Into the void...
“That night she sat for hours, too numb even to drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead.”
-Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
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2002-08-23
12:18 p.m.
I’m still reeling from the negatively charged adrenaline rush I experienced when I found my boss back early from vacation. I actually really like my boss, though, so the problem wasn’t in finding that she was back. Rather, it was from realizing that I’d have to talk to her sooner than I’d imagined in regards to the fact that I’m applying for a promotion ridiculously soon after starting this job. I’m smart enough to realize that my chances are unfathomably low, but I also realize that I’d kick myself if I didn’t at least TRY to get this job.
Lately, I’ve discovered myself going through extreme episodes of psychotic behavior. It’s odd because I know when I’m doing it, but I sure as hell can’t stop it. Things like eating junk food, buying expensive jewelry, talking too much and too fast about things I don’t mean to talk about, applying for an unreasonable promotion, grasping at straws for more and more to do, including filing an application for permission to use copyrighted materials from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, writing the next Great American Novel, registering for graduate courses and thinking in advance all the way through what classes I’ll be taking two years from now (if I’m still alive then), buying promotional items for my website, and the list goes on and on and on....
What the hell am I doing?
It’s not that any of it is necessarily terrible behavior, but I can tell that it’s unreasonable and I hate to be unreasonable. All this writing and all this thought about how exactly one goes about being LOGICAL precedes my current state, and I now find myself behaving without any ability to think before I act. It’s personally disturbing and frustrating beyond my average state of being generally frustrated with everything.
Further, what bothers me is that I can recognize these things as being manic episodes. They’re relatively minor, I suppose, but they’re manic nonetheless. The one episode that really threw me and convinced me that I am, in fact, experiencing manic episodes was when I actually fully conceptualized the internet and compared it to the possibility of turning human thoughts and brain waves into electronic impulses that can be sent into and out of people’s minds such that every human being at any given point would actually be capable of reading everyone else’s mind. It would be like doing a search on the internet; you type your mental electronic impulses into your metaphysical search engine to state the person whose mind you would like to read, and the next thing you know you’ve retrieved the impulses that tell you precisely what thoughts they’re currently thinking.
M-A-N-I-C.
Now I’m dizzy. The tremendously bright red splotches on my chest are gone, but I’m still dizzy and confused. I’m still seeing things through fog. I’m still feeling the tightness in my throat and the ensuing sense of unsatisfactory release. My anxiety causes weird tenseness in the soft palate at the back of my mouth and into my nasal passages, and I frequently find my tongue swelling oddly, as well. As the anxiety fades into a lesser degree of anxiety, the muscles in the back of my throat release a little bit, sending a rush of mucus down my throat so quickly that it frequently chokes me and makes me cough uncontrollably.
Thankfully, I have an appointment on Monday morning to meet with the shrink for the first time in a year. Perhaps he’ll be able to tell me why my drugs no longer work and I continually feel like shit. Perhaps he’ll be able to do something to help these odd manic spells that keep occurring for no reason. Perhaps he'll be able to come up with a way to stop this awful throat/anxiety problem.
Perhaps, but probably not.
