My mind is seldom idle, much to my regret, but it is nevertheless the devil’s playground. My brain, however, is a festering lump of dysfunctional neurochemistry and electromagnetic randomness. This does not make for a happy playground.

Almost took my exit today, but was inadvertently saved by a call from an old friend who was pleasant enough to let me ramble and rant without simply hanging up. Better than tea with the Queen any day.

Thanks, Donna.

i'm back in Sahuarita.  After taking care of my friend's dogs and house in Pinetop, I flew to a little town in northwest Tennessee.  Think I was there for 6 days or so.  Found a house built in 1920 that seemed ideal for me at $84,000.  But I don't have the cash or prospects enough to warrant a bank loan, so I've pretty much given up on making an offer on the place.  I now have no health insurance (no longer qualified for the State program because my company didn't make enough money last year).  I've applied for SSI Disability, but that is going nowhere fast.  They say I might hear something in 120 days.  They deny 75% of applicants, so I'll likely have to dispute their finding.  Am hopeful that my private disability policy that I've had since 1985 will finally come through with $1,000/mo until I reach 65.  I've not painted since March.  I just can't do it any more.  The prices on all my remaining unsold shamans has been raised accordingly.  There will be no more.

Meanwhile, ALL my medications have stopped working.  Effexor XR and Mirtazapine failed fairly gradually, but certainly, so I am again severely depressed and sleep-deprived; I awaken fully every hour or two throughout the night.  So I find it difficult to concentrate or engage with most anything during the day.  And again with the cold sweats.  Not fun.  I had to get a waterproof mattress pad.  I theorized that I might be having some kind of epileptic activity in my brain at night which manifested itself by stirring me to complete wakefulness, so my psychiatrist prescribed Depakote.  Took it for a couple of weeks with no change, so gave up, though I'm certain that some kind of brain activity is causing these damnably consistent episodes.  The good news is that because they are no longer effective for me, I won't be out the $500 or so they were costing me each month.  That's a steep price when it is all from a quickly drying pool of savings.

So that takes me back to ECT as the only available treatment that may work again, but it is s expensive that I'm reluctant....  Tried to get into a 
Vagus Nerve Stimulation (implant) study at the UofA, but they've expressed no interest in having me be a subject.

So I'm generally miserable all the time now.  The rich, I hear, just got richer, and I've gotten poorer.  I had thought that a move to a small town to which I'd never been before would give me a chance at a new life.  In fact, I had convinced myself of that.  Now the dream of starting something new is just a tattered mist.

Oh, well.  My life and welcome to it.  I'll have two shaman paintings in the MO show this year.  They are 40x30 and priced at $10K each, and I've told them that this will be my last year participating.  You can stick a fork in me, 'cuz I'm done.

Mornings:

And still losing the war. I keep beating myself up because I can’t control my brain and the feelings of loss and displacement and fear and hopelessness that hammer within me each day. I know what the cause is, but seemingly not the cure. The resulting anxiety I feel seems to grow daily, but the woods are dark and deep and I have no one’s hand to hold. I stagger. I cry. One more day. One more day. And then perhaps none and no one will really care. Why can’t I separate the good from the bad and keep it that way, tossing out the bad into the depths of an endless sea? Why can’t I be brave? Why can’t I win one for ME?

Over the next few days, I’ll be traveling and looking for the place I seem to belong. I hope I find it. Otherwise, this story will have another unhappy ending.

I feel that the road I am on will come to an end soon. I’m trying to run away. I’m trying to run away from me and from everything I’ve known. This loneliness cannot last, and I will have to see to that myself, somehow. I’m going to Tennessee and then back to Sahuarita, but beyond that is a dark wood, and I’ll be taking the path less traveled. It is as though I want to disappear and be buried in the potter’s field.

I’ve been in north-central Arizona for the past week or so, dog-sitting for an old and trusted friend. During this time, I have endured what seems to be a complete failure of my anti-depressant medications. I have felt hopelessness and ann inability to cope that seems to breathe its rancid breath from within my bones. My life has fallen apart as parts of me have collapsed through doorways to separate dimensions. The revelation I’ve had is that I’m now not just looking for a home, but for a place in which I belong. I know where I belong: at Mary’s side. But I am too weak. In shame, then, I look far away for a place in which I can become invisible to all those who have known me. If I look and can’t find a place of anonymous belonging, there is but one path left, and that path I will follow.

Tags: depression

Following is something I gave to my current psychiatrist at our last meeting.

What I would like to discuss with you would surely take more than my paltry 15 minutes will allow, and I couldn’t afford it anyway, so this is just a gift from me to you.

