To the edge once again

It’s the reason so many psychiatric patients eventually exhaust all but the most devoted of their support system.

Come clean—I stopped taking one of my meds.

But be fair—I told my doctor, my psychiatrist that is, and though skeptical, he agreed.

It’s called Remeron and it has two faces. The first is to lift the spirits. I looked it up on a great website—crazymeds.org. OK, maybe not the most reliable, but definitely more readable than the drug-sponsored sites.

This guy’s take (site is obviously written by a manic)?

Remeron is legalized marijuana.

Might be. Because it does exactly what dope did to me, those many years ago when I was young and experimental.

Remember the munchies?

“Coffee ice cream!” I shouted over my shoulder at Raf, who was puzzled—why was I going to CVS at 11PM? And why couldn’t I stop and answer, so urgent was the craving?

Oddly, I don’t actually like coffee ice cream—but four hours after taking Remeron 15mg PO at HS (that's for Ruthie, to remember her nursing days) I would commit armed robbery to get it.

Well, it wasn’t doing my blood sugar any good—to say nothing of my cholesterol. And my other antidepressant—Lexapro—had worked fine for two years, until Wal-Mart sacked me when I was working my way through the death of Franny. 

I convinced the psychiatrist. And I tapered off the drug, as instructed.

First days were fine. Actually, almost better than fine. I was in Culebra and had an exalted moment. I was on the morning trot, listening to The Creation, when it hit me, how uncannily apt the music of my journey had been. Starting with Winterreise as I went into the bottom of death and despair. Then Beethoven, the Heiliger Dankgesang—as I moved through sickness to health. Lastly, The Creation, as I gave birth and set forth a Franny—a new Franny, my Franny—into the world again.

The Creation—get it? The gods aren’t subtle around here....

We came to a hill, Franny and I—she was trotting alongside of me—and the Haydn came to a long, achingly beautiful ascending—acsending, catch that word?—passage.

Right, so we were three: Franz Joseph, Franny and I.

So I had Franz Joseph in my ear. I reached out and grabbed Franny by the shoulders and hugged. And we sailed up the hill together.

Right—all was well for the next couple of days. But then I stopped writing. Got off my normal schedule. And two days ago, had a very strange thing happen.

Hypoglycemia.

Well, it’s happened before. And somehow, it was 2PM and I hadn’t eaten anything. So I went to the café, and they made me a very good, very large tuna sandwich.

Oddly, the sensations didn’t go away. For me, hypoglycemia is about anxiety. I get desperate / frantic to eat.

You do, and it goes away.

Why wasn’t it?

Right—went to CVS and bought orange juice. Drank the full container. 

Still felt hungry.

Then Miss Taí calls—she’s sensing a rat, or maybe something fishy. I tell her about the hypoglemia. Call tomorrow.

By the time Raf arrives, I’m pretty much a wreck. Now I’m having muscle cramps, and I decide I need magnesium. And oddly, the muscles cramping are ones that never cramp—my fingers and the top of my ankle. Then I notice that I can’t really breath. Well I can, but not easily. And damn, what’s going on with my blood sugar?

Why am I so anxious?

And why was I still feeling strange the next day?

And feeling dammit it’s not fair why has my life been so fucking hard I’ve had to STRUGGLE FUCKING STRUGGLE for fucking years now and I’ve never had it easy and fuc kingf can fuqeiufam l;alcqm09rinf             p’

Phone rings. Miss Taí, wondering how my mood is? 

Can’t talk, I need to eat, call me tomorrow.

But she made me think. This couldn’t be hypoglycemia. Come on, Marc—you’re an old nurse. Think it through. What’s different?

I go into the kitchen. Why am I here? Why is a banana in my hand? Am I supposed to eat it…..

You can eat it if you want. Now go back into the kitchen.

Why am I standing in front of the sink?

Water—you need water.

And now the pill.

I see the pill in my palm. I take it and swallow it. It is four fifteen.

At five, I am doing dishes. I am telling myself, ‘you’ve also been given stuff many people have not. You are way talented in ways many others are not. You see things others don’t. You had wonderful parents, and have a long stable marriage. Yes, it’s been hard. But others have had it harder….’

OK—so Taí?  Call me at four—let’s figure out how to sell this book.

