A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late December, 2000
Wednesday, December 20, 2000
6 PM. As I expected, I did not get much sleep last night and felt kind of anxious. But although I was sweating and restless, it wasn’t intolerable, and I did manage to get a couple of hours sleep.
I did yoga at 6 AM and left the house at 8:15 AM. Once again, there was not too much rush hour traffic. I really had never been to the middle of downtown where David Bodney’s law office, Steptoe and Johnson, is on the 28th floor of a skyscraper on Washington and Central.
I got there early, but finally Bodney’s secretary put me in a conference room with the test. He came in a little later.
It was a law school-type exam with hypos, so I should be used to it, but I still have brain fog and brain buzz so I’m certain I missed a lot. I tried to write legibly, and at least my hands stopped sweating (the way they are now).
By 11 AM, I still had one more question, but even though I rushed, I couldn’t make my appointment with Dr. Brubaker, so I called and canceled.
I’m not going to worry about how I did on the test, but I think Bodney will take pity on me and give me a B. I hope so.
I called Sat Darshan about lunch, but Gurudaya was taking her to Target. It was just as well, as I was glad to get home. I spent the rest of the day indoors.
Dr. Brubaker left a message; I’ll call him tomorrow and he said maybe we can deal with it over the phone.
The brain buzz (which just hit me) doesn’t seem to affect my driving; It just feels weird. I almost think it’s my sinuses. Or it could be a new symptom caused by my anxiety. If it doesn’t get worse as the dosage increases, I guess I can adjust to it.
My right palm is soaked right now, so I’ve resorted to a towel under my hand as I write the way I often do now. Hopefully the sweatiness will pass. Sigh.
I wrote a lot of emails today. I told Timmy in Tennessee that I’m sending him a couple of my chapbooks. That guy Michael doesn’t want to be my lover, but I don’t know if I can deal with his Christianity and love of Home Depot and left-brain engineer mentality.
I also wrote to Teresa, Alice (who called yesterday but couldn’t talk today), Josh, Patrick and others. I also put a personal ad on Yahoo, checked more websites related to the drugs I’m taking, and read most of the paper. (I skim a lot more now, probably a good thing.)
In addition, I did a little housecleaning and transferred all my stuff to my new backpack.
During dinner – a Boca burger with onions, corn relish, ketchup, mustard, kimchi and beets, I heard an NPR story about the death of former New York City Mayor John Lindsay and I couldn’t stop crying.
I thought about how, as I got better in the spring of 1969, I worked on Mayor Lindsay’s Republican primary campaign for reelection at the corner storefront office on Avenue R and Flatbush, and how bad I felt when he lost in June to John Marchi.
Early the next morning, when I got to the campaign headquarters, I found that but someone had written “Nigger Lover” all over the glass storefront door with some kind of black marker, and I had to try to get it off with just soap and water from our dirty little bathroom. As I kept rubbing the words off, I was so upset that tears kept coming to my eyes.
Larry, a wonderful old-time Irish pol who smoked and drank heavily, ran the office and was so nice to all of us kids who are working there.
Sadly, in early November, when I was bussed with other campaign workers to a storefront in Bay Ridge, I saw a sign, “Rest in Heaven,” with Larry’s name and photo. He had a heart attack the previous week, just days before Lindsay was vindicated by winning reelection on the Liberal Party line.
I guess I was crying this afternoon mostly for myself. I cry easily these days, and it feels good, as if I am getting back in touch with that 18-year-old boy recovering from agoraphobia and re-entering the world. My work in the Lindsay campaign was one of my first forays back into society.
Although I have a spectacular memory, I’ve blacked out so much of the agoraphobic time between September 1968 and May 1969. It was before I started writing my diary, so I can’t look at any record of those days.
I think my stomach is a little upset now because I was crying while I was eating that spicy food I had for dinner.
But I liked sniffling and getting all that stuff out. Now I cry at the drop of a hat. I probably need to cry even more.
Well, four weeks from today, I start teaching at ASU again. I can’t imagine if I will feel better, worse or the same by then. I do know that I survived this fall of 2000.
Tomorrow is the shortest day of the year. Chanukah begins at night, and it’s almost Christmas, the third Christmas in a row I’ve been in Phoenix.
Thursday, December 21, 2000
6 PM. I just took my Klonopin because I’m starting to shake a little. Today I had a 2 PM appointment with Susan and played phone tag with Dr. Brubaker, although I told him my side effects were receding.
