The Cold Grue

I'd first read the term cold grue in the story Thrawn Janet by Robert Louis Stevenson. It was an arcane term to me, but I knew what it meant the moment I read it. I'd known that feeling since I was a child. It usually arrived in November, when it arrived at all, and lay mostly under the surface of winter, waiting to loom up at certain vulnerable moments - something that seemed almost sentient, a grey existential chill that was not merely cold, but deathly.

The appearance of the cold grue was something I'd come to dread. A rising uneasiness, the sense of something minatory, searching along the ground with the wind. I'd felt it a few notable times in my childhood - the visit to Liberty Hill, a playful seance gone awry that my cousins and I held on Thanksgiving, 1980, and the time surrounding the violent death of my aunt not too long afterward. Every holiday season since has been an exercise in keeping it at bay. 

Having spent my much of my life in Texas, it was something I'd associated with my home state, something that lived in the winter landscape there, so I did not expect to find it the first time I visited northwest Ohio in 2022. But on the second-to-last day of my trip, there it was, drifting toward me in waves as I stood on the steps at the art museum, as ominous and melancholy and as pure in form as I'd ever felt it. 

 

I'd never expected my path in life to lead me to the Midwest, and certainly not to such an unadulterated version of the feeling I'd been hiding from. Perhaps it was just my mood that day, I'd thought. Maybe it was just that I was standing in a sculpture garden. As I'd written in one of those links above, the surreal nature of modern art always did leave me a bit uneasy. Or perhaps it was just a temporary, momentary effect of the weather. 

When I did move here in 2023, it was summer, and there were only the aquarium blue sky and cornfields and the sound of daylight crickets in evidence. The cold grue was far from my mind. I would walk through the swamp preserve in the afternoon, or the marshy edgelands next to the mall, studying wildflowers and cottonwood trees. We visited Lake Erie. Then autumn arrived. 

The grue did not come right away. Gradually, though quicker than I would have imagined, the landscape changed its character. There is no real autumn where I'm from, so to watch it take on color and atmosphere was fascinating. Did you know that leaves will simply fall off of trees, without being blown down by wind after drying up from drought? I didn't, so just to watch them was like standing in fairyland. I was very lonely at the time, but it was beautiful even so. I spent so many evenings out there, learning about my newly adopted home, trying to take my mind off the rest of my life, which had quickly commenced unravelling. I learned about being cold, putting on more and more sweaters every time I went out. The skies became greyer and heavier, the chill wind fluttering the remaining cottonwood leaves. 

Near the center of the swamp preserve is a forest of skinny black ash trees. In summer, they were green, humming with insects, but no sooner had November come the skinny forest had transformed into a leafless, slightly hallucinatory labyrinth. The effect being a bit like a hall of mirrors, if only to reflect the inner self. I always felt uneasy when passing by, but as the fall closed in and the temperature fell, I found myself drawn to the place. There was something familiar down among the ashes, something ominous and melancholy and cold. I was so lonely, so heavy-hearted. The reason I'd moved here had fallen apart. I was unwelcome and unwanted, my future in serious doubt. The cold grue beckoned with frigid fingers down this forlorn path. It came over me with such intensity that day that I realized I was in the center of it, as if it had all come down to this singular point in time. I sat down and spoke to it. 

"What are you?' I said.

"The process of dying" it replied.

"Why are you here?"

"It's the earth's dying season"

"Why have I felt you in so many circumstances, then?"

"Because all deaths are the same to the dead." 

My phone rang. I gathered my things and stood up to walk home, wondering if was still existing in my world at all. 

I've moved on since that day, slowly piecing my life back together, trying to find any remnants of my lost inner light. The cold grue remains, in the autumn wind, in the snow, in the garden that has gone to seed. I'm not so troubled by it anymore, even if I am still haunted. I live in a place with all four seasons now, and have a lot still to learn about spring. 

Celestial Clockwork (or): Waiting Around for Grace, cont'd

Well, (she said, to the empty air) you can't have thought I'd forgotten, for the heart is persistent, down to its last agonized beat.

I don't know if this will make any sense. Maybe it will only make sense to the ones who need it.

I wrote the linked post quoted above back in September 2021, after a particularly haunting sort of day, the kind where absence feels as solid as presence should be, and loneliness is so sharp you can almost trace the outline of what is missing from your life. 

The title was from a song that was stuck in my head at the time, called Waiting Around for Grace, about which I'd privately mused that "Grace", aside from a desired state of being, might as well have been a dear friend you'd once arranged to meet at a certain time and place, who never arrives because she'd died long ago. (A feeling not unfamiliar to me - my best friend has been gone 20 years now.)

