that sequence. Any significant change is not welcome.

Well, today, while practicing some diaphragmatic breathing, fatigued by excessive stress, weary from feeling too much and from the effort to not feel anything, which is actually quite hard, depressed, both physically and emotionally, by a jumble of sedatives, I turned my attention to my breath, counting to five, holding, exhaling, counting to eight. My focus lasted, probably, for five or six minutes. Then I noticed my breathing becoming shallower. Then I didn't notice anything, because I asleep. I vaguely remember Seorin, who was breathing next to me, telling me that I was asleep, at which point I made a defiant decision to, fuck it all, abandon the exercise and doze for, let's say, twenty minutes. Which was two hours.

Now, had this happened at two in the afternoon instead of seven-thirty at night, I doubt it would have marred my exquisitely overcontrolled daily regimen. But as I woke close to ten, with darkness thrown through the room and my dear expectations blundered, a shock of panic shot through me. I immediately drove to the store to buy cat food for a cat I don't own and calculated the odds that I would be able to burn off enough adrenaline on the tennis court, where the automatic lights shut off at eleven-thirty, to enter into a state of deciduous quiet before boiling my tea, eating some godforsaken dates and hemp powder, and then exiling my mind to its nightly rounds of peripatetic therapy. Also, sleeping at odd or unpredictable hours makes me feel high, which makes me feel nervous, which makes me avoid doing it, except when I lie down to do some diaphragmatic breathing and drift off, and then, apparently, make a conscious choice to stay asleep while asleep--I don't understand how that works--is it like a Russian doll, with one consciousness inside another inside another?--only to regret my unconscious/conscious decision to sleep once I regain consciousness.

But to the point of this gonzo story: three days ago I learned a new yoga pose that, although expert and energizing, molds your face into the frantic scare in Pee-Wee Herman's Big Adventure, when Large Marge springs her gruesome supernatural mug on hitchhiker Pee-Wee. I tried it out at the gym yesterday, and I felt okay, not at all like a dismembered fat trucker from beyond the grave. So my confidence in practicing fancy mindfulness tricks grew, and when I came home tonight, tired and weary and depressed, and confidently pondered how, hey, a half-hour of breathing, on the bed, with my shoes off, in the dark, would really calm me down, I wasn't likely to be wrong.

From somewhere so deep inside myself that I don't actually find it funny, I want to smirk at all this very pregnant nothing. Here I am, roused at being set free from a strict set of actions that I don't appreciate having to perform, but also upset that I'm temporarily out of their influence. It also amuses me, but doesn't, that I, like Coleridge, like Hamlet, was driven to act, to precipitate the change I so desperately desired (and despised) not by anything intrinsic to my person--not will, whatever that is, or conscience, or passion--but by accident. That said, tomorrow I'm going back to my old game of planning and executing every last breath, bath, and blinking of the eyelids.

In a way, this debacle puts me in mind, first, of some very unfunny French farce that I haven't read or even heard of, and, second, of the Friedrich painting of the well-dressed gentleman standing on the precipice of what I can only assume is some melange of a German mountain, a Scottish bog, and, in the distance, Monument Valley as filtered through the lens of John Ford. Yes, there he stands, heroic, lonely, individual--Childe Harold posing for his girls. But who's that lurking behind him, framing him, offering him to his audience as the very deliberately stranded and aloof and transcendent wanderer? Who's telling us his story; who's making him up? After all, this man, if he does exist (he doesn't) really is just looking at some Nature. Maybe he's hungry. Or has to pee. Or wants to set fire to the trees below. It's the unseen personality, the ghost in the machine, that makes this painting meaningful.

We too have our minds-behind-the-mind, our ghosts in the machine. Today mine put me to sleep when all I wanted to do was to count as the air moved in and out of my lungs. Tomorrow, when I play my counter-gambit against nobody in particular, we'll see what other personalities emerge to claim their turn at playing. But one thing is clear: whoever opposes me, in all its shapeless, invisible silence, the "me" that I breathe with, build words with, and make worries with, he'll be wary the next time his shoes are off and he's bellyfull. That's when men get made into wanderers.

We must cultivate our garden (without pesticides)

Now put that rubble over there, next to the other rubble.