And thanks!

And Thus Spoke Susan

Readers of this blog—which, I’m happy to report, include folk from Spain (17), Russia (11), UK (6), Trinidad and Tobago (3) and one each from France and Ireland—know that I’m busying myself by listening to Haydn’s The Creation. Well, why not? For seven years I sat in a room and threw pencils at the students. Don’t I get a break?

And speaking of breaks, why do I have to write every day? Can’t somebody else shoulder the burden? And since this blog is now international, shouldn’t it start getting serious?

Well, it was puzzling me, yesterday, as I sat in the Internet café absorbing the air conditioning. What to say about my paisano, my countryman, my almost neighbor?

Paul Ryan. Resident—or so I thought—of Janesville, Wisconsin. The very city my father, Jack, was born in! And a man who has cheese flowing in his veins (as he disturbingly said yesterday). 

But what to say?

Well, those years of being a teacher paid off. A student asks a question you can’t answer? Send him to the library to do some research! Get somebody else to do the work.

Susan!

I dashed off an email, asking if she might say a few words about the man, and then began to feel a little bad. Was it an imposition? Was it fair?

Would Jack approve?

Would Susan feel a bit used? She’s a busy lady, after all.

Answer came back in 45 minutes!

And here she is:

The New York Times (part of the liberal media) this morning (August 13) published a story on Paul Ryan (“Conservative Star’s Small Town Roots”). It leads with “the death of his father when Mr. Ryan was only 16 punctured his life of math tests and bike riding . . . ‘Paul went to work at McDonald’s and began to pull his own weight . . . ‘ says his brother. ‘It is remarkable that he chose a path of individual responsibility and maturity rather than letting grief take a different course.’”

The article continues: “His self-reliance followed him to summer camp, where as a counselor he canoed and hiked, and into young adulthood, where he took up deer hunting, a fact noted in his engagement notice in 2000 in The Milwaukee Journal- Sentinel. “Ryan is an avid hunter and fisherman,” the paper reported, “who does his own skinning and butchering and makes his own Polish sausage and bratwurst.”

What you won’t read in this lengthy hagiography is that Ryan’s mother inherited a bundle from her family’s fortune*, his father was a successful lawyer, the camp Ryan went to was Camp Manito-wish (a pricey camp in Northern Wisconsin -- the price today runs from $2000 for two weeks of basic camp to $12,300 for three weeks on an expedition), the Ryans lived on Courthouse Hill in Janesville (and still do --at least for voting purposes, although he’s rarely left Washington since graduating from college). But the NYT article makes him sound like a typical small town kid, bike and paper route, and appealing to Palin fans’ love of hunting and butchering.

As a student (Miami University in Ohio), Ryan was described as “a freshman with a Ph.D. attitude” but Ryan only completed a bachelor’s degree in -- well, they don’t tell us what his major was. He was in too big a hurry to get to Washington. In summers he was an intern there for GOP politicians. Upon graduation did he get a job and some real-world work experience? He did work briefly in the family construction business founded by his great-grandfather. (In the mail room, no doubt.) But not for long. He ran for Congress and scurried back to Washington.

Besides being entitled, Ryan is a hard-core Catholic -- he is adamantly opposed to not only abortion (even in cases of rape or incest), but also birth control. He hates gays and loves guns. Not only for hunting, evidently, as he supports concealed carry of handguns and the kind of weapons used to kill people in the Colorado theater and the Wisconsin Sikh temple.

The article winds up with “Ask one of the 87 Republican freshmen who came rolling into Washington in 2010 — many of them with no political experience — whom they most idolize in Congress, and chances are Paul Ryan’s name will come up.”

Interesting, as the Tea Party loathes Washington insiders, and Ryan is as insider as it gets.

So the GOP has given us two men from privileged backgrounds and money, neither of whom appears to have done a day of sweaty work in his life, both of whom are deeply embedded in authoritarian, patriarchal, anti-woman religions. 

 *See Esquire Magazine: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/paul-ryan-family-wealth-11644997

Wow! Guess I got the answer there!