It was a significant day, spiritually at least, and aside from the post named above, I had continued to write and ponder on it for a long time. I'd always expected to finish this related piece called "Celestial Clockwork" when I figured out what it all meant, but 4 years later, I don't suppose I am any closer to knowing, so I guess I'm just going to post it today. 

This is what I wrote, back in 2021: 

Celestial Clockwork

 The restlessness started in mid-afternoon. It wasn't uncomfortable, exactly, but unfamiliar. Like craving food while having no appetite. 

The sense of needing something gnawed at me, though what it could be was not clear. I ran through all the possibilities in my head, all the things a person might conceivably need, but nothing came up a match. 

I went outside to where my husband sat under a tree, partly to consult him, but mostly because I couldn't stay still. "I need something, but don't know what, " I said. "Do you ever feel that way?" He looked up into the branches, thinking for a moment. 

"No, never."

Trying another tactic, I asked "well, what do you need, then?"

"Chinese food." he said.

Okay, we could do that, at least. Get the keys and go. You know how it is with these things. When you don't know what you're looking for, you might find it anywhere.

...

The restaurant seems out of place in the market plaza; the curling manes of the stone lions not in keeping with the stark façade. Like a few things I've come upon in my travels, these lions do not want to be photographed. It's simply not possible to get them both in the frame. I gave up trying long ago. What's the use of having the yin without the yang?

Inside is a darkened maze of wooden booths and bamboo screens. It's very quiet. The servers dart about soundlessly. In the center of the maze, the buffet tables are steaming. There is something slightly surreal in this, I think, the bright shimmer in the dim room. Visible heat. Strange how a sense of unreality can creep into most mundane of scenes. The transmutation of the unseen into the seen.

My husband has positioned himself at the end of one of the tables, and while I know he's just waiting for the General Tso's chicken, there's something about the sight that puts me in the mind of a chess piece awaiting the next move. In turn I position myself near the cauldrons of soup, another chess piece, if a less imposing one. In the stillness, I can feel a clock ticking both inside and outside. Above me, I notice, the ceiling is painted like the evening sky. 

Outside the restaurant it is silent. Amid the oblique geometry of the forecourt, the breeze moves in angular bursts. Pigeon feathers hover and swirl before drifting away. It's still summer, and hot, but the air has a trace of melancholy, the end of the season in a tourist town. We take our food and head home, and somehow things seem different, even though it's not clear what has changed. There is a vague sense of a far-off glimmer. Perhaps some unseen satellite ascending.

....

I don't know from astrology; I only know I like charts and glyphs. It's a comfort to me, mapping the arcane. Planets transit the houses, the moon changes its phase, a stranger on the street turns to catch your eye. Who can say what it means? I just like to think about it. 

Anyway, it helps with the restlessness, which has begun to metamorphize into an uncomfortable prickling, the feel of a cheap wool sweater on a hot day. The clock is ticking, I can feel it now that it has come into my awareness, though it must have always been there. What it is counting down to is a mystery. Perhaps some enigmatic matter of fate, which I can sense now like magnetic north or the pull of the ocean across the plain. 

This might be an unlikely claim from someone like me, but sometimes there is no point in asking why. Every so often, things just are, and you won't get anywhere pretending otherwise. I meditate for an hour, surfing relentless waves of inner itch, but all that happens is wanting to shed my body like a dry lizard skin. So, lacking any other solution, I mentally track the planets through their whorl of nebulous destiny. I don't believe for one moment that, say, Venus transiting the 7th house has an actual, physical pull on anything, but I know - the way one knows these things - that recurring patterns in the chaos are a signal. Cosmic tarot. Symbol plus placement plus synchronicity. 

It's Saturday, the 11th of September 2021, and aside from the internal ticking of the clock, there is no sound but the echo of blowing leaves.

At home, I skim the edges of the yard, looking for a place to land. It's easier to think outdoors, and there is much to ponder. The ticking of that clock, for one thing. Why do I suddenly feel as if I'm one of those number slide puzzles with the tiles slightly out of order? That I need to figure out what to shift before the clock winds down? It must have been just after 6:30 when I settled down in an out of the way corner behind the house. No one would be likely to find me there. My restless heart ached for peace, among other things. It seemed I was supposed to do something, and there is nothing worse for an aching heart than to feel there is some unknown move you should make to resolve the pain. 

I sat there in the dusty heat and tried to clear my mind. Somewhere up above I was dimly aware of planetary gears. I was conceived in September and born in June; there has always been something autumnal inside me, a wistfulness, an animal-like alertness to incipient change. I felt it keenly at the moment the clock went silent. A dust devil rose from the ground like a phantasm, present only briefly but portentous all the same. Somehow, I knew - at that moment, like a weight falling - that the first part of my life and its purpose were over. Whatever signal I had been sending like a determined firefly had gone out into the aether, and now there was nothing to do but to wait for a signal in return before moving forward to the next.

