Ode to my head

13Dec11

Last night I had a dream in which I could take my head off my body. I could open it up at its “seams” and fix various things.

At one point I wanted to turn it over to see what it looked like where it was normally fastened onto my neck. I felt my head’s weight in my hands. It felt about as heavy as I would expect: ten pounds or so. I felt its thickness and its warmth. It seemed solid and alive. It had dirty blonde hair, as I do.

I turned it over and saw that it was sewn up under my chin and back to where my spinal column would be, so that no blood would spill out.

Then I realized that I’d better put my head back on or I wouldn’t get blood to it and I’d lose consciousness. I suddenly wondered how I hadn’t blacked out already. I saw on my head that my eyes were closed as though I was sleeping—peacefully—and at the time I didn’t question what eyes I was using to see that the eyes on my head were closed.

I started to feel lightheaded in the dream. I didn’t know how I would get my head unsewed or affixed to my neck again so that blood flow would resume. I placed my head back on my neck, and at that point my entire body felt like the one I was dreaming with.

Soon after, it seemed, I awoke.

Now, as I write, I am tempted to exhort myself, “You really should get your head examined.”

But I already did that.

Last night.

In my dream.

photo: ElissaSCA; from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Filed under: bipolar disorder, depression, dreams, High Line, imago dei, joy   |  2 Comments

Byōbu: block the wind

24Nov11

Sunday morning. A light breeze from the east allowed for only a zippered fleece. It was about ten degrees warmer than most late November days should be in New York City. As I reached the corner of Broadway and 86th Street on my way to CVS to get the prescription, I noticed a woman of about fifty with a silver aluminum cane, one of those standard medical supply jobs with the black foam handle. She swung her right leg forward with it in practiced rhyme. Her eyes left crows’ feet behind them—deep fissures in desert-white skin, and her mouth stretched to a trapezoid, its sides turned down revealing molasses-colored stains between her teeth.

Soon close to the other side of Broadway, as I and others walked with the light and the woman with the cane somewhere behind me, a man in his 40s on a bicycle sluiced toward us from our downtown side, having run the red light. He mulled whether he would ride in front, then behind, then finally in front, of our group. As he knifed past, he looked steadily ahead—a Mona Lisa fuck-you smile unaware of the hoi polloi behind an invisible velvet rope held by stanchions. I walked the remaining block uphill, between Broadway and Amsterdam, and went inside CVS, where all the sick people in our neighborhood go and where all the people in our neighborhood go when they are sick. They have been playing Christmas songs for more than a week now, and it’s not Thanksgiving yet. Karen tells me it’s been since before Halloween. I hadn’t noticed. Until recently, it’s usually a quick trip after a cell phone call emerging from the subway: ‘Honey-hi-I-just-got-out-at-86th-need-anything-for-the-boys…milk?-how-we-doing-on-milk-yes-I’ll-wait-while-you-check…’ I go if we need Toaster Strudel or toilet paper, and my earbuds and iTunes afford me a Mona Lisa posture toward all other shoppers. In the last two to three weeks, though, the trips have usually included a prescription. They come in white paper bags with light blue cost summaries and explanations stapled to the outside. The cashier scans each bag like it’s a half-gallon of 2%, a box of Contact Lens solution, or nail clippers. They all go in the same translucent CVS plastic bag, which I swear will rip because of the Contact Lens box yet never does.

After CVS, my walk home is downhill or on level sidewalks. On West End Avenue between 85th and 84th, in front of the building where Rachmaninoff once lived and which has a bronze plaque to that effect that many passers-by stop and read, I see a white pigeon with scattered gray spots. It’s preening itself, taking the oil released from its uropygial gland with its beak and applying it to its feathers to keep them waterproof and flexible. It does merely what works and what it must to survive; ornithologists tell us how it’s the diester wax in the oil that does it. Unlike their Columbidae cousins, though, the morning doves, the pigeons’ Jackson Pollack-like traces around the city warn pedestrians of their presence. Thin, silver spikes are affixed to ledges on office building doorways, and city residents cringe when they swoop overhead, having heard of or experienced unwanted deposits on hair, suit jacket, or dress. Yet while pigeons are always discussed by citizens or handled by building managers in the plural, this one in front of me appears to lack nearby companions but seems content. With its white feathers and off-colored spots against the manicured concrete, the pigeon completes an urban gray-scale palette.

