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.