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Deported from Prozac Nation

Feb 19th, 2025 by

Weyhey! The brilliant thing about restarting my blog is that nobody gives a gold plated good golly gosh about blogs anymore and I can write whatever I goddamn want and there’s a strong chance that the best part of nobody will ever lay an eyeball upon it. It’s very freeing, very bracing to the ego to yawp into the ethereal electronic void.

YAWP!

So, as it is, I’ve been thinking about antidepressants, as you do in this burgeoning capitalistic hellscape known as the USA. Not that I’m clamoring for a ‘scrip, not for any of a number of reasons, not least of which being a national Secretary of Health and Human Services who has publicly fantasized about rounding up people who use antidepressants, ADHD medications, weight loss medications, and anxiety medications and putting them into Wellness Camps to nature that shit out. Because workhouses, insane asylums, and debtors prisons, panned out marvelously well for the inmates of yore, didn’t they?

But mostly, because there’s not a pill on this planet that’ll do for what’s the matter with me.

What’s the matter with me is systemic. Not my system. Not my body and all its demesnes and appurtenances. The ol’ guts and humours are ticking along quite nicely, thank you so much. My iron levels are appropriate. Get plenty of Vitamin D. My dentist tells me my gums are in admirable condition. Shit, against all odds, I don’t even have bifocals yet. All that is all right. What’s my problem is that the world we live in is fucking uncongenial and that wears on a lady after a while. Wears her right on down to a nub. Gets on her goddamn nerves. Burns her out.

And lo, it is burnt out that I am. A cinder floating on the breeze. A smoking crater. I’ve been burning the candle at every burnable juncture for years and I am running out of fuel.

Things went to hell for me not long after Joel died. Shit has never been easy, but the demands of being a new mom (Joseph was only 18 months old), being pregnant, and taking care of a family member with dementia were all consuming. I was not a bundle of fun, being recently and traumatically bereaved, sleep deprived, hormonal, and at the beck and call of a dying woman. My friends slipped away silently, almost unnoticed as I slogged my way through the pressures of caring for a toddler, caring for a dementia patient, caring for a new baby, not caring for myself. I understand! I do. People felt awkward. They didn’t want to intrude on my grief, impose upon my time, interrupt a child’s naptime. They didn’t know what to say. They thought I had it handled. And I accept that I wasn’t able to make a lot of social calls, wasn’t able to meet up spontaneously, missed a lot of events. When the kids got to a certain age, I simply couldn’t just bring them along. Nobody would have been happy with that result.

And so with each passing year, I became more isolated. Who would I call upon to watch my kids so that I could reconnect with friends? Could I reconnect with friends? Hell if I know. I no longer know what people’s schedules look like, what their lives look like. “Reach out,” people say. I’ll tell you I have, and when I do, “we’re out of town” “X has tryouts” “I’m at a race that weekend,” etc. Because I have lost touch. Because life got in the way.

Most of what’s wrong with me is that I never have a chance to recharge. I never have a chance to decompress. I am always working or momming. I have a half day each week when I am not working or momming, and with these snowdays, I rarely seem to have that. Or when I do, I am stuck in appointments, running errands, doing all the shit I can’t do when I’m working or momming. Most certainly I am not relaxing. I am not doing things that refill my cup. I’m just doing the shit I have to do because I have to do it, because I have no support, no help, and no relief in sight.

Yeah, I feel “depressed.” I feel low. I feel sad. I feel exhausted. Frustrated. Anxious. I feel like fried shit. And there’s nothing I can take that could help with any of that. I feel like this because I am run ragged.

In the past, I thought I had depression. I tried antidepressants. Prozac. Wellbutrin. Lexapro. Some other bullshit. Wasn’t nary a one of them did a single solitary goddamn thing except render masturbation null and void which is really just adding insult to injury. I tried. I tapered on, dosed up, tapered off. All I ever got out of an antidepressant was fatigue. Or weight gain. Or nausea. Or dizziness. Or memory lapses. Or heartburn. Or maybe some exciting combination of any or all of the above. Again, it’s adding insult to injury; already I’m feeling beat down and exhausted, so I take a neat little pill that gives me fatigue. SWELL! I feel frantic and distressed and distracted, so this tablet which causes a vague mental fuzziness is exactly and precisely what I need, obviously! And what ho; that body dysmorphia would naturally be helped by the sudden and unscheduled appearance of an extra 15 to 20 unsought and unbidden pounds, wouldn’t it? All that, and still feeling like my soul was kicked down the stairs and then pissed on. Sign me the fuck up!