Well, I did ask. And I pondered it all today, on the daily trot. The Creation, I had decided, was what was called for, after such a gloomy report from home. And I had decided that The Creation would be done in German, since the English version, apparently, resembles a bad computer-translation. Here’s WikiPedia on the subject:

Van Swieten was evidently not a fully fluent speaker of English, and the metrically-matched English version of the libretto has given rise to criticism and various attempts at improvement. Indeed, the English version is sufficiently awkward that the work is sometimes performed in German even in English-speaking countries. One passage describing the freshly minted Adam’s forehead ended up, “The large and arched front sublime/of wisdom deep declares the seat”. The discussion below quotes the German text as representing van Swieten's best efforts, with fairly literal renderings of the German into English; for the full versions of both texts see the links at the end of this article.

Right—German it is! So all I understand are three words: Und Godd sprach. And God spoke. Until I came to this, the slyest and most respectful homage to Handel possible.

In Angustii

Well, Jack was bugging me, so I had to do it.

I had written about that sociopathic piece of music, the Grosse Fuge. And thrown in “And this, from a student of Haydn?”

That wasn’t right.

And Jack didn’t approve. So I struggled with him for a while. I mean, hey—how many people read this blog? How big is Haydn’s reputation, next to mine? And if we were gonna worry about anybody, shouldn’t it be Beethoven?

Not right.

Damn it. Look, Jack—and by the way, aren’t you dead?—it’s not that big a deal. And Haydn himself was famously a nice guy. Gracious. Good. One of his contemporaries called him the embodiment of Enlightenment's ideal of the honest man. (OK—give in to temptation, haul out the French. L’homme honnête! Now that’s class….) So he probably wouldn’t mind.

Marc.

Shit, am I ever gonna be free of you! I’m 56 years old, and you’re still able to say my name—Marc, and note the lack of exclamation mark! You had the quietest voice and, somehow, when you spoke, the heavens moved. Dammit—go putter in the garage. Build something. Stop bugging me—I haven’t defamed Franz Joseph Haydn.

Guess the response!

So I dug it out, the Lord Nelson Mass. Oh, hell, we’ll do the Latin (also classy): Missa in Angustii. Haven’t heard it in years, though I once played it for Raf, and argued it was a more sincere, more—well—honest work than Mozart’s Great Mass. Why not hear it again?

It’s amazing.

Also proof that the old can pull a surprise or two. It’s certainly traditional in content—the text follows the traditional Latin Mass. But wow—what the guy does, from the very first notes!

It’s pure terror.

OK, I enjoyed it enormously. Perfect music for a morning trot. Came home and looked it up. And discovered that, as usual, I’m not particularly original.

Everybody else thinks so too.

Well, that damn father of mine wouldn’t let me rest. He put me to read the whole article: here’s the skinny. The mass was written in that period when Napoleon was very near to conquering Europe. Austria was on edge, nerves were frayed. Haydn composed the work not knowing—no one did—that Napoleon had been defeated, and called it Missa in Angustii. A mass for troubled times, is sometimes the translation. But why not do the simpler thing?

A Mass in Anguished Times.

And was that enough for the old man?

NO! Then I had to download The Creation from Amazon—and pay 18 bucks as well—AND I had to read the biography of Haydn in Wikipedia.

OK—and are you listening, Jack?—here it is. Father is a barrel maker—or something, can’t remember. Mother was a servant. Musical family. Haydn at age six is sent to a relative to live and to develop himself as a musician. This the relative enables him to do, though he also doesn’t feed the child very well. Haydn serves as a choirboy until his voice changes. Actually, after. The empress complained that he sounded like a cow.

Thirty years in the employ of the Esterhazy family. Isolation for much of that time. And yes, he wore livery and did chores. Also composed like a fiend.

Had a completely unhappy marriage, which of course at the time he could not dissolve. So both he and his wife took lovers.

Several trips to London. Return  to Vienna. Teaches Beethoven, who predictably (and metaphorically) bit the hand that was trying to feed him. Composes the Creation over three years at the very end of the 18^th century.

Well, I listened to the first and part of the second sections.

And—you can guess this, right?—it’s friggin’ A.

And here again, he starts out with an amazing section of the chaos—the void before God filled the world. Full of dissonance, completely surprising.

Well the old man was right, as old men often are. The old Haydn reveals himself as something completely new. And my dead Jack is true to life—a fair guy who wants his kids to do the right thing.

Now will you go away?