I’ll go up to 150 mg. of Serzone late tonight and we’ll see if my side effects get worse. For now I can live with the buzzing in my head.
I got a ton of replies to last night’s personals ad on Yahoo. It’s odd that I ask for intelligence as the main thing I’m looking for, and then I get lots of replies from dummies.
A couple of the guys seemed okay, but I don’t expect anything will happen.
Last night I wrote some more emails, including one to Jaime. It was just a brief Christmas greeting, but he sent me back a short, sweet note right away. I know he’s probably flattered that I once had such a crush on him.
That guy, Michael, though, is just a bit too obnoxious for me, so I blocked him.
I slept all right and was up at 6 AM. My palms were sweaty, but that went away after a while.
Teresa was very upset after Cat told her she’s pregnant. That’s the disaster scenario Teresa predicted last summer: not only did Cat go back to her husband, but now they’re having a baby.
Paul and Jade already knew about it and kept it from Teresa for as long as possible. But you know Teresa: she will not relent and told Cat that Neil is not welcome on Christmas after last year, so now of course, Cat isn’t coming either.
That just makes it hard for Paul, of course; the baby will be his first grandchild, after all. Teresa says it will never be her grandchild and she doesn’t care anything about the baby.
Teresa said that Barbara and Pam have lost their step-grandkids through death and separation, and she says the only one of Paul’s kids whom she considers hers is Jade.
So Christmas at their house will be very uncomfortable. The next day, she, Paul and Thomas leave for San Francisco to stay with Deidre, her husband and Stephanie, so maybe that will relieve the tension.
Timmy in Tennessee posted to the Paxil group that he tried to kill himself the other night. He took 80 milligrams of Paxil. That amount merely put him to sleep, but the cops came over to his apartment.
I had previously told Timmy to promise me that he’d never harm himself; I told him to call me if he became suicidal. Unfortunately, I was on the computer when he phoned, so my line was tied up on the modem.
Timmy wrote that he wouldn’t do anything like that again, but I don’t know, I want to speak to him.
I finally got to chat with Ronna today; I could hear Abigail in the background, talking a mile a minute about some toy while Ronna’s half-brother James was trying to take care of her.
Abigail just got potty-trained, so she can start preschool in January. Chelsea is in first grade, likes her class and teacher, and is learning to read.
Matthew apparently just missed getting a really good job at NYU medical school (an insider got it) but he’s still up for a few other jobs. For now, however, they are still staying in Jenkintown.
Ronna said that Billy, his wife and baby left Fort Lauderdale and are now in Shippensburg, where Billy heads the counseling program at the university. Sue and her family in San Francisco are fine, and Ronna’s mother is visiting with Ronna’s uncle and aunt in Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Rona was, of course, sorry to hear that I’ve been ill and said they are finally getting a computer soon. We’ll see. But I’m really glad we got to talk to one another because it’s really important for me to stay in touch with friends.
Sat Darshan called while I was at the psychologist and then when I went to Wendy’s for a baked potato. When I finally spoke to her, she said she had another disaster today when Kiran’s finger got squished in a door.
Luckily, it wasn’t broken, but she was screaming and they had to spend a couple of hours in the emergency room – exactly one year to the day that Kiran was in the ER with a broken arm.
Will Sat Darshan’s trials and tribulations ever end?
Mom said that Marc had two cell phones for me, each with an hour’s time on them. Mom had to get off when China threw up in the kitchen after being upset because Dad left the house.
Anyway, this morning I went to Albertsons, mailed out bills and sent out the Dictionary of Literary Biography and Night and Day printouts to a couple of friends.
I also completed and sent out an application for a residency at Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondacks. Although I was feeling sleepy, I did laundry and exercised.
My session with Susan went well. In the waiting room before I went into her office, I was finishing The Anxiety Disease.
It’s good for me to have someone to talk with. Susan says she can hear my voice when she reads the stories in With Hitler in New York, and she told her son, who’s an editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review, about my being a fiction writer.
(God, if I had known that, I wouldn’t have trashed the ASU English Department the way I did at our last session.)
Susan thinks that if I can get stabilized on 300 milligrams of Serzone, I should be able to wean myself off Klonopin and stay on Serzone for nine or ten months.
Our last appointment is on Thursday, January 11, though she will ask for a couple of more termination appointments from United Healthcare.