....

And that (having never become clear on her purpose) was all she wrote. 

Not that there was no more to the story, you understand - there was so much more to the story, so many layers, and loops, and walking one careful foot in front of the other down what seemed like a fateful and fated road that somehow instead came to a dead end. 

Yet, the feeling remains. The sense of absent presence, a third energy, a golden thread, an intangible field on which unseen action is meant to play out. My life has changed completely - sometimes serendipitously, sometimes forcibly pummeled into a new shape - from the way it was in 2021. But where this journey goes or why, I have even less of a clue now than I did then. 

As for Grace, I'm no longer waiting for her arrival. I accept that she isn't coming after all. Even the Chinese restaurant with the curly-maned lions is long gone, and the Texas hill country is far in the distance. I had a heart attack last year, and now my agonized old heart beats more erratically than ever.

Even so - for the moment, though - it still persists. 

The picture at the top of this post was taken as a somewhat mocking nod to that very same linked piece, outside a florist in Detroit one night in the autumn of 2023. Perhaps you can tell by my pained smile, that - despite the signage - grace was not exactly forthcoming for me at that time. 

Speaking in Thorns

The hardest thing, maybe, is having lost your direction. All the things you wanted don't want you anymore.

The road dead-ends in a tangle of thorns. 

The Blue Hour

Outside the window, it was the blue hour. 

Sometimes when I walk down the road in the evening, the world goes fuzzy at the edges. Like a carefully controlled hallucination just beginning to break apart. 

How is it that I am here in this place? In those moments, it feels like the real me is somewhere else. 

9 crows roost in the sycamore tree. I don't know what it means, only that it makes me shiver. 

My tarot cards show nothing but swords and empty cups. 

Pluto, 29° 59'

It's the time of endings, and even the birds are restless. Footprints in the snow, walking away. I see (to my surprise, though it really shouldn't be) that I wrote this exactly 2 years ago, and this nearly 3 years ago, and wouldn't you know it's all to do again, because submission to Fate is a constant process, it doesn't matter in the slightest that you are so very tired now.

You're Not Existing In Your World At All

It was the 26th of July, and we were at the storage unit by the side of the highway, loading my belongings into a truck. By then, it was near dusk.

He said, "well, if you choose not to go, imagine what you will be doing at this time tomorrow. If you do go, imagine you're not existing in your world at all." 

...

It's late October, and I'm somewhere else, more alone than I've ever been. If there is a sun anywhere in the overcast sky, I can't see it. Twilight birds flit through leafless branches. I wonder now if there is any world out there where I might be allowed to exist.

Crossroads

 September, 2020.

A crossroad, according to folklore, is a place between places, neither here nor there. It's no surprise then that I seek them, dream about them, a place that's nowhere; free from the world and the ties that bind, my disintegrating marriage and the pressures of responsibility. If I were nowhere, maybe I could be my own true self, or even just exist, without being ground down under this relentless weight.Turning into dust.

Last year, I likened myself to a moth in a lampshade, and I suppose it's still true, but the transformations of this summer have set me completely on fire. 

I'm not interested in becoming moth-ash, or dust, or any of the sad remains that litter so many glass globe lights. Instead, I dream of flying to the crossroads on my flaming wings, heat streaming upward, into nothing, nowhere, freedom. 

Moody Street

Funny, the things that come to mind as you're on the edge of sleep. The immersive flashback, the vividness that emerges from fatigue-frayed reality.

In my memory, we are walking down Goodwin avenue, my husband, our kids and me. It's mid-October, and we're on our way to the pumpkin patch at the church on Moody street. It's not very long since we'd moved to the gold house, and it's nice to be in walking distance, though our youngest is still inclined to complain. The late afternoon air is cool and crisp and all the neighborhood is decorated for Halloween. Wrought iron and gingerbread strung with scarecrows and lights and leaves.

It's all so beautiful, and yet. I am sad.

It doesn't matter. I laugh and run ahead. My misery is like distant thunder on a clear day, conveniently ignored until it's too late.

 It's a fraud, of course, but then we all have our role to play.

At the church, we pick a number of suitable pumpkins, bearing in mind that we'll have to carry them home. I remember how the orange stripes in my sweater coordinate with my chosen gourd as if I'd planned it, how the boys' forest greens and maroons all pull together as if we'd conspired to look like an ad.

I'm lucky. I know I'm lucky, even my jeans proclaim it. The silver four leaf clover jingles as I walk. My hair is in two long braids (to quote Collette) like reins. Oh, yes, the symbolism is amusing. As if my jeans are chiding me for my unhappiness, as if my hairstyle hints at how little control I have over my own life. Moody street, indeed.