After some long discussions with my bother, it is clear to me that I have been steadfastly dysthymic since at least age 9, and this general condition has been occasionally punctuated by episodes of severe depression. Some drugs have worked amazingly well for a time and then quit working in an instant. Same with ECT. I have for years been confounded by this and have finally recognized a truth that I think you and I and the world at large has missed or ignored.

Some are born with perfect pitch. Some can add fantastic sums in their minds like magic. Some have eidetic memories. Some can hear colors or taste sounds. But our society does not view these conditions of being as necessarily diseasees and therefore needful of a cure.

I believe that my dysthymia is much the same. It is my normal, natural state, and much as the body seems to have a weight “set point” which it will guard ferociously, my own body seeks to return to this state whenever possible. The episodes of severe depression I experience have at some times been disabling and therefore in need of treatment and “cure,” but though stress is the usual trigger for these episodes, dramatic change of circumstance of any kind can trigger rapid responses in my brain.

Several months ago I was in a car wreck... a rollover down a 45-degree slope and instant deceleration by arrival at a vertical wall of dirt at 55 mph. I should not have survived, But I walked away with no more than two stable fractured vertebrae. A month later, I left Mary and Rebecca’s home to house- and dog-sit for an old friend in Pinetop. Within four days, the Effexor XR stopped working. This was not because of the stress of being in Pinetop, I now believe, but the sudden change from having my heart broken over and over daily.

This was not stress, but the release of stress. And how did my body and brain respond? They responded by returning to my natural, normal state of dysthymia. This revelation was not necessarily a welcome one, but a very important one for me. It alone explains all the various gymnastics my brain and body have endured for some 50 years now.

I do not have perfect pitch. I am not an idiot-savant capable of playing a complex work by Mozart after hearing it once. I do not have a preternaturally positive outlook. I am in my normal state, mildly depressed. That is me.

I believe that psychiatry has missed this point entirely, or, worse, has chosen to ignore it. But the observable fact is that my body and brain will fight to return to its natural state by any means available, whether by direct or indirect ”manipulation” of neuro-transmitters and receptors, by radical changes in the operations of the hypothalamus and hippocampus, by changes in cortisol levels or whatever is necessary.

Arthur Conan Doyle, in the persona of Sherlock Holmes is quoted thusly: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

I believe that I have now learned the truth.

Lawrence W. Lee
6/18/08

Have you ever known the days that were too long by half? By half at least. And the nights anticipated from morning light too far away and both too long and too short? These are the hours that confound me now. The sharp end of things again. I’ve done all that I know to do to make life better for myself and for those I love. But there seems to be a wall there; here, right in front of me. It seems that nothing I can or could yet do will make things any better. My life was not meant to be lived alone, I guess. Perhaps that’s why I hungered for real love at such an early age and for so long. The only substitute was work, and work became my passion. Then thre was Mary. Now there is nothing. My body fails me daily win ways both large and small; sure signs to me that 60 is NOT the new 40. I know nothing else to do, and even work seems a sham at best. There is this wall. This wall. It is there when I awaken and there as the sun declines. And nothing else. I hope that I do not yet understand what the wall really is. I put it there. It is my construct, surely. I do not know what I fear most: that the wall will be my new forever, or that it will be breached or climbed or simply disappear.

I'm having a few withdrawal symptoms from the Effexor that kept me sane for another 8 months, but nothing as horrid as I was led to expect.  I think being away from Mary for this period has really helped me, but I still see a steep uphill climb, especially since I plan to cancel my near-useless health insurance that has cost me $450 a month with a $2K/yr deductible.  Interesting calculation: food or insurance.  Hmmm.

I AM working toward something artistically, due to Bill's passion for hunting, and that will help, but though I'm doing much better than I expected at this point, I know that my mind is just barely in control of my brain at this time, and when it gives up, I'll be forced back to ECT.  There is no issue there except the damnable cost.  Both the ECT and the Effexor have ended up costing me about $1K/mo, so I guess for me that is just a continuing cost of staying in business (alive).  At least the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy I've used has really helped keep me afloat during this latest episode, and I'm working hard to see my way through.

It is hard knowing that I'll never have the things or options I once had... that I am still starting over at 60.  And without a good woman's love to help light the stars at night, the darkness is deep indeed.

It has occurred to me today that tomorrow will likely just be more of the same.  I want nothing I can obtain.  Nothing is incomplete.  No adventure awaits, and I care for none.  Most of the day will be spent fulfilling trifling obligations to Bill, usually in perfect silence because I forget to turn on any music.  There are no movies I care to see.  There will be no questions of import to be answered.  I'll get hungry and have to eat.  I have no battle plans to draw or love to give.  I'll experience neither fear nor hope. All longing has been sucked out of me. I'll fight off sleep during the day and lie awake waiting for it at night,.  I'm not really sad.  I'm just living.  Just existing.  If this is not fertile ground for the fruit of depression, then it is something unnamed and even worse.