There was an article in today’s Times on this writer, Thomas Frank, who’s got a book out, One Market Under God, which criticizes the extreme capitalism of the 1990s.
It’s amazing how fast we are sliding into a recession come one that may be the disaster I’ve long predicted. Bush is actually talking up the chances of a recession because he wants to use scare tactics to get his $1.3 trillion tax cut passed.
Of course, the GOP conservatives will blame the recession on Clinton and the liberals just as they gave Clinton no credit for the recent boom, saying it was all due to Reagan’s legacy of tax cuts.
The article mentioned, in contrast to David Brooks’s bobos (bourgeois bohemians), probos (proletarian bohemians) – examples of which are college adjunct instructors and Microsoft temporary workers.
So if I do go bankrupt again in 2001, it will again be amidst the backdrop of a very serious economic downturn. It will be fun to watch George W Bush deal with it.
Although the stock market had a dead cat bounce today, the tech stocks are way down for the year.
*
10 PM. Tonight I spoke to Timmy at his parents’ house in Nashville.
I’ve been very concerned about his suicide attempt and told him he needs to take his Paxil, which he’s been on for 16 months, exactly the way his doctor prescribed and not skip, double up or reduce the dosage.
Though he’s very messed up, Timmy is a smart guy, and of course I’ve got an unsuitably large crush on him. I guess I have a thing for skinny, fem black guys in their twenties.
We just seem to click when we talk about it all different stuff, and he picked up on my humor without the uncomfortable silences or saying “Huh?” the way most other guys do.
In contrast to Timmy, most of the guys who answered my Yahoo ads don’t seem compatible with me even as friends. Consider Harold, the 50-year-old recently divorced guy who’s very nice, but he’s a 25-year Air Force veteran, a gardener and probably a conservative Republican.
Perhaps I judge people too easily, but I can help by instinct with whom I might click – and It’s not with Harold or the bow-tied black intellectual in the Bay Area or the recovering alcoholic who never went to college or the Filipino nurse who values being “discreet.”
Even the muscular blond Jewish guy who’s lived in Davie and grew up in Westchester is looking for someone he can go skydiving with. Not me!
It’s interesting to see what’s out there every six months or so. While many of these guys have great qualities, I don’t see myself dating any one of them seriously.
I don’t see myself with Timmy, either, but after over a month of emails, we’ve developed trust and a friendship.
Wednesday, December 27, 2000
6 PM. Today was stressful. Sat Darshan said that Libby and Grant can’t really understand how depressed and dysfunctional she and I are. Though I love the two of them, and they’re great friends, seeing them stressed me out.
They arrived at my apartment at noon, and I went over to their RV park at 2:30 PM, getting completely lost even though I pass the place every day on my way to ASU. I’m just totally messed up these days.
After we all had dinner at a wood-fired pizza restaurant on Mill Avenue, my car wouldn’t start, so I became very upset. It turned over, but Grant said I must have a clogged fuel pump because gas wasn’t getting to it – or perhaps I just flooded it in my anxious way.
While Grant was finishing up with the AAA, I managed to start the car by pumping the gas pedal.
I’m going to have to take the car in to be fixed, but at this point, with the Christmas holiday and all the tourists here for the Fiesta Bowl, there are no car rentals in the Valley, and I doubt any mechanic will look at the car until Tuesday.
As with Sat Darshan and her car, it’s just so hard when you have no money. Although Grant understands how little I make, like Teresa, he said I need to lease a car when I get myself financially settled.
Before the car trouble, I was actually having a pretty great evening. It was nice to be out on Mill Avenue amid the distractions of Christmas and Fiesta Bowl week. Before that, we went to ASU because Grant wanted to get ASU T-shirts. While we were in the bookstore, I bought the two textbooks for my Press Freedom Theory class.
It was nice to see Lindsay and Wyatt again. When I got to the RV park this afternoon, the kids were in the heated pool – though at 65°, I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and heavy jacket.
I spoke with Libby as the kids splashed around while steam was rising from the pool’s heated water. At first, they were going to rent a car so we could visit Darshan tonight, but going to Phoenix seemed too much for all of us.
Sat Darshan herself was very depressed because of her birthday; her dad’s birthday was Christmas and they always celebrated it together.
At work, no one gave her a birthday card, and she felt bad because the other workers always seems to get them. That led her to start sending out her résumé tonight.
