Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.58.0311040539370.2286@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: under the control
Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2003 05:39:51 -0500 (EST)
under the control tried to get off welbutrin which i took on my own, lexapro as well, the other twisted molecule from celexa, the last taken after the debacle in miami. so i stopped the first and went through a couple of sleepless nights and shakiness., the days were filled with exhaustion, i couldn't move, my work was an afterthought which kept pouring itself out in spite of my mind's uneasy clawings. after that i gave up on the lexapro as well, cold turkey, and then the shakes began, something that shouldn't have happened after this drug, which has me in its unholy grasp. i found anger welling up, rising to the surface, my existence a pure fury against my situation and all that it entailed. the fury led me to push everyone around me to the limits, there was no going back, nothing from the path bringing the wonder of despair home again. i began to get dizzy, and dizziness took hold of me, i'd stop in the middle of the sidewalk losing consciousness, holding on to azure as if my life depended on it, which it did. i couldn't work or worked rather in a trance and the production, more distant than ever, continued as i found myself more and more sexually aroused, stripping everything bare between us, my consciousness the first to go. i was shattered, i'd go to sleep around ten, only to wake for hours in the middle of the night, as now, when my hormonal rhythms are still screaming and stressed out muscles tense to the breaking point. i was never awake and never asleep, i could barely keep myself upright with these spells or swoons as i began to think of them, a latter-day neurasthenia haunting me as the world swayed and rippled. azure was going through other trials and tribulations, i found i couldn't help her, both of us swimming to the bottom of the airless grotto, gasping for breath, screamed drowned in the screams of others. down there i meandered, my fury reaching new heights, terrifying me, an enormous depression past despair waiting at the suicidal door. for once it wasn't easy to lie within the old familiar feelings of the down world, new gates and portals were giving way exposing raw skin, nerves, unknown tissues for unknown purposes, each of them blistered in the salt, some dull monster emerging. i gave up, reached for the pill, the ultimate stage of the addict, after four or five days of this, living off the chemistry once again. one wasn't enough, a second that night, the promise and premise of a third, a fourth, the continuity of a functioning mind not quite my own, the turn towards a different kind of somnolence, all questions turned problematic with dulled belief in the possibilities of answers, answers linked in ragged nets to questions in the salt air above the ocean of truth precisely because of its lack of limitations. now i'm a re-covering addict, the addiction to lexapro forming the hunger in my mind, the welbutrin long lost and unmissed, expose of another chemical landscape. i couldn't manage both, i recognize the stress and most likely shortened arc of the madness of my life, i continue exhaling the language of description, the paste over the substance of the real, the substrate over the substance. a little while ago i was sleeping, something uncanny woke me, and i'm again here, the dizziness a slight new turn of events, writing this down before it gets lost like so many other texts expelled from the surface of my mind. i tend myself, i tend myself constantly, words flourish in spite of the onslaught of the casualty of the brain. i'm at the tip of the flame, the bottom of the chasm, salt burns my wounds, soaks the oils from the skin, fills the pen, makes thoughts rise. i'd rather fight the mind than the brain, i'd say i'm back, but for how long before some new addiction makes itself manifest, something keeping me on track and the track a little longer. ___