After years of trying to be a modern woman and treat my low moods chemically, I realized by dint of therapy that I felt like shit because my life kind of is shit. It really is. I have a lot of responsibilities, and precious few breaks. The best I can do for myself is accept that I have drawn a lousy hand and that I’m not a very skilled player. That I have made some not-so-great decisions out of the choices that were available to me, and what it is is what it is. Most of the time I can float with the tides of my fortunes. I can say, “okay yeah this sucks, but I can do sucky things; I’ve been doing them for years, and nothing has stopped me thus far.” Most of the time I can roll with that. I think they call that shit “radical acceptance.” And despite the frustrations, the exhaustion, the bleak outlook, I can find joy in some moments, some days. I can find peace sometimes. I can get my head down and keep powering through, because frankly that’s the only option I have. Throwing my hands up and falling to pieces is a luxury unavailable to me.

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DIYing the Mother/Daughter bond

Feb 18th, 2025 by

I know the “theory” of love languages is bunkum, but there is definitely a value to accepting that different people express affection or connection differently. And for my Mom and I, our moments of bonding and closeness seemed often to occur while elbows deep in a messy DIY project.

One of my cherished childhood memories dates back to the fifth grade. The summer before fifth grade, my sister and I had a hell of a row and in a fit of pique, I moved out of our shared bedroom into the tiny room adjacent to the family bathroom, which we’d previously used as a playroom. The playroom was a little afterthought of a chamber, approximately 7′ x 10′ but I made it work. I toted my bookcase, bed, and bureau up the stairs from the basement, solo, a testament to the unnatural feats of strength for which I have been and still am known. By the time Mom got inside from mowing the yard, all of my sister’s playthings and art supplies had been removed from the playroom, and my bedroom furnishings and treasures installed. Mom decided it wasn’t worth the fight and allowed my claim on the little room to stand. There I luxuriated in privacy and excellent daylight, wherein I drew paper dolls, wrote stories, and listened to whatever terrible music was on the radio.

Fifth grade was a fuckawful year. The teacher we’d landed that year turned out to be a mercurial and chaotic woman unsuited to teaching in general, and teaching in a one-room rural school in particular. The thing about a one-room school is that you aren’t just the fifth grade teacher. You’re the teacher of whatever grades there are students in. So you could also be the kindergarten teacher, the first grade teacher, fourth grade teacher, fifth grade teacher, and eighth grade teacher. As she was. That’s a lot to hold down, and if it turns out that you’re not actually that great with kids, it’s recipe for burnout and meltdown. Subsequently our teacher regularly meted out arbitrary and severe punishments, snapped and snarled her way through lessons, and generally stressed the student body the hell out. As such, the student body responded in the way of stressed out kids, and acted out. A lot. All the chaos, noise, and bad vibes would wear upon me, up to the point where I would get sick, or at least convince myself and my mom that I was under the weather.

On one particular and memorable day, i decided to try to pull a sickie, and Mom decided to go along with it. She called the school and let Mrs. Fish know that I would be absent, and we went into town, procured a gallon of pistachio green paint, came home, and she proceeded to teach me how to paint a room. MY room. I learned how to cut in around trim. I learned how to load but not overload the roller, and how to overlap roller strokes so that the paint would dry smooth and free of lines or thin spots. Useful life skill, learned at age 10, still used to this day. I LOVE to paint, and I’m pretty damn decent at it.

A teenage girl wearing a red sweater and wire rimmed glasses laughs while a hairbrush is waved in her face
A faded photo somewhat showing my beloved green paint

The following summer, when I was 11, Mom decided that I needed a desk for my artwork, story writing, and craft projects. The local paper announced a community yard sale, and so we marked the date and went to town to see what there was to see. Sure enough, a lady was selling a desk of the correct dimensions to fit into my scrunchy little bedroom. Said desk was butt ugly, coated thickly and drippily with a highly glossy fake cherrywood varnish, but for $5, the price was right. We drove home with it laid down flat in the capacious trunk of Mom’s 1974 Dodge Dart Sport, and in the following week Mom taught me the ways of Zip Strip, scrapers, wire wool, sandpaper, and finally, linseed oil and turpentine. We refinished that little desk, and there it stood, a handsome matte-finish natural pine, stinking to the high heavens and ready to receive my stock of stationery, art supplies, notebooks, and envelopes of hand drawn paper dolls.