Dysthymia, depression, melancholy, destructive introspection, malaise. There is no name for what I feel. Perhaps someone will, someday, invent one. I think of my own death and it does not impress me. It means nothing. None of us will ever understand, if understanding is to be had at all. And in the end, none of it will have mattered. The billions upon billions of lives and loves and deaths will not the universe change. My sin is in recognizing this truth. And your sin is in not.

Following is another response to an email I received last night.

"I know that my brain is not  serving me properly right now.  I don't want to add to Mary's anxiety or Rebecca's problems or my own anxiety by living there.  Besides, I don't think I can say goodbye to Mary without losing it completely, and I don't think she will understand.  I'm gone now and can just stay gone.

Most people have a vision of what their immediate futures are likely to be.  They have plans.  They have things they want to do.

Only today did I realize that I see nothing but emptiness after the 14th.  I've given it my best shot, and it wasn't good enough.  My pie-in-the-sky plans are just that.  The reality is that my life  will just be a continuing fight and downhill slide, especially if I fork over the money for ECT.  So I've got about 5 days to figure it out.  I know you want to help.  I know I probably need help.  But I also know that this is the big turning point for me, and that I will either make the turn on my own or go off the cliff.  In the long view, it doesn't matter, anyway.  You know it doesn't.  As you are so fond of pointing out: such are the conditions that prevail.

Right now, Tucson does not appear in my recipe.  Or maybe I just haven't read far enough.  But the thought of returning there now gives me the willies and takes me back to places I don't want to go. I'm actively looking for a place cheap enough to rent.  I even looked in Tucson.  I'm making inquiries about ECT in other countries. And If I can find cheaper ECT somewhere and last long enough and can afford the flight there and back, I'll probably go that way.  If I don't, well, the cost of keeping depression at bay is just too steep, and after 40 years of it, I'm burned out.  I'd rather have a long sleep and someone else spend the money on other things.

Thanks for all you've done.  I've told my brother but no one else; not even Rebecca.  Oh, I dread that.  I may have to arrange for my grandson or Rebecca to put the few things I need (passport, auto records, recent mail, printer?) into a box and mail them if I end up renting somewhere for a while.  May even make a pass by the gallery to clear out the easel and chair and such, though I don't plan to use them again for some time, if at all.  If I don't, they'll be yours to use, dispose of, or give away.  I'll leave the keys and exit through the crash-bar door.

If I die, my will gives the Corporation and all its assets to Robin, forgives the $100K debt from Rebecca, leaves my life insurance to Stephenie and her kids, and the rest, I think, after some money to Robin's kids, goes into some kind of trust for Mary's future care.  Just got that all signed a week before coming up there.  Guess I should get those papers, too.

I have no grand plan to kill myself.  I have no grand plans at all.  So we'll all just have to wait and see what happens.  Whatever it turns out to be, I'll be just as surprised as anyone else.  I'm not frantic.  I'm doing my best to think things through.  I'm not much of anything, really, but remain determined to do the best that I can.  I've never asked more of others and will not now ask more of myself.

I never was one to burn my bridges behind me, but my feet seem to set a new blaze to this one with every step I take.  Maybe that just happens naturally when you have enough years under your belt.

Yes, I know this not normal.  I'm not normal.  But I AM rational."

Five days.

Some of you may know that i underwent a series of 8 ECT treatments about a year and a half ago. Afterward, though a bit slowly for my tastes, I experienced great relief from depression. That ended suddenly in August of 2007. I chose to try drugs again because of the cost of ECT, I was pleased to discover that therapeutic amounts of Effexor XR proved to lighten my depression. This lasted until about a week and a half ago. Since I'm house-sittting for a friend, I could not up my dosage from the recommended 300 mg/day to 375, but had to go up to 450.I had planned to go back to ECT if /when the Effexor became ineffective. Being away from Tucson when the Effexor quit helping has made things more difficult.

Following is a recent email I sent to a friend.

"I've been thinking very hard the past few days on what to do.  Few people want to be around me because I'm depressed and fixated on my own personal sense of tragedy.  So I'm lonely most of the time.  I don't like lonely.  I have no hobbies, and the things that do interest me I can no longer afford.  I've tried to find something else.  I have failed.  I have no home.  I've always had a home, but no more.  I hated renting.  I am depressed again and have increased my dosage ofEffexor to 450 mg/day.  I was not going to do that, but I'm up here and my psychiatrist is down there and the next stop was going to be
ECT.    And that will take weeks or months to set up.  And it may or may not work.  I've asked Bill to ask his doctor friends inArgentina how much ECT costs down there.