Sat Darshan felt nauseated and tired, so I knew it would be too hard for us to go over, especially after Grant decided not to rent a car and I’m nervous about driving mine – now, of course, even more so.
I tried to explain to Libby and Grant how hard it’s been for me to adjust to Arizona and how sick I’ve been in the past two and a half months.
Dr. Brubaker called and said I could try staying at the dosage of Serzone I started today, 50 mg. in the morning and 200 mg. at night. The only side effect I’ve noticed is drowsiness, and my anxiety is mostly gone – although today, when the stress began to pile up, I felt it.
My computer crashed at least eight times today. The screen flickers and then freezes, and all I can do is shut it off manually. I may have put too much stuff on the hard disk yesterday.
Sean answered my holiday greetings, saying that unlike me, he’s still at the same old place, the house that he’s been sharing with Doug in Tampa for so many years.
I wish I had the security of Sean’s life: his relationship, his career, his house. I sacrificed all that to be what – a writer? – when I don’t have the talent to make a real career of it.
I feel bad that I can’t treat friends like Libby and Grant the way that they have treated me. I feel bad that I felt too anxious to drive to Sat Darshan’s.
Today was the worst I’ve felt in a while, and if I can’t deal with this amount of stress, how am I going to deal with another semester of teaching at ASU and MCC?
As Grant said, old cars are always breaking down, and he’s right that in saying that I just need the coping skills to deal with that – and everything else in my life.
Right now I need to relax and let the Serzone do its work. Last night I slept really well.
I will be really glad to see 2000 end. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way about another year.
Thursday, December 28, 2000
8 PM. Last night I couldn’t fall asleep until 2 AM because I was still stressed out over the car trouble – which actually now seems to be nothing. I was very lucky to have Grant and Libby with me.
This morning my car started fine, so last night I must have flooded the engine the way I did when I was anxious on the day of my Mesa Community College observation.
I finished reading The Anxiety Disease, which I’d like to start reading over. I also read the newspaper and The Authors Guild Bulletin with the group’s report and symposium on the midlist book.
The chain bookstores have made a bad situation worse for the midlist book, and the current problems are especially depressing for someone like me.
I began to obsess a little, the way I did when my depression first started, about the choices I’ve made in my life which led me to the mess I am in now. But I tried not to go overboard and didn’t get very anxious.
Reading The Anxiety disease showed me that in many ways I merely controlled the panic disorder of my adolescence, and that for much of the last 30 years I’ve lived my life in thrall of the disease by limiting my options or by reacting to it by being overly independent and moving and changing jobs often so I could avoid agoraphobia.
I also need to ignore well-meaning people with unsolicited advice, particularly those who tell me to stop taking medication. If someone told Dad to stop taking his heart medication or someone told an insulin-dependent diabetic to go “drug-free,” people would think they were crazy.
But many people are too ignorant to understand about mental (brain) diseases.
Yes, stress played a part in what happened to me last night, and conditioning also played a part.
But remember, it was only in 1969 after the Triavil kicked in that I was able to take buses and subways further and further, risking anxiety.
Actually, last night was fine: I had a good time going out to a restaurant with friends until the car problem popped up.
But I also spent the night tossing and turning in bed, thinking about how I don’t really want to teach English 102 at ASU and MCC. I also came to the conclusion that I don’t really care about my graduate courses.
Still, it’s just the four months from mid-January to mid-May, and I can deal with that now that I know I won’t be coming back to ASU in the fall.
Talking to Libby and Grant made me articulate the reasons why I prefer Florida to Arizona and that I’d like to get back there.
(Both Arizona and Florida gained U.S. House seats in today’s reapportionment, as did Texas and Georgia; New York and Pennsylvania lost two seats each).
I need to wait at least three months before I decide about staying in Arizona for another year. It’s still one day at a time in the course of my recovery.
Libby called at 9:30 AM today and said they looked at the map and where her father lives, a town near the New Mexico border in the mountains that is much further from Tucson then they had thought.
Because they were going to leave Mesa this afternoon, I hurried over to their RV park. Libby and the kids were all either in the heated pool (80°) or the hot tub (100°). I stayed with them there until we went back to their luxurious camper until 1 PM, when they left.
Libby and Grant and their kids are excellent friends. Grant said he’d send me plane tickets for a visit to Los Angeles this coming spring or summer, but of course I can afford the cheap Southwest fares on my own.