Many years further on down the road, I became a homeowner. My house came gratis with something akin to a garage, but far more akin to a home-made carport clumsily enclosed with chipboard which had suffered greatly from the depredations of termites. Prior to my having taken possession, the termites had been treated and terminated, but I would have no peace until the rotting and gnawed chipboard was removed to a dumpster. My Mom was STOKED. She insisted I hold off on the demolition project until she and Dad came to visit, because she hadn’t destroyed anything in a good long while, and was overdue for some deconstructive catharsis. With a selection of crowbars, prybars, and clawhammers, we levered, smashed, pried, and heaved, and in the space of an afternoon, had reduced that decaying garage back to a reasonably tidy carport and a very tidy pile of broken down chipboard panels, easily disposed in a friendly dumpster.

Mom always made as if she didn’t particularly like the house Dad and she lived in from 1973 until their respective deaths in 2021 and 2025, but she never gave up on the place. Having been cobbled together from an old schoolhouse and a bunch of salvage lumber, for the purpose of serving as a roadhouse and service station, it had never been seriously intended as a residence, and was rife with quirks and inconveniences that irked her more or less periodically. When time, money, and motivation aligned, Mom made many forays into making the bizarre semi-commercial structure more convenient and homely. Whenever we’d come home from school to a pile of lath and plaster out the back door, we knew Mom was on a Campaign, and we should brace ourselves for disruption until operations had processed to their logical conclusions. The scents of latex enamel, wallpaper paste, carpet glue, and caulk were part of the ambiance of home.

A shabby white house with a grey roof

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Absolve the sin of living in the skin we’re in

May 30th, 2017 by

I want to talk to you today about pain. About humanity. About striving, craving, wanting, revolting, shying, flinching, and retreat.

I want to talk to you about an epiphany.

I want to talk to you about self harm.

We are driven, we humans are, to test, to experiment, to explore both the world our bodies live in and the bodies that lives in the world.  Our minds, delicate and amorphous, are as hard to fasten down to a point as a jelly on a bulletin board.  Unmoored, our inscrutable ethereal selves demand confirmation, negation, and proof that we are real.

We respond, us corporeal beings, by telling our incorporeal elements to get bent.  We shut them up as best we can. We inflict indignities upon ourselves to keep us in our places. Work, booze, television, drugs, gossip: pain.  We confirm and negate as we beat ourselves up in one way or another.  We are real, so real, even as we wish we could not be.

What is your blade?  What is your red-hot match head?  What mortifies your flesh to alleviate your spirit?
What reinforces your humanity in all its profanity?

When I am all out of sorts with myself in the world, when I can barely stand to live in the hide that binds me, I take to the hills.  I must ride, as hard and as uphill as I can.  My lungs must burn, my thighs must ache, my forearms corded against the torque I am inflicting on the bars as I lever my way up, out of the saddle and throwing down my all, the biggest, nastiest, least-compromising hills I can find.

I thrash the evil out of me, for the moment, in sweat, in pain, in gasping breaths and knotted muscles.  I run from the devils that call me their own, my sweat-slick hide eluding their grasping claws as I rise above the turmoil, if only for a brief respite.  I spin and accelerate or grind and trundle up from the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole.  I break for that sunlit upland, a gleaming plateau of catharsis and endorphins, where for (perhaps) a long moment, I can draw a deep breath, awash in the satisfaction and security of knowing that I can run, even if I cannot hide.

The anxiety, the sadness, the uncertainty, the static and sturm und drang may once again wax and eclipse me, but I can and I do know how to blast them away.  Pain.  Good, life-affirming, expurgating pain.  Excoriation. Catharsis. Absolution.  Paying the penalty for my humanity, one incline at a time.

Posted in biking, Distractions, Loss & Grief & A Hole In My Soul, Notions and Rants | No Comments »

Last night a DJ saved my life…

Jan 15th, 2017 by

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_LcH4DUtuo

I was thinking about the Ten Albums that Defined Your Teen Years thread that’s going around.

I am going to be a sad-ass and admit I don’t have a roster of ten albums. I listened to a lot of different music, depending on my mood. I was, to the largest extent, a pretty basic metalhead. I listened to a lot of Iron Maiden (I liked them because of all the literary references) and Metallica (I liked them because their lyrics were sharp and clever, and their frenzied “thrash” style sounded good turned up loud and was fairly likely to annoy any passing adults). I also listened to a lot of older hard rock: AC/DC, Nazareth, Slade, Black Sabbath, Motörhead. Also a lot of the classic rock that had sounded the clarion for the coming of Metal: Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Cream, all of that busy, swirly, noisy, feedbacky, assertive psychedelia.

So, the record that TURNED MY WORLD UPSIDE DOWN ON ITS GODDAMN HEAD was the compilation-and-live-recording album “Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death,” by American punk band “The Dead Kennedys.” I’m not sure exactly who it was, but it likely had been eitherLevi Bradis, Eric Savala, or Eli Criffield who turned me on to that album, but it struck me hard and struck me dead on. The songs resonated with the way I saw the world. The aggression in the vocals exhilarated me and energised my fighting spirit in a way that nothing else had before.