The truth is that I have secrets, which are both not as bad as and also worse than anything you are thinking. They weigh on me as I trip along in my braids and boots. I laugh and chat and feel so heavy I wonder if I can even make it home. But I do.

At the house, we line up the pumpkins on the front porch steps, one for each of us. After dinner, it's time for homework and baths and bedtime, and eventually I find myself back outside, alone. My secrets make me reluctant to sleep, if only because I don't want to wake to face them.

I stay up late reading under the hexagonal light, and when I finally do sleep, I dream of a dark hallway with a broken mirror at one end. Bloody Mary has escaped, as well as her sister in white. The are coming down the hall in their old-fashioned dresses, their faces veiled, hiding a horror of which I can't speak.

White Mary stands in front of me, silent and eerie, her veil moving with her breath. She reaches toward me and I wake just as the world turns red.

I sit up knowing my future, the shape and color of it, at least, the same way that secret sorrows are sorrows because you already know how they end.

There is some knowledge you are not allowed to escape, not then and not now, even in the frayed edges of your sleep.


Note: the events described occurred in 2006.

That night, I'd been reading a zine called Bloody Mary's Cool Little Sister, which no doubt inspired the arrival of the Marys in my dream.

The Landscape Dreams Uneasy

It's that time of year when the horrors begin to creep. Not the thrill of Halloween or the romance of falling leaves, but the cold landscape sleeping.

If you can call it sleep.

You can feel trouble gathering out here in the country, between the lowering skies and the rocks that jut out like bones. It's not personal, it's just November, and the Goddess of Thorns will not make it easy.

In the cities, it's safer. All those people and the lights and the shops. You can ignore the hostility that seethes beneath the surface, the landscape that wants rid of you.

It's tired. It's had enough. If you listen closely, you can almost hear it moan. It's not personal. You mustn't think I haven't tried to be friends. But I was born here - I know it like my the back of my hand.

The bleached grass, the bone chill, the grim specter of the sleeping earth.

It always makes me sick to my stomach, this feeling. It gives me the cold grue and no mistake. Yet I tried not to fight it today, tried to see what it would teach me.

In my mind, I could see miles of limestone and windblown earth, swept by overwhelming dread.

I never did like the sight of those hills in the distance.

There are certain cold days when the clouds are low and the atmosphere wraps you like a blanket, safe from the landscape's uneasy dreams. But not today. Most definitely not today.

Days like today are the thorns and spines and psychic wounds that come with the dying of the year.

Web of November

The other morning, I dreamt the town was covered in spiderwebs, including a massive one in the sky.  This was a good dream, which is a bit of a surprise. I'm not the biggest fan of spiders.

After reading up on it, I understood a bit better. A spiderweb can be a sign of creation and self-determination. After all, the spider creates the web under its own power. Which is something I'd been thinking about, one way or another. How much I act versus how much I'm simply reacting to others.

Spoiler alert: not enough and way too much.

And of course there is also Indra's Web. Or maybe there is only Indra's Web. Who knows?

The months of November and December are always difficult ones, and this autumn is determined to be nothing but rain and fog. The only thing to do is keep walking.

In the meantime, I think about making my own web, weaving thoughts and actions into something useful.

Small Solace

It's October now, but the Summer of Ill Luck refuses to give up its bony grasp. My brother is in the hospital, in intensive care. Despite seeming perfectly fine on Saturday, by Monday he was on a ventilator, suffering multiple serious conditions. There's no knowing at this point if he will recover.

This of course has been distressing to the family, my youngest not the least, and it's causing him to act out. And then there is my mother, whose state of mind is not good. And there's my spouse's health, and my teenager's moods, and the bills to pay and those other fears I never talk about. This leaves me in the position where I often find myself - having to prioritize my worries.

It's a crappy state of affairs when you have to decide what scary thing to focus on first.

Crappy, but hardly new.

In times like these, I find myself I find myself running the same old internet search - how to find solace in times of trouble. The results are always the same, too - references to Bible verses or comfort food. Being a chronic dieter who went to Christian school, these things leave me more than cold. They leave me feeling hopeless and alone.

So the internet having let me down, I turn back the way I always have, to the small, seemingly meaningless things that tie me to the material world.

The sound of a branch tapping in the wind. The red light on the radio tower that blinks all night. The hum of the power lines, or scratch of dry leaves on the ground.

I'm not the only one who finds comfort in such things. My friend and I used to intone "the strawberries, the bowl of milk" ala the Seventh Seal, knowing that it wasn't about the strawberries or the milk, but the solace of simple objects during the dark night of the soul. The focus on the thing that is not your despair.