Despite my poor chances, I’ve applied to McDowell, Yaddo, Ragdale and Blue Mountain Center, and I’m still on the Djerassi waiting list. I don’t know how I’ll get through the summer financially, but we will see what happens.
Sean replied to my Christmas email, saying that unlike me, he’s “a stick in the mud, always in the same place.” I wrote back, saying I envied the security and stability he and Doug have in Tampa.
Were all my wanderings and career changes worth it? At this point, it doesn’t seem so.
I’m relieved that Mom finally got her flu and pneumonia shots at Safeway yesterday.
I’d like to sleep now, but first I need to take Serzone.
Sunday, December 31, 2000
9 PM. Since 1969, I’ve written these year-end diaries. Back then I was 18, a college freshman on vacation at the Carillon in Miami Beach with my family – including family members I haven’t seen in years, like three of my four first cousins.
Here I am, 31 years later, at the start of the sticklers’ Millennium and 21st century as a 49-year-old single man in a studio apartment in dreary Mesa, Arizona.
I’m dependent on antidepressants and tranquilizers to help me recover from the same anxiety, and to a lesser degree, the same depression afflicting that clueless, too-smart-for-his-own-good kid I was in 1969. Can I avoid the Grateful Dead cliché lyric about it being a long, strange trip?
I emailed Jim and said I’d be staying in tonight. Given the traffic and the guns being shot off in celebration, I’d prefer to spend New Year’s Eve at home.
Earlier, I passed some twentysomethings at this apartment complex who were apparently pretending that a boy had gotten shot. They videotaped him writhing in agony after a firecracker went off, pretend-yelling for medics, “White male down!”
An older white woman, also passing by, berated them.
In less than an hour, whatever they have now – a bell? an apple? a computer screen? – will descend from the tower on Times Square, cleaned up from yesterday’s snow, which apparently put the city in a magical mood.
Teresa wrote from Stephanie’s computer that she’s glad to be in San Francisco, far away from New York’s blizzard, though Thomas and Paul are flying back tomorrow.
I also got a note from Igor, who’s still in Florida and looking forward to a new issue of his litmag and a new book of poems. Violeta’s relatives are visiting, and he said he might look for a new job next year.
I just finished the last 60 pages of David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise, which I read for several hours last evening.
It’s a stylish, profound and funny book, but the hilarious chapter on how one becomes an intellectual wasn’t the only one that depressed me – mostly because like the people Brooks ridicules, I wanted to write op-ed pieces, go on panels and talk shows, write books that got read and reviewed.
I’ve done most of those things, but on a very low level and very sporadically. Despite all my publications, grants and residencies, I haven’t achieved much as a fiction writer. After all, I practically had to write my entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography myself.
So here I am, five months from my 50th birthday and thinking I was probably better off as that clueless, scared 18-year-old on 12/31/1969.
Except that isn’t true: I’ve had loads of varied experiences, a great storehouse of anecdotes, information and an 18-page curriculum vita.
Still, my potential is gone and I literally don’t know what to do next – or where I should go.
Up at 5:45 AM, I couldn’t get back to sleep.
The Tribune’s front page story focused on East Valley newcomers who love the place. I think I’m going to cancel my subscription to the paper, as I can’t deal with the right-wing editorials, columns and letters to the editor; I’ve never seen a Tribune article about gay people.
At least the Republic published my op-ed “My Turn” about the whiteness of J. Seward Johnson’s bronze statues in downtown Mesa in addition to publishing my “State Lines” column.
Besides, the New York Times is plenty to read, and I can hear local news on KJZZ.
I guess I was a little depressed this morning, though it felt more like a normal down feeling than pathology.
I went to the Barnes & Noble in Ahwatukee – for the first time, I think, since I began to feel ill in late October – and read the Week in Review, Business and main news sections of the Sunday Times as I drank two cups of caffeine-free ginseng-peppermint iced tea.
The cold drinks gave me chills but no jitters.
Later, I went to Wendy’s, where I wished the three girls behind the counter “Feliz año nuevo” as I paid for my baked potato and Diet Coke.
After a brief visit to Albertsons, I came home, did the laundry, and tried to set up the VCR I bought last night at Walmart. We’ll see if it records the yoga show in the morning.
When I called Apache Junction, Mom said everyone was staying in tonight.
This year divided neatly in two: with the first half, mostly in Florida, as one of the happiest times in my life, and the second half, mostly in Arizona, as one of the most unhappy times.
But somehow I’ve made it to 2001.