I don't want to see Mary again.  I cannot face saying goodbye.  I don't want her to think that I don't love her.  I don't want to live in her house.  I still love her.  I need to make a living, but I can't find a job.  I don't want to paint unless I get enough to really change my life, and at the current rate, I'd have to paint until I'm 90.  I've looked for teaching jobs.  Even interviewed.  The depression is not helpful in this area either.  So, I spend my money of ECT and be a homeless house-sitter with no prospects for a better life? With whom do I share my life if I'm a house-sitter?  Besides, I smoke.

So, why am I continuing to live?

What good is it?  Every day is just a little worse than the last one.  Right now, it is just so that Bill's dogs will be fed and watered.  I do not plan to see Mary again.  I don't even know whether I'll be coming back to Tucson at all.  I have used every idea I've been able to come up with and have failed.  I hurt inside psychically all the time.  I have to take a handful of drugs to go to sleep.  I have to take more drugs to go back to sleep after a few hours.  Is this a life worth living?  I'm thinking not.  I'm thinking that I'm REALLY worth more dead than alive.  The longer I live, the less I'll be worth.I hate being this way.  I go into town every day and try to make a new friend.  But I'm nothing but my past.  They say; are you married? I say no.  They say "What do you do?"  I say nothing.  They ask me what I enjoy... I say nothing.

So can't a guy get tired of it all?  I get an "A" for being a good man but no credit for the course.

I had a good life.  Why do I have to suffer more every day and watch it fall apart and become nothing but memories, fading?

I spend most all day thinking and rethinking these thoughts and trying to hold things together.  No straight-jacket for me.  I'd kill anyone who tried that, or they'd have to kill me trying.

So, bad things happen to good people all the time.  Why am I not allowed to just cash in my chips?  I don't want to come back to Tucson.  I want to go where
no one will find me.  People say"Find Jesus!" and "Use Herbs!" and "Stop eating chocolate!" and "Stop smoking!" and "Meditate!" and "Exercise!" and "Drink Snake Oil!"

Well fuck them all.  I'll do what I decide is best.  Oh, you can talk things over with Steve.  Steve can talk with you. Robin can talk with Zoe´.  I can talk with myself  People say  "Oh, you'd never be a burden for me."  Right.  I know how that works, and I'm not going there.

Sorry.  Just talking to myself again.

So now I'm going to take enough pills to go to sleep and at about 3 AM I'll take some more to go to sleep again.  And then I'll get up and feed the dogs and go through it all again.  Bill is supposed to get back on the 14th or so.  Don't know where i'll go then or what I'll do, but I doubt that I'll be coming back to Tucson.  I've already started looking for a really cheap place to rent.  All I need is a refrigerator and a lamp and another inflatable bed.  Then I'll go somewhere with my list of logins and passwords and untangle myself from the WWW and cancel my disability insurance and my health insurance.  I may or may not tell anyone where I am.

Or maybe Bill will have an answer good enough to hold me together for a while.  Or maybe I'll call my psychiatrist tomorrow.  Or not.   You know how they say "Everything happens for a reason"?  Well, in MY brain, malfunctioning though it may be, that is bullshit.

Fuck it.  I'm tired of thinking today, and I know I'll just be doing the same thing tomorrow.  This is the pits."

I'm stumped.  Decided yesterday to take a look at the website for Safari Club International, wherein my friend is a life member, and discovered that I'd missed--by one day--the deadline for applications by new entrants.  That means that my first opportunity to show there will be January 2010, which is way too far for me.  Oh, well.  And the cars... now I'm filled with doubt.  The distances are too great if I insist on UAE as my entry-level.  So I'm back to the Goddamn Indians, and I have little if any interest in going further with that.

I looked into the possibility of teaching at the area Community College.  They seem to have no interest in the Fine arts whatsoever.

Further, I've found, not at all to my surprise, that I'm lonely as hell here.  Being away from Mary is good.  But I need another person in my life to at least have the illusion that I'm doing something worthwhile.  Oh, I always did most of the business things myself when Mary was working too, but it was for US, not just for me.  And I am too much "damaged goods" to foist myself off on anyone else, now.

So I've taken to sleeping as much as possible just so I won't feel lonely.  Some people I know will automatically blame me for not trying to find new friends, but that is not true.  I have tried, but seem to come off as a creative oddity, so I introduce myself, talk about meaningless things for an while, and that's that.