As I round the corner and head west on 84th Street—our block—I see walking toward me a woman in her early 30s, her mid-back blonde hair finishing in curled and bouncing meringue. She is smiling and occasionally looking behind her at a girl—three, maybe four years old at the most—who, I see before I pass, is laughing and unaware of anyone but the older woman. Her tiny teeth are separated by spaces. Her cheeks are rounded and pink in the centers, and her hazel knit cap is pulled smartly down her forehead to block the wind. She squints. Her sparkly gaze doesn’t veer—she laughs while looking straight ahead at the woman, whose face turns occasionally and with mock surprise to keep taut the invisible string between them, as though the girl were a paper-thin kite in the blue November sky.

Filed under: parenting   |  1 Comment

Urban Flight [abstract]

10Aug11

My American friends told me that Hong Kong was ‘like New York on steroids.’

Having grown up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, I was skeptical about the Asian city’s intensity or impressiveness. Yet, I must admit I was astounded by China’s ‘Special Administrative Region.’ After 23 meetings in 13 days— all meetings but two held in Central and Wan Chai districts —I knew why the city was known for juicing. I later asked a Chinese friend about this.

“It’s such a dense city,” he said… [more here]

Photo: Surrealplaces

Filed under: birds, city, urbanism   |  Leave a Comment

Daddy’s not angry

07Aug11

Suicide has visited our family several times. Specifically, I’ve known four people who have decided in their depression to murder themselves. Three of these were family members; one was my father. All were men.

Diagnosed with bipolar disorder 16 years ago, I can’t say that the thought never crossed my mind during times when I suffered from near insufferable depression. (If that adjective seems hyperbolic, then you haven’t been there or don’t know someone who has.) In fact, the last time I experienced any real depression—and it was the worst one I’d experienced—it was September 2008. Watch this:

I had completed a work project and, frankly, did a poor job. Well, a superior called me out on it (he was right, of course), and I slumped into a two-week-long depression. Instead of explain here, Dear Reader, why this depression was so inextricably linked to my need to please people and win their approval, suffice it to say that I slumped quickly into a self-doubting and self-hating morass.

I had rarely taken sick days due to my bipolar since 1995, but during that time, I did take a few days. My bed was my refuge. Yet, it was no relief. The down comforter was no comfort at all; I drew it around my shoulders like a life preserver, and yet it served more as an anvil. In my erratic dreams and half-sleep, my sense of inadequacy hounded me like a yellow-jacket would a sugary soft drink. In the worst moments, which I no longer emotionally feel but rather whose content I recall, I even doubted I was loved by the God who sacrificed his very self for me. If you think that’s not painful, try thinking about someone you implicitly trust, someone you’d die for, someone who you want to be with if stranded on a desert island with one other person…and then imagine that in an instant, that person wants to annihilate you. You mean nothing to them.

What’s the point? you ask yourself.

Well, there is none. So you start to toy with the idea… and then the plan.

I never planned, but I did entertain that guest who doesn’t wipe his feet on the doormat nor say thank-you after being served.

To explain the outcome of that two weeks and the tool I’ve used ever since, I won’t preach but, rather, will testify—you know, like in those small, hot, Baptist churches where the fat lady with big breasts gets up in front of the congregation (whom she calls, ‘Church,’ like when someone during announcements says, ‘Good morning, Church. I want to tell you about dinner following the service today…’). She might be wearing a white hat. She fans herself with a service bulletin, which uselessly pushes stultifying air toward her shiny, sweaty cleavage. She looks past her children and the spot where her husband used to sit, her sisters and nephews and nieces, her neighbors (even the ones she got into an argument with yesterday), and she looks past even the town prostitute and town drunk, who sit one row apart toward the back left. She looks past them all and then up, toward a slat vent in the a-frame building, as if her eyes could carry her to Him. As if that 180-pound body would float up through the belfry were it not tied down by her orthopedic shoes and gravity. She speaks.

At the end, she says, ‘I am sinner. That I know. And yet I know my precious Jesus died for me. I know that my Lord is not angry with me. He has always been saying, “Come home, my daughter. Come home.” And he says that to you.’ Her eyes get wide, and her gaze drops to Church.

She looks at the prostitute. And then the drunk. And then she looks at her sisters, and her children, and aunts and uncles and neighbors. Because, while they all know that what she says is true, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded. And then she closes her eyes, lifts her head again and considers her own words. Because it doesn’t hurt her, either.

‘Daddy’s not angry. You can come home.’

video/poetry: Scroobius Pip

Filed under: depression, Jesus, redemption, suicide   |  6 Comments

So far…

31Jul11

My first of three weeks in Texas (with Karen’s family) was largely devoted to researching generosity in large cities (online and in texts), and some of the next two will be as well. That is, when we’re not swimming, eating fried catfish, napping, or looking for deer bones in the woods behind Memaw and Granddaddy’s house.

Filed under: city, generosity, Kerrville, parenting, Texas   |  Leave a Comment