We all have our ways, I suppose. My cousin watches the original Planet of the Apes whenever she feels desperate. I prefer that episode of Doctor Who, Partners in Crime. Grandpa Wilf at his allotment, always watching the sky. But to each their own.

There are things I like to think about.

I like that the Vatican has an observatory, and that the time and date website thinks, for some reasons, that I am in a town 20 miles away. The sight of moths fluttering in the lamplight, and hot tea after midnight. Taillights receding into the distance. Weather reports for small towns. Articles about gardening. The knowledge that the road stretches beyond the horizon.

All together, it makes a sort of sacred space, albeit it a strange one, full of the most ordinary things. The strawberries. The bowl of milk.

Ordinary, but still sacred. The small solace, the respite, however brief, from the suffering of existence.

update - In the several days it's taken to write this post, my brother's condition has improved and it looks like he will live, though he will need major surgery. He's able to communicate enough to complain now, so that at least is normal.

R.I.P. Bambi, The Goodest Of Good Girls

Bambi taking me for a walk.

After many years of loyal and faithful service as a good girl, our beloved friend Bambi passed away this week after a sudden illness.

She's finally escaped that leash at last.

The world seems so much darker without her.

Heart Shaped Box

My son, who is 16, was listening to Nirvana's Uplugged In New York on the way to school the other morning. I thought to myself, it must be coming around to the anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death soon. 24 years ago. How time flies.

I knew it not because of my memory - which is good for this sort of thing, yes - but because of the feeling in the air, the deathly smell of Spring.

It's understood that Spring is the season of rebirth, but those of us who tangle with despair know the other side of it - that beneath all the new green is the sickening smell of decay. There are terrible things down in the leaf mould and humus, things that don't bear thinking about if you know what's good for you. It makes sense to me that suicides increase when the growing season begins.

My son wonders what it was like back then, when Nirvana were the big music act and grunge was the thing. I tell him, there was a reason we liked our music so aggressively, appealingly* glum. It was relevant. It was the mood of the time.

Case in point - on the day Cobain died, I was visiting my neighbor Kathy and her brother Darren at their parents house, up at the lake. They were house-sitting while their folks were away, and for my part I was just glad to be out of town. The change of season had done nothing to ease the damp chill of my apartment or the dark pall inside it. There was a lot wrong in my life - Kathy knew this, I think, that's why she'd invited me - and I desperately needed a break.

Diary entry, April 5, 1994

Pain is measured in dols
Triptych - a three panel painting
Gold - Au
Paroxysm - a fit
Sibilant - hissing
Apocryphal - mythical
Alfred Nobel invented a number of explosives

A creepy, creepy day. Cold and humid and dark. I woke in the night and thought "winter is coming" and was filled with dread, as if it really were Autumn and it would all be to do again. The eeriness I feel is so big it's beyond describing.

....

Of course, on the the 5th of April, none of us knew that Cobain was dead. We only knew he was missing. There was some concern though, and there were updates on the TV news. Only a month before, he'd been in a coma, and things had seemed iffy for a while. I commented to Darren (no doubt sounding more callous than I'd meant) that if Cobain had passed away, he might be considered a legend, like Morrison or Joplin or Hendrix had been. I wasn't thinking about it so coldly, really. I was just pondering the strangeness of such a scene, in which one went from being a "troubled rock star" in the here and now to being something quite different in memory.

A few days later, I was back in my dismal apartment when the news broke that Cobain's body had been found. While I hadn't necessarily been convinced before that moment he hadn't just been hiding out somewhere, suddenly it seemed obvious that he could have met no other fate. Suddenly, it seemed that the anguish in his voice had contained a certain foreknowledge of doom.

But then, a downward spiral is always easy to see in retrospect.

I had no personal attachment to the band besides owning their albums; I hadn't even seen them live. Still, that day I felt something shift. It was subtle and nameless, but it was there. The song Heart Shaped Box played on the radio again and again, not that it had ever been away for long.

By then the weather was hot, as humid as steaming wool. I went for a walk among the warren of streets on the other side of Main. The leaves and grass were unfurling in a grotesque display of fecundity and the scent of decay was overwhelming. "The day was bright and shiny like a mirror" I wrote in my journal later, "but the underside of the mirror is death."

Indeed, half hidden under the overgrown shrubbery on Market street, I'd come upon a dead rooster in the gutter; his iridescent feathers shining blue and green. It seemed telling somehow that no one had bothered to retrieve the broken corpse. A terrible knowledge gnawed at my unconscious, and to this day I'm afraid to walk down that street. I have the uncanny feeling I might meet my own ghost.

This is how it was back in those days; It's hardly even symbolic. It was the mood of the time. Anguish and apathy buzzed like fat flies in the sodden heat. Hidden things festered out of sight. For a long time, a raw nerve had been thrumming in the background of the country.**We all felt it, we all knew it was there, but Kurt Cobain had helped give it voice.

