Little Match Boy

"I read to live in other people's lives.
I read about the joys the world dispenses to the fortunate,
and listen for the echoes.
I read to live, to get away from life.
I have no illusions. I recognize the limits of my dreams.
I know how painful dreams can be unless you know they're merely dreams.
I do not dwell on dreams. I know how soon a dream becomes an expectation.
How can I have expectations?
I do not hope for what I cannot have, I do not cling to things I cannot keep.
The more you cling to things, the more you love them.
The more the pain you suffer when they're taken from you.
Ah, but if you have no expectations, you can never have a disappointment!"

- edited from "I Read" from "Passion" by Stepen Sondheim

Reflections...

from "Bed of Roses" by Bonnie Hayes sung by Bette Midler on "Bette of Roses"

All the wasted years,
All the useless, bitter tears
If I'd known I'd have stopped it at the start.
I knew life was long
And I knew life could go wrong
But I never knew my life would break my heart.

Dreams die harder than pride-
I have learned my lesson well-
I will put them both aside
'Cause I made
And I'm going to lie
in this Bed of Roses.

I'm tired and I'm dying to be free.
Gonna lay down like a sigh
In my Bed of Roses
This Bed of Roses I believed my Life would be.

Salted Earth

“The grief rolled off of him in waves. It was palpable. If you sat too close, you could taste it in the air as if he had just finished a meal heavy in loss and sorrow.”

Quote of (most) Days

"I have no 'loved ones'. Oh, don't get me wrong, there are 'ones' that I love, they're just not mine to have."

The Eye of (or Calm Before) the Storm

So I didn’t win anything in the Lottery today-again.
Like many people, I vividly remember the night of my mother’s death. It was over 34 years ago, I was ten (yes, I’m 44, congratulations, you’re a math whiz) and after my mother had been taken away in the ambulance, my brothers and I were kept at home by a neighbor who had us watching television to try to keep us occupied and distracted. It was a sitcom starring Jimmy Stewart and I remember laughing at something and stopping abruptly with the thought, “my mother may be dying and here I am laughing, I’m an awful person.” While there had been heinous problems in my life prior to that evening, I think my depression really took root at that moment.
I woke up this morning to bright golden sunshine but it has gradually completely clouded over and grown quite chilly. What most of the nation doesn’t realize about Seattle is that, even when totally overcast, it’s still very bright. It’s just the difference between the yellow-gold brightness of an incandescent bulb and the blue-grey brightness of a fluorescent one. Back in the suburbs of Detroit where, when it gets overcast, it can get so dark that the streetlights come on in the middle of the day, people can’t conceive of it still being bright when cloudy. However, much like the midwest, the weather here is remarkably changeable. In a phone conversation I had a few moments ago, I was told that in Greenwood (about 3 miles away from me) it’s totally sunny and warming up-and, according to the forecast on the radio-it’s due to get back up into the 70’s by later this afternoon.
Funny how the mind distracts itself while the world comes down around it.
I have a week to come up with six thousand dollars or, in a month, I’ll be homeless.
God, I hate being melodramatic yet my life does seem to go that way a lot.
The money I owe is a hospital debt that I incurred from not having any insurance and missed a couple of payments on and has been sold to a collection agency. The agency contacted me three weeks ago and, that day, I went into a major anxiety attack; racing pulse, sweats, irrational fear and transient numbness (though that was mostly in my face). After realizing that I couldn’t achieve anything while in that state, I put off dealing with it till the next day. Subsequently, each time I’d explore options, the sheer enormity of both the debt and my ignorance of how to deal with it would overwhelm me and begin to induce another anxiety attack (much as it is now, just talking about it) and I’d set it aside again.
Then, of course, the depression kicked in.
One of the symptoms/side effects of depressed and other
emotionally/psychologically damaged people is “wish fulfillment” or “wishful” thinking. The sincere belief that unrealistic, sometimes fantastical events will take place and resue you from your life. For example; the director or screenwriter or somebody who sees the Chuck Norris film I had a small (but featured!) role in will want me in their next project-at a significant salary, of course; or, the common one, I’ll win the lottery. Yes, I’m an intelligent, educated man and I’m aware of the odds against either of those but tell that to the little voice in my head screaming “everyone tells you how the camera loves you and how talented you are!” and “but SOMEBODY wins the lottery-it COULD be you!” So I’d keep checking the web to see if the movie’d been finished, and buying my lotto tickets and holding my breath.
The last time I attempted suicide (and was consequently hospitalized for a few days) it was the result a of a post-anxiety attack depressive period.
In my head, I’ve started writing the note.
Pray for me.