So I don't know what's next.  Living with Mary hurts badly and will surely worsen.  Living alone hurts, too, and leads me to philosophical ruminations that do not help.  I see that I am becoming a burden to those I love, and that was never the plan; Mary and I were going to be self-sufficient until the end.  So right now, now that my new will is in place, the best solution I can conceive is to disappear and die.  Going to happen sometime before long, anyway, and I'd much rather choose the how and the where and the when than find myself hampered by a stroke or some such and be unable to die with dignity.  If Rebecca nor anyone else knows where I am they may worry but will be unable to intervene, and I'll have ID on me so they can deal with all the after-death stuff easily enough.

I think that I'd been depressed for so long that I forgot, if I ever knew, how to have fun.  There is not an ounce of joy in my life now, and only darkening clouds overhead.

Oh, Piss on it.  PLEASE!  THIS IS NOT A CRY FOR HELP.  I'll do whatever I do, and I may have less courage than I'd hoped. I certainly have dimmer prospects than I'd planned, and I'm oh so tired of it all.  I always thought that I'd "win" in the end.  But I've used all my intelligence and creativity and money to no avail, and that's what pisses me off.  This one, last, simple task of living alone and liking it is a land too far for me, and whether the blame is mine or not, that is the simple truth.

Maybe my niche marketing should have been directed toward someone akin to the patrons of old:  Mr Pope or Mr. Medici.  Har!  My best client turned out to be a crook and was killed by a bomb on his 40th birthday; suspects, but no arrests.  And that was years ago.

Drove into town and bought more peanuts for my friend's pampered squirrels, got something at Taco Bell, went to the Post Office, and then came back here to seep.  Sleep is my only escape.  Just ignore all this if you want.  Just me thinking. When I sleep, I don't think.

Perhaps I'm just depressed again. I don't really now. I do know that I'm tired of living. I'm tired of living alone. I'm tired of trying to make these crazy ideas work. I've truly reached a point at which I am worth more dead than alive. And don't think that I haven't tried to right my course. Just today I drove into town to talk to some fellows about anything except my past, present and future. That worked well enough until I left; back here is the same old me. Met a guy who said he got rid of his past a couple of years ago. Just threw it away, he said. So what is he now, I wonder. He is his past, whether he thinks so or not.

I can't throw away my past any more than he could. And my present is taking on a horrible tinge of hopelessness. I try. I try. And yeah, yeah, yeah, one more good old college try may just do the trick. So I should keep on trying, eh? Keep on until I'm broke and broken? I don't think so. I've already been more of a burden to those about whom I care than I ever thought possible, and that can not continue. My plan for suicide by neglect isn't working, so a stronger, more directed plan must be conceived. I've had a good life and don't want it to end badly. I just want it to end soon.

More than anything, right now, just at this very moment, what I want most is to cry. I've taken the anti-anxiety pills. But the lump in my throat won't go away. So I'll cry. Been there before. Too many times. Maybe that will help for a while. Maybe I'll go to sleep. The sad part is that I'll probably wake up again, and nothing will have changed. In the long view, it won't matter in the least. None of it.

I just finished an apparently "true" movie called "into The Wild" about a college grad that decides to live off the land in Alaska. His final revelation, just before he dies, is something I learned many, many years ago: happiness is only real if it is shared. So he died and someone wrote his story and they made a movie, and the actors and producers will make money, and maybe some of them will be happy.

I, on the other hand, who have known this truth all along continue to live and look for happiness.

Given the conditions which now prevail, I fear that happiness is not mine to be had.
some of you might want to argue the point and suggest that my loneliness is my own creation. So go ahead. I know better. Or I already know that, too. The issue remains, however, that I am miserably lonely for good companionship, and though I do try and will likely continue to try to improve my lot and chance to find happiness, I don't presently see the way to get from here to there.

So tell me to find Jesus or God or Work or Volunteering or Teaching or whatever. But I am what I am, whether you or I like it or not, and there is no magic mushroom that will change me. When you have walked down the path that I have, then you will have a right to make comment that I am bound to listen to. Until then, say what you want. Maybe I'll listen; maybe I won't. I'm nothing special. None of us are. Our selves are the merest of perturbations in the web of space-time, and all is illusion. I hurt, but it is of no matter. People die and kill and save and do whatever people do, but it is meaningless in the end. Think 4 billion years. Nothing matters. And that is the hardest lesson of all.

Nightmares again. Well, one big nightmare about a place mary and I built but no longer own. Once again I awoke breathing hard, thinking all was lost. So I'm working with what I have, again: brains and cleverness. Can I make a new future without loking back? How healthy a mind does that require? Imponderables.