How much all this would mean to my son, I don't know. It would be nice if it didn't have to mean anything. It would be nice if his generation had no need to deal with raw nerves and corruption and things hidden out of sight. But it seems that this will not be the case.

This Spring, the landscape has burst into greenery like I haven't seen since then. Pollen blows in waves, water drips from weeds. I feel shaky, remembering the dead rooster and my own ghost left on the side of the road. I'm middle-aged now. I tell myself I've been around, there's no need to be afraid. It's only Spring. It always passes, if you wait long enough.

I tell myself this, and hope this year that it's true.
I keep watch and wait for Summer to come.

*We were depressed as fuck, but we still grew up listening to Abba and The Knack.
**For further reference re: my claim that something had been wrong in the background for a long time, see the article Kids In The Dark by David Breskin. The relevant point to me here is not the Satanic Panic angle or even so much the murder itself, but that a whole community of teenagers kept silent. 

Valentine Bug

Flu shots notwithstanding, we've been brought low by the flu bug this Valentine's day. At least we had some pink heart-shaped cookies, though, and some adorable aliens as well...

Take the color where you can find it, on yet another grey and drizzling day.

The Inconstant Muse

1. Something Happened

It was a cold, lightless day, perhaps it was January; the weather had that distinctive, hopeless feel. I was in my mother's car, coming back from San Antonio, I think. On the corner of Magazine and Butcher streets, I remember seeing black branches and telephone wires outlined against the sky. There was nothing special or unique about this moment. There is no reason it should have lodged itself in my memory. Bur there it is.

The moment fades, or rather fails to continue to exist.  I am sitting in my apartment. Through the windows I can see remnants of the lowering gloom. Fear is running though me like electricity, like a red-hot grid of nichrome wire. There'd been no segue from there to here, no awareness of movement, only nothingness, a numb and fathomless void.

I take out my notebook and write the words "something happened", as if this could help me reconstruct the missing time. It couldn't, of course. It still can't. I can only recall suddenly being there, in that dismal place that smelled of rat-chewed paper. What can you construct out of nothingness, beside the alarming certainty that for a moment you had ceased to exist?

2. The Curious Tale Of The Invention Of Prozac

It was a couple of years later, in the middle of summer, I caught a bus to Waco. It was hot and sunny that day. I wore a crop top with a sunflower print - sunflowers being the thing that year - and jeans with navy blue flats. I had a tiny handbag and eyeliner that matched my shoes. It was an ill-fated romance I was having up there in Waco, though it might be more accurate to call it a waste of time. Whatever it was, the ride to get there was 6 hours of sheer and utter boredom, although if you think about it, the sort of excitement you'd get on a bus is probably not the sort of excitement you'd want to have anyhow.

I've never been able to sleep in a moving vehicle, and back then there were no clever phones to occupy your time. On the way to the station, I'd stopped at the new grocery store on the south side of town to grab a bag of Gardetto's and a magazine from the rack. There was no sense in being hungry as well as bored. Thus fortified, I got on the bus.

It wasn't until halfway through the trip I'd started flipping through the magazine. That particular bus took a long and torturous route once it left Travis county, so unless you enjoyed looking at dilapidated buildings and cedar brakes there wasn't much to see. Memory tells me it was beginning to get late in the day, although that might have just been dimness from the tinted windows. If I had to guess, I'd say it was about 4 o'clock.

That was the year Prozac Nation: Young And Depressed In America was the hot bestseller, which I hadn't read because I was already young and depressed in America and didn't feel the need to read about it. Elizabeth Wurtzel was everywhere though, and she was in this magazine, too. I remember her photo next to her byline, wearing a lavender-colored blouse. The article was about the invention of Prozac, how she'd gone to research the story of the drug that had saved her life. I read the article, which was somewhat of a disappointment, and nothing much interesting happened on the rest of the trip. I left the magazine on the bus when we got to Waco and that was that. Whatever else was in the magazine, barely a hint remains with me now.

...

Years pass. Waco, with its dour atmosphere and concrete skyline, recedes into my history. The dismal apartment recedes, too, thank god. I move away, and life goes on.

And yet. The memory of that bus ride and that article come back to me again and again. They show up in unguarded moments, prodding at me like a troublesome ghost. Here is where I wish I were a better writer, because how can I truly describe the eeriness of these moments? The way it brought to mind writing in my notebook that "something happened"? The way what should have been a simple memory seemed as if it were hiding something I should have known all along?