The Darkness Beckons

I guess I really ought to look up some statistics on Depression, the percentage of the population that suffer from it, the percentage of diagnosed cases that result in suicide, the percentages of suicides that were treated and untreated for it...but my depression leaves me too tired to even do that.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/suifacts.htm
http://www.allaboutdepression.com/gen_04.html
Isn’t Google a wonderful thing?
I took care of (as in “primary caregiver”) my great-aunt Clare for ten years. She was paranoid-schizophrenic to begin with and developed alzheimer’s on top of that. (I come from an incredibly polluted gene pool) One night, as I was holding her hand, waiting for her to fall asleep, she told me that she had realized her mind wasn’t working very well anymore and that she was sorry to me for what she was putting me through. I wept for hours later that night.
One of the scariest things about the darker moments of an episode of depression is that your mind begins to betray you. The inability to focus through the mental fog, the loss of memory of things you want-but not the things you need to forget and, mostly, the way incredibly inappropriate things pop out of your mouth that you didn’t even realize were in your mind. Looking in the mirror, tieing my tie to get ready for an audition , my gaze wanders up into my own eyes and “I want to die” comes out of my mouth seemingly of it’s own accord. (any wonder I didn’t get cast?) A friend telling me about a student of his who was hit by a bus and killed instantly and I say “lucky bastard” before even asking the kid’s name. The incredibly uncomfortable silences after these utterances aren’t much fun either. I mean, what’s to say?
When it gets really bad, it’s like being drunk-you have virtually no inhibitions. You feel that, not only do you have nothing, you actually are nothing, therefore, there’s nothing to lose.
Another consequence of the loss of mental focus is the loss of body awareness, a kind of drunken clumsiness. You forget how big or small you are and run into or miss things you’re reaching for. You feel the pressure, see the bruise or worse, the blood but, despite how badly everything else about your existence hurts-actually, physically hurts-you have no awareness of the damage you’ve just done to your body. Unfortunately, this doesn’t extend to body-consciousness. You laugh at the blood, you think “maybe some of the ugliness and pain will drain away.” But it never does. And, eventually, the episode fades and everything hurts that much worse-and leaves scars to boot.

The Darkness Gathers

It’s odd, how comfort, time and absence can make you forget things. Especially important things. Life-and-Death type things.
A friend of mine has an “Idiopathic” (meaning they can’t tell him why he’s got it or when it will or won’t strike) condition and, because it’s not something he deals with regularly, not only does he forget how sick it can make him, he forgets he even has it. Consequently, when he does have an attack, he forgets he’s lived through it just fine before and is convinced, this time, it’s going to kill him. But this isn’t his story.
Over eight years ago I was diagnosed as clinically depressed. Yeah, cliche these days, I know. It seems like three out of four people you talk to is on one or more of Zoloft, Paxil or Welbutrin. And some of these drugs really do work for some people. That is, if you take them. Which can only happen if you can pay for them. Aye, there’s the rub.
In 1961, the year I was born (maybe it was prophetic?) Joseph Heller got his first novel, “Catch-22” published, here’s an excerpt;

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

“Catch-22” has become part of the American vocabulary because of that book. And damn, has our society got a lot of them!
There is virtually no public mental health system in this country. There are crisis intervention hotlines, but they’re manned by volunteers and otherwise subsidized by corporate donations. So they’ll keep you from killing yourself but not treat you so you no longer want to. Depression is a debilitating disease that leaves many of it’s victims, if untreated, unable to work. No job=no insurance, no money to pay for the treatment that would allow them to hold a job. “Catch-22.”

Keeping Track

There have been shows I’ve performed in where I’ve kept a journal, rather a log, from the first day of rehearsal. I recently discovered that my last Director kept a blog (the 21st century equivalent) of the shoot I did with him. I was both surprised and ashamed. It reminded me of how much I used to enjoy doing that and how much I learned about my craft from writing about my experiences in it.
My problem is, well, one of them anyway, that I think too much. Perhaps it's my actor training-everything has to be properly learned, directed and then rehearsed, therefore everything I write has to be properly written, edited and then rewritten. No wonder Mary Poppins got pissed at being called "practically perfect in every way." It's exhausting!

On A Snowy Morning

Last week I spent a couple hours writing "Tsunami Thoughts" and, with one keystroke, accidentally (and permanently!) erased it. That taught me to write things in my word-processing program first then copy them here-but this morning I just don't want to take that kind of time. You see, here in Seattle, snow has the life expectancy of a bouquet of fresh-cut daylilies and poppies; under optimal conditions, a day, day and a half (if you find mostly naked stems attractive) but fresh and whole; hours at best.
One of the reasons I moved to the Pacific Northwest was that I hate the cold (but my body can't handle heat) and coming from the Midwest, I've shoveled enough snow to qualify for senior status in the Futility Society (I mean, it all melts and vanishes anyway, right? yeah, my folks would never buy that, either). But once a year for a day or two, okay, pretty-pretty, call me when it's gone. Except, somewhere deep inside of me, this little boy woke up at the sight of all this scientific miracle of nature and, for just a few minutes, I gave into him.
The almost tickle-cold when the snowflake first touches your skin, and the speed with which it transforms itself into water and runs away! The almost electric sparkle when, after twirling for minutes with your head thrown back, you manage to catch one on your tongue. And the taste! Clear, sharp, sweet, minty and...gone. Again. And again. How it just scatters as you walk through it-weightless yet thick and almost furry!
But this little boy doesn't know that he's been imprisoned in an old man's body-tilting my head back gives me a crick in my neck and since I no longer own insulated boots, walking through fluffy, frozen water makes my bunions ache. Yeah, it would be fun to throw snowballs at the dogs-even this jaded old man agrees they're cute when they look up at me with snowbeards-but I don't have a fireplace to curl up in front of afterward to chase the chill from my joints and an electric baseboard heater just isn't the same thing at all. So, instead, I'll curl up with a book in the chair in my front window, a blanket over my legs, the dogs at my feet, watching today's children playing in the park across the street and promise the little boy inside, as he fades sadly and unwillingly away, that tomorrow, when it's a little warmer and this is mostly gone, we'll jump in a few puddles to make up for it.