When an earthquake struck Lisbon in 1755, deists all over Europe collectively wet themselves. If you ever read Candide, you remember Pangloss, "all words," the philosopher who died fifteen times, only to be revived fifteen times, so powerful was his optimism that he could not be extinguished. Well, Voltaire, the author and derider of Pangloss, with all his Leibniziana in tow, didn't find the nonfictional extinction of the Portuguese so amusing. He suffered quite a crisis of conscience, in fact, in trying to reconcile his deism, which prescribed a benevolent, or at least curious and not malicious, Creator with human and natural evils, such as Stephen Baldwin existing or earthquakes in Portugal. Ultimately, Voltaire decided that the problem was insoluble, courageously chucking along with it his belief in the Innocence of Nature--he called it "optimism"--and instead opting to accept the practical reality of evil forces, rather than explain them away as somehow mysteriously necessary gifts from Father Knowledge. For many years, he struggled painfully with this paradox, until, angry in his elderdays, while mocking and chuckling his peers into rumination, he came to a gentle and obvious, and therefore quite clouded, solution.

We have an obligation to be moral, happy, wise, and deliberate. Just as we owe our consideration to others, we likewise owe it to ourselves. It is ethically repugnant to be self-defeating or self-insensitive. (Provided, of course, that defeating or neglecting oneself does not induce any of the four previously mentioned virtues. Masochists, you are exempted.) Now, this banal insight, while conciliatory and kind of cute, and true, doesn't quite cut it, but only prepares us for the rarer, brighter intelligence to come: when we tend to ourselves, we make a reasoned choice to be helpful to others; to reform social injustices and intervene on behalf of those who suffer them; to make inferences and acquire knowledge and not to hold beliefs; and to divide our desires, which we cherish most personally and preposterously, as well as destructively, from our works, which we execute upon others. From this distinction, it follows that if we fail to help ourselves as we would another, we have injured not only ourselves but also every person or animal that would depend on us, converse with us, care for us, or even cross paths with us; we also have undermined the moral model upon which we build our laws, from which we inherit our discourses, and against which we measure our sensibilities. Self-waste, in other words, is toxic, and it prevents its agent not only from accomplishing any good but also from blocking its poisonous infiltration into larger social and ethical structures. To do good socially, you must do good personally. A bit trite, I concede. However: to do good personally, you must be faithful to reason, whose fidelity requires that you both know the facts in their best availability and live your life not in contradiction to but in harmony with them.

So back to Lisbon. When anywhere from ten to one hundred thousand people died there during and after the earthquake, deists like Voltaire faced a new challenge: to somehow justify either God's intention to cause such evil or his refusal to stop it, as Rousseau chose, or to infer on the basis of such natural evil that God, if He exists, has no business in human affairs and that, therefore, an unbridgeable moral and theological gap separates God from everything else. In his humility, Voltaire picked the latter, not an easy inference for a man whose entire universe ticked on the clocks of Newton's celestial smoothness. Descartes, after all, had argued, and Leibniz had concurred, that Nature, like a fluid, moves its components in such a way that everything preserves two principles, those of economy and coherence. A world in which God is one thing, and everything else another, flagrantly violates the Cartesian code.

Nevertheless, Voltaire proposed it, and then accepted it, and then loved it. That is the garden that he told us to cultivate. Our human, earthly, personal garden. Not a wilderness of abstractions and precepts and rules, but an orderly, kind, reasonable, careful community. A living world, not a dead idea. And from this declaration he forged a brilliant moral program and description of our place in this floating, wandering world. Nature, with its inscrutability, may be indifferent, or fickle, or hostile; mobs of men, with their religions, their extravagances, and their dangerous whimsies may be cruel, or prosecutory, or unthinkable. But an individual person, whose garden is cultivated, who enjoys the simple pleasures of good food, good company, love, and friendship, whose very soul is itself simplicity, can be generous, and tranquil, and sane. We ourselves are a world. And although the laws of our own worlds continue from and comply with the laws of unthinkable mobs and a fickle, inscrutable Nature, they are not identical to them; we have a choice, whether to mimic the caprice and coldness, the fervent and fury, or to take what we have been given, our inner turmoil and tension, and to feed and craft them into superior, personal truths. Nature may be deadly; men may be violent; but I may be sane.

[Send complaints to my therapist, who stimulated this unavoidably pretentious diatribe by sagely suggesting that I haul my hyperreflective, ego-musing brain down to the pawn shop off I-35 and Cesar Chavez, where "compramos oro," and trade it for some gold teeth or an eight-year-old's brain. And he was serious about the brain exchange. He suspects my biggest problem is that I think too much. And he's right. Like a latter-day Kierkegaard, I've wondered my way into mind-forged manacles. His exact words, I think, were "you need to start being stupider." So: goals for the week: find, capture, and interrogate an eight-year-old to learn his secrets; dispose of same; windowshop for lobotomies.]

"Bad day, fuck it," says Stephen Baldwin in that movie

Hey, how you doing?