Dead Kennedys arrived in western Nebraska on a wave of interest in the music coming out of the Northwest at the time – we all got pretty heavy into The Meat Puppets around then, too, and Nirvana was a ubiquitous presence on the radio and on our subconscious.

And to be fair, I liked the Meat Puppets a lot. I loved the squawky, yowling vocals, the weird bluegrassy influences, and the absurdity of a lot of the lyrics. The Meat Puppets were a regular on the tape deck in my 1959 VW. Meat Puppets II was playing the day I literally got blown off the road. My sister and I found ourselves looking out over the trunk of my car, buried up to the emblem in a snow bank, while Curt Kirkwood howled, “….got bit by a dog with a rabid tooth/ went to her grave just a little too soon/flew away howling on the yellow moooooooon.”

Nirvana…well, they were there, a hand on the wet clay of many a vessel of my vintage. I suppose Nevermind legitimized my depression, made it feel like less of a burden, less of a freak-attack, and even like a potential for creativity. All the artistic types were mad, weren’t they. And of course Nirvana and their “grunge” compatriots represented a stylistic turning point for rock music; you can tell in a chord or two if a popular album was pressed before or after 1992.

But “Give Me Convenience” was the album that changed my tastes, energized me, gave voice to the demons of dissent that fluttered and whizzed around my subconscious. They validated my viewpoint; I felt less alone knowing this band had written and recorded and performed those songs, that other people bought the album, went to the shows, and presumably held sympathetic thoughts. I’d been political and mouthy since middle school, but DK gave me a sticking pin and a tether.

Posted in Delight, Distractions, nostalgia, videos | 1 Comment »

Dispatches from inside the siege

Jan 14th, 2017 by

You.  You feared that we’d come for your guns.  Did we?

I.  I fear that you will come for my books, my words, my thoughts.  Will you?

I fear that you will stop my children’s teachers teaching them about geology, geography, biology, history, literature, and the diversity of experience in this great wide world.

The world is so full of a number of things
I’m sure we should all live as happy as kings

I fear you will authorize and command the formation of an American Stazi – citizen vigilantes empowered by law, champing at the bit to stamp out whatever you deem to be dangerous or seditious thought.  When my children are taught Creationism and Abstinence at school, will your Secret Police sweep all students’ households to ensure no parents are hiding copies of Origin of Species and Our Bodies, Ourselves?  Will you seize my children and sweep them off to re-education camp if I help them memorize the poetry of A. E. Hausmann, or let them read Ninteen Eighty Four, or put a Dead Kennedy’s disc in the CD player and talk to them about what the lyrics mean?

What books will you burn? What recordings will you erase? What classics of art, cinema, literature, dance, and architecture will you deem decadent and ripe for destruction.  How beige will our world be, before you determine it is “safe” for your ideals and agendas?

I ask you: will I be required to keep my metaphors in a locked cabinet, with the safety on?  Will there be a magazine size limitation on my vocabulary?  Will it be per syllable or letter?  Can I keep my words if I promise to use them only for sport hunting and target practice, but not for assault nor insurrection?

I ask, is it too late to order my cyanide capsule, or will you be issuing them as a matter of course?

Posted in Notes from the resistance, Notions and Rants, Oh, for fuck's sake | 1 Comment »

The treasure of routine

Jan 12th, 2017 by

I rode my bike to work today.

Many of you are like, “yeah, so what…you always ride your bike to work,” but the fact of the matter is. I have a job to ride to.

It’s very, very, very part time, but. I have eight hours a week where I am being paid for my labors. Eight hours a week where I do not have sub-3′ humans hanging from my trousers and issuing incomprehensible requests. Eight hours a week where I can wear earrings and not have them snatched off the side of my head. Eight hours a week where I can speak in complete sentences and be responded to in kind.

It’s not much, but by golly, I’ll *take* it.

Posted in bike commuting, Delight, Parenthood | No Comments »

And you may call me Shitmaster

Jan 11th, 2017 by

This beautiful afternoon, while it was about 65F and sunny, while one child was zooming around the yard on his Strider and the other was literally wallowing in the mud that constitutes our sandbox, I did a Minesweep of the back yard and cleared out all the dog-doody the last snow had concealed.

And it got me to thinking that a quite large proportion of my waking hours are dedicated to literally “dealing with shit.” Two cats, one dog, one toddler, and a pre-schooler whose toileting habits can be best described as erratic. I am almost never not touching poop.

