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.