Last week, after meeting with new doctors and drafting a new plan, I was hopeful for the first time in weeks. Life was still hateful, mind you, but not as bleak. Like the first day of a new semester, before the actual work begins, before the responsibility of learning becomes tiresome and real, when effort is just an idea in someone else's brain and impossible-to-know theorems are sunshine and fairy rainbows. Then you read the first chapter and think, "Napoleon sucks. France sucks. I want a taco." Well, the notion of getting off drugs you've only tolerated for three years and replacing them with promising, benign, new drugs sure opens your heart like first love; the reality is more difficult. Also like first love. It closes your heart like a hammer on a seashell.

I'm slowly realizing how psychologically dependent I am on drugs I don't even like, how reluctant I am to get rid of them, despite my distrust of them, a lesson I''ve patiently refused these three years while under their influence. Now that the opportunity has come to try other options, I'm afraid to let go. Take my old friend imipramine hcl. I've been on and off this loathsome horse since I was nineteen. It turns my mouth into fried Andean sand, sends the earth spinning every time I stand up or bend down or basically move, persuades me to sleep restlessly for eleven or more hours at a time, and, jackpot, from time to time makes me feel unreal and confused and basically ghostly. It also does some guerrilla-style urban warfare on your dental health, by which I mean it ruins it. But! Maybe I'd be worse without it? Probably not. But you never know, and that glint of uncertainty is all the anxious mind needs to savor the stress, to chew it tasteless like an uncharismatic gum.

At this point, as I taper from that gum so that I can subsidize other obnoxious gums, my mental engine is grinding very hard and hot, like Melville's paper machine in the Tartarus of Maids, to manufacture blank sheets of paper: phantom fears and predictions about what catastrophes will befall me when I forsake the god of imipramine for his cousin god. It's a stupid but compulsive game to play. And although I know it isn't, participation feels mandatory.

So, for the past three or four days, as I decreased my dose, I've worried more and more about the doom scenarios I'm letting myself indulge. Meanwhile, the anxiety I'm already feeling, in addition to the stress generously supplied by these indulgences, through the contribution of bad sleep, good but pernicious tranquilizers, stubborn, wild bodily sensations, and gripping headaches, disorientation, and nausea, and with the support of every grievous thought I've ever had, has made me feel, to put it mildly, undecided. Not about giving up the drug, which I have to do, but about the action's benefit. And about being undecided. Which is a whole other set of spirals and Mobius strips and chaos riddles. 

So, that confidence I mentioned earlier--I called it "hopefulness"--that's been mutilated. It's still here in some form, I think, but it's grown ugly enough that I'm having trouble recognizing it. In its place, I've found some hideous gnomes called "resignation" and "fatalism." Not that these creatures impress me. But they are persistent, and they can jump on you from behind and choke you, like the turtlenecks Mitch Hedberg warned us about. They wear you down. Or they try to.

So, as I get ready to get ready to go to bed--I'm so anxious these days that I build rituals to prepare myself for other rituals--I reflect on a long day (it wasn't really, but it felt interminable and also weirdly light, as in the unbearable lightness of being, as though it hadn't been here at all), a day of feeling headsick, then heartsick, then uncomfortably empty, then unspecifically heartbroken, and now a little of them all plus nervous, I have to say, like Stephen Baldwin in that movie, "Bad day, fuck it." But I'll never wear a big cross like him. I have to draw the line somewhere. Everybody has his Waterloo.

Recovery is an eight-letter word (I counted)

We're here for the free lutefisk.

I'm the one on the left, left of the guy on the left who's looking to the left. You know, seeing all these obviously disintegrating peasants lining up to look nervous makes me wonder: do Norwegians carry an anxiety gene, maybe mutated from the pillaging gene, which we all know from books.

So, welcome. This is my Hoxton blog, where we reinstate that happiest of romantic therapies: talking about ourselves until we can't feel our feelings. Personally, I plan to follow Charles Lamb's example by alternating morbid self-pity with cheery (but not giddy) evasion. So, please, enjoy this slide into funhouse feelings and epistemologies, where, I hope, I can embarrass my fears sufficiently to make their menace small; so I will. Perhaps also I can grieve here in public and rid myself of their mental burden. So I will. Complaint for catharsis; burlesque for being here.

You know, being Norse and therefore sad, and vitamin-D deficient, with many a defiled monastery on my ancestral conscience, my task is likely to be long and difficult. Like Henry Lancaster, that other pretender-marauder, I'll practice penance, make a siege, and play tennis. But expect no chantries. This Henry don't pray.