Which is why the skin is actually peeling off my hands. I wash my hands about 74 times a day. I can’t keep ahead on the lotion game, and have given up. Total lizard hide. Cracking hangnails. Split knuckles.

Still – I am probably sanitary…as best as is possible, at any rate.

Posted in Too lazy to classify | No Comments »

From the Department of Unpopular Opinions in re: Depression

Jun 7th, 2016 by

It occurred to me recently while on a bicycle ride (where easily 85% of my real thinking occurs) that maybe depression is something I just have to accept and live with.

I’m looking at it this way: I’ve been trying for the best part of fifteen years to get over, ahead of, or on top of my depression, and shit ain’t happening.  A little medication, a little therapy, I think, “okay, I got this managed,” and lo, a year or so on and it all falls apart.  Some personal catastrophe breaks me up, or maybe just nothing other than my shit-for-brain-chemistry rears up.  One way or another, the net result is the same.  Feelings of worthlessness or futility.  Or just numbness.  Everyday life being just. so. much. work.  Being so tired. And annoyed.  And sad. And just plain done.

Therapy is like booting a cut tire.  It’ll get me home; it seems like I’ll hold air for a while, but inevitably, I’m going to deflate (probably when I need most desperately to be rolling).  And medication is an awfully mixed blessing.  It may get me over the “hump,” but it doesn’t always.  And the side effects that come with it, especially the “flattening” and loss of appetites that attend are a steep price to pay.  Especially when I am already in a very demotivated place, adding a chemical that makes me even more tired, that makes me not hungry, that takes my will to be joyful along with softening my will to be sad…I have a hard time reconciling that balance.

Sometimes  I wonder: is a certain degree of existential dread just plain normal?  Everyone struggles.  Everyone hits tough spells.  Everyone will live through a few traumatic events during this journey from womb to tomb.  Why fight it, especially when the fight is so pointless?  If it is a fight I am destined to lose, maybe it’s a better idea to stop wasting so much energy on fighting it, and learn to live with it, live around it, and accept that these bottom-scraping low periods pass, just as the good times do.  I wonder, do the hard times just seem to last longer because of how “time flies when you’re having fun”?  Like when I am going through a good patch, I might not realise and appreciate it as I should because we’re conditioned to notice discomfort, but take feeling all right for granted?

Maybe what I am saying is that I should start taking the struggles for granted and when the smooth patches heave into view, I should land ’em like a victorious pirate captain, plant my flag, and celebrate like I have commandeered the finest shipment of Good Times on the high seas.

 

Posted in Distractions, dumb things I have done, grumbles gripes and pointless bitching, Loss & Grief & A Hole In My Soul, Notions and Rants, Oh, for fuck's sake | 3 Comments »

No-one gets out alive

May 6th, 2016 by

The pop culture vision of senile dementia is the doddering eccentric, who calls her grandkids by the wrong name, makes non-sequitur commentary whenever it’s devastatingly funny to do so, and genially bungles her way through the “golden years.”
The reality is that dementia sneaks up on a person and can turn a person who was wonderfully daffy, witty, adventuresome, and interested in the world into someone who is frustrated, peevish, suspicious, who lashes out against the constraints her failing cognition is overlaying on her lifestyle.
The past four years or so have been very rough on my Mother In Law, and subsequently upon her son, Joel and on me. Most especially so after Joel died, as he was her main anchor to reality, and the one for whom she would pull it together as much as she could. After Joel died, the slow, decline that had been creeping up on her over the course of probably five or six years began to spiral downward precipitously. In the past sixteen months or so, she has gone from a woman with cognitive impairments, language impairments, some physical limitations, but still a strong sense of who she was and what she has done in this life, to a woman who is nearly bed-bound, who is refusing food, whose ability to communicate verbally is all but fled entirely.
Today, I visited her, and found a very ill, weak, disoriented woman. On Monday, I am to meet with her care team to discuss Hospice options.
Dementia is one of the worst ways to go out. It is a long, slow, terrifying, inexorable slide to the end. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

Posted in Family, Joel Dyke, Loss & Grief & A Hole In My Soul | 1 Comment »

Interpretative T-Ball

Jan 30th, 2016 by

When we were out walking today, we stopped at our shitty neighborhood park, and for once there were some other kids there playing. They were a bit older than Joseph – two little boys and a girl, aged somewhere in the four to six range. They were trying to play Tee Ball, but were mostly either missing the ball or battering the tee. Joseph now fondly believes that baseball consists of whacking the hell out of a pole and spent a fair amount of the space between naptime and supper using a mailing tube to biff an old wrapping paper tube into oblivion.

Posted in Parenthood, Super-Short Entries, Utter Silliness | No Comments »

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