Around 2010, with growing uneasiness, I finally decided to look up the article. Perhaps it would give me a clue as to what was wrong. The magazine had a large and thorough archive that was easy to search. Nevertheless, I could find no such item. I looked up everything Elizabeth Wurtzel had ever published. Again, there was no such thing. I searched for other writing on the subject, but there was nothing that was familiar in any way. Frustrated, I looked up the actual history of the invention of Prozac, and discovered that almost everything I'd remembered reading in the article was wrong.

And then comes the funny part - because the Cosmic Joker has a way with these things - I realized that the author photo I so clearly remembered wasn't of Elizabeth Wurtzel at all, but Elizabeth McGovern, the actress. No sighted person could possibly mistake one woman for the other, but here I was, with both images in my mind, somehow without questioning it. How could this happen?

There was an obvious explanation. I must have fallen asleep on the bus, even though I'd swear I hadn't, and dreamt the article. No, this isn't a usual thing to happen to me, but who's to say it can't, after all. Nothing mysterious then, only an ordinary foible, mistaking a dream for reality.

Except...except...I realized (and records bear this out) that the store where I'd bought the magazine and snack hadn't even been built until a year later. This is the point where the dream theory falls apart. I rarely went to that side of town unless it was to go to the bus station. I only used the bus when seeing Waco man. I was no longer seeing Waco man by the time the store was built. And the only time I'd buy those kind of snacks or that certain magazine is for a road trip. Anyway (for what it's worth) I remember it as clear as day: me in my sunflower top and my navy blue shoes, excited about seeing my boyfriend, waiting in the express lane, plucking that magazine out the rack, the smell of the brand new store, the high windows, the light on the south side of town.

There is no boredom, road hypnosis or toxic traffic fumes to confuse this part of the memory. It is untrammeled. And here the eeriness comes over me again. I would swear - will swear - I got off the bus with the memory of reading that article. But now I have to ask...when exactly did the false memory sneak in and replace apparent reality? And what happened to the reality?

Where does memory go when it disappears?

I suspect only Mnemosyne knows.

Widdershins

There are different kinds of spirals, though.

Sunwise bringeth, widdershins taketh away.

Take away sorrow, despair, bad dreams at night.
The ravages of loss and time.

Take these things and leave me whole again.

Sunwise

All day I fight against the fear, the hopelessness, the gloom.
Are we in the rabbit hole or out?

One can only wish some light would appear from the grim grey sludge of feeling.

What I Wore Last Thursday

On the Thursday after the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, I found myself at McDonald's, where I'd stopped to get my morning coffee. In the cold and echoing restroom, I took this selfie in the weird selfie-mirror they have because, I suppose, we are now living in some kind of bizarro world and I hoped the me on the other side was having a better time.

Looking back, I kind of admire the way I fail to exactly match the color scheme.

Invisible Monster Update

A while back I posted here about the "invisible monster" of anxiety and depression, and my use of  theta wave isochronic tones to try to reduce it. I promised an update back then, so here it is. 

Originally, I had planned to use the use the tones regularly, then take a break to see if the positive effects lingered. As it happened, I couldn't take a break for very long, as the anxiety levels would start creeping up again. I also experimented with many of the different types of theta wave tones available. Some of them make very pleasant listening, but for my own anxiety reduction effects, I still haven't found any better than the ones posted in the linked entry. YMMV.

Despite these not being brainwave frequencies, I also experimented with tones from the solfeggio scale. Even though any scientific evidence of these being beneficial is suspect in the extreme, I've personally felt that some musical tones can have positive effects. 417 Hz is a very comforting sound to me, though 528 Hz seems to be most popular. Regardless, this method didn't help and actually was starting to make things worse. I kept at it for a while, because I really wanted it to work, but eventually couldn't deny the detrimental effects. I found Buddhist and Hindu mantras to be more helpful than these. Again, YMMV.

What I did find to be extremely effective - and gives a huge boost to any calming or anti-depressant effects of the tones - is combining another form of media with the sounds. There are a lot of  videos on youtube that combine tones with visuals or music, but I found creating my own version to be much preferable. Here's how I made it work: 

I'd play the tones with headphones, through a phone or tablet. Using the television in my bedroom, I'd select either a piece of music that had only pleasant associations for me, or video that I'd found particularly calming, pleasant or had especially good memories attached to it. The aim here was to keep my mood elevated and thoughts focused while in the meditative state and not have them veer off into some grim or frightening territory. With depression and anxiety, the thoughts are already trained to go in that direction, so it was important for me to counteract that.

With music, the volume on the television didn't need to be especially loud, just enough to hear it behind the tones. For some reason, this tended to work better than the tones that were already embedded in music. Not sure why - maybe it was simply down to the music being a personal choice.

