(10/2006)
I was at the halfway point, out at something they call Candy Cane. It's over the Maryland line, uphill through Beach Drive. I ran it in the chill 40 degrees Fahrenheit, then felt the weakness you feel after you migraine.
I wasn't careful a few nights ago, with my medicine, and ended up with a migraine. It's just that easy. In the old days I had an excuse: I didn't know all the dangers around me that could flip the trigger. Now I know all too well about the dangers. Cheese, wine, chocolate, nuts, various delicious things that require aging--also in the mix are a variety of environmental factors. No sleepless nights; no over-exertion; no skipping meals; no flashing lights.
No flashing lights? How the hell is a person supposed to live in this world, in this strange country full of electrical things, without flashing lights?
I ask you again, how? What if I had a stroke, right here and now. My wife would find my body in a couple hours and I would awaken to various beeping sounds, the smell of a disinfectant, and the many, many electic lights of a hospital, including some metal box that monitors my heart and flashes a number every few seconds. If I was conscious at the time of my removal from the house, I'd have to witness the speedy metal conveyance they call an ambulance, flashing its lights for everyone within a mile to notice. Or if anyone nearby gets hurt during a normal day (this is a city; it happens every day) I'll have to see the same thing. How can I be more careful?
Not skipping meals may be the next hardest part. Who eats meals on time? I don't mean that as a hypothetical question. Who makes it to every meal? You have to be a hard-on about that, especially at work. At first I wasn't--you get into these meetings where some dick isn't paying attention to time (I mean, the only person in the room who's ignoring the time is the guy running the meeting) and you can't pay attention to anything he's saying and when he says is that a good idea you just mumble something, hoping to heaven he doesn't have another point to make. But he does have another point to make, of course, and by the time you get to where your food is your scalp is already tingling or your face feels like it's turning into cold clay, and, vavoom! There goes the next three hours.
Needless to say that doesn't keep me from having lunch anymore. I don't work for Amway, or the Krishna consciousness movement, where they really do use deprivation of meals to persuade people to do what they're told. I'm just talking about a regular workplace.
(written 10/2006)
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Monday, October 09, 2006
Doing a Double (fiction excerpt: Madhouse Diary)
(10/2004)
Ed on Madhouse Diary: Doing a Double
Dad worked in a mental hospital. He'd come home at 4:30 except on the days when he worked double shifts. Then he came home after 11:00. When he was mad at us kids for fighting or generally being difficult he'd remind us that just to keep us in clothes was costing him two sixteen hour work days a week. Every Sunday night and every Thursday night was the schedule. I guess he had Saturday off. He usually slept all day. His snoring was loud enough to make us all understand that we better be quiet. I counted sixteen hours on the clock one day and realized that, as far as functioning through the day, sixteen hours was more than one day. It was all the day's life drained from it, and some of its bones ground into dust as well. I was a kid then, and I knew that a length of time you wouldn't even be bothered doing fun things had to be torture. Dad was a big strong man but we knew he was killing himself gradually.
Years later I'd work a couple sixteen hour shifts to see what it was like. I didn't have kids at home, I wasn't working in a mental hospital, and I wasn't an overweight smoker like dad, but I bet I felt something like what he felt. You don't want to feel that. Around the fourteenth hour I remember something like madness creeping in, then fleeing quickly and leaving me with a queasy sense of triumph that I hadn't fallen into the abyss. There was some gateway that opened in the mind during the double, but it was easy for young, fearless me to see it as a fearful place and step away from it. But was Dad able to avoid its lure?
The whole notion of working in the mad house is a Dickens nightmare. How did Dad come to it as a viable employment option? He could've worked fifteen miles closer to home at something far safer. Safer both physically and mentally. I worked it out in my mind that something about being in the crazy house made Dad feel justified in being in a terrible mood all the time. When it came time to voice his state of mind to the world, what else need he say besides "mental hospital" and "kids at home" before even the most cold-hearted listener would begin to think, that explains it.
(Written 10/2004)
Ed on Madhouse Diary: Doing a Double
Dad worked in a mental hospital. He'd come home at 4:30 except on the days when he worked double shifts. Then he came home after 11:00. When he was mad at us kids for fighting or generally being difficult he'd remind us that just to keep us in clothes was costing him two sixteen hour work days a week. Every Sunday night and every Thursday night was the schedule. I guess he had Saturday off. He usually slept all day. His snoring was loud enough to make us all understand that we better be quiet. I counted sixteen hours on the clock one day and realized that, as far as functioning through the day, sixteen hours was more than one day. It was all the day's life drained from it, and some of its bones ground into dust as well. I was a kid then, and I knew that a length of time you wouldn't even be bothered doing fun things had to be torture. Dad was a big strong man but we knew he was killing himself gradually.
Years later I'd work a couple sixteen hour shifts to see what it was like. I didn't have kids at home, I wasn't working in a mental hospital, and I wasn't an overweight smoker like dad, but I bet I felt something like what he felt. You don't want to feel that. Around the fourteenth hour I remember something like madness creeping in, then fleeing quickly and leaving me with a queasy sense of triumph that I hadn't fallen into the abyss. There was some gateway that opened in the mind during the double, but it was easy for young, fearless me to see it as a fearful place and step away from it. But was Dad able to avoid its lure?
The whole notion of working in the mad house is a Dickens nightmare. How did Dad come to it as a viable employment option? He could've worked fifteen miles closer to home at something far safer. Safer both physically and mentally. I worked it out in my mind that something about being in the crazy house made Dad feel justified in being in a terrible mood all the time. When it came time to voice his state of mind to the world, what else need he say besides "mental hospital" and "kids at home" before even the most cold-hearted listener would begin to think, that explains it.
(Written 10/2004)
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