With video, the one I find most helpful has a particular hypnotic effect. It's a section of a playthrough from a video game I once enjoyed, called Rollaway (or Kula World, or Kula Quest.) I don't play a lot of video games, but this one I recall being unusually happy playing way back in the day. Given what I know now, this makes perfect sense -  imagining a ball rolling away from you while you're standing still is an excellent hypnotic technique. (Go ahead, close you eyes and imagine it right now!). 

Here's the video, for reference: 

The music in this section of the game is also one of my favorites (Hiro, by Twice A Man). With this video, I don't even bother to lower the volume, as the ringing sounds of  the collected coins and keys, along with the music, strike me as both calming and upbeat. The combination of visuals and tones in this case create a more lasting positive effect. 

There are a few others that I've been working with, too. I suppose ultimately it comes down to which ones give you the effect you want. 

So, my assessment today, having done this for a period of several months, is that these techniques have been more or less effective, at least for me, and none of them (save the solfeggio tones) have been detrimental. None have actually made my condition worse. Of course, my condition at the start was pretty damn bad, so this is not saying that I'm anywhere near "normal" for an average, non-depressed person yet. I still hold out hope, though.

Using my blog posting habits as a measure, I've been able to post more than in a long time. This is significant, because it's something that has to be planned, constructed and time being made to actually write something, as well as the power of concentration needed to do so - and it does create some amount of guilt for me because it feels more like "playing" than any kind of work. The fact that I've been able to do it shows improvement, I think. 

The invisible monster is not defeated yet, but the battle continues.

Fighting The Invisible Monster

Possibly the worst thing about my anxiety/depression  is what I call "the horrors". It might be more accurate to call them "the terrors", but the horrors, with its shades of  Heart Of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, has always felt more appropriate.

The feeling may be best summed up in an image. The Scream might be the most famous example, but what really comes to mind is a drawing, ubiquitous in old horror comics - the face of the hapless victim, pouring with sweat, eyes wide upon finally seeing the monster that's been hunting them for the last couple of pages. I know that feeling, intimately and horribly. For me, though, is what seems like the ultimate unfunny joke - the monster is invisible.

This has been the most frustrating thing for my loved ones, I think - seeing a person frozen in blind terror at something that can't be seen, heard or otherwise perceived. It's frustrating for me, too. This is not something I'd signed up for, this nameless, faceless, free-ranging annihilation anxiety that's beaten my quality of life to a pulp. It's not something easily understood by people who haven't been there. Trying to explain this miserable internal state is fairly pointless, and not something I do well. Indeed, I hate writing about it at all. It makes me nervous.

The only reason I mention it today is because I have found what seems to be a little relief, and I want to write it down, make some catalogue of minor success. I've tried many things over the years, but aside from taking a particular SSRI  (which worked all right until it gave me OCD and chronic sleep-paralysis) and a combination of COQ10, barley grass powder and yoga (which worked like a charm throughout the summer of 2002, before running out of steam), most things haven't made enough headway to make them worth noting.

I'd tried binaural beats with some small success, but when I came across  isochronic tones, I felt my response was much stronger. About 6 weeks ago, I started listening to theta wave isochronic tones while sleeping, or even just sitting quietly, and noticed my anxiety was much less prominent afterward.
It's this one in particular I've been using while meditating or sitting quietly:

And this for sleep:

I've tried the Alpha, Gamma and Delta wave tones also and find Gamma and Theta to have the most positive effects. For me, anyway. While Alpha  is touted as a most beneficial type of brainwave, and I do find visualizing comes more easily while listening to the tones, I've found that my depressed feelings and despairing thoughts increase afterward. Delta has its own set of weird effects, which may be down to my peculiar brain chemistry. Whatever the case, my anxiety - though not gone - is reduced and I haven't had a real attack of The Horrors since beginning. Because of this I've been able to leave the house 4 times under my own power, organized my closet, made a Halloween costume and have turned in several blog posts in the last 6 weeks, after promising myself that I would do so -  which is sort of like climbing a mountain would be for a normal person. At this point, even if it's far from ideal or even average, I consider this a great improvement.

I'm going to stick with this pattern for another two weeks, then take a break and see if the reduction in anxiety continues. I've read that an overabundance of theta brain waves can lead to depression, but given that my depression and anxiety seem to be hideously intertwined, I'm grateful for a relief in at least one of those things. The fact is, I can't do much to help my depression when I'm frozen in terror. Or horror. Whatever.

Meditation is supposed to be an excellent tool to deal with anxiety, but lets's face it, I'm far from being an enlightened monk who can find inner peace amidst the constant, grinding fear. This might be meditation the easy way, tinned and ready for consumption, but between that and never getting better, I'm going to take it. The effects seem to be quite similar anyway. It's not so much fighting the invisible monster as dissolving it - like the koans say.

I will write an update at some time in the future. Meanwhile, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this could be a drug-free remedy for The Horrors at last.