Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.
- Friedrich Nietsche

I’ve reached a point with this blog where I feel like it’s time to take the next step, and leave my sylvan glade behind. To those who have read along with, I offer my appreciation, and wish you many further journeys in your futures. As for me, and as for Nietsche’s wise words, I think I’ve reached my goal with this blog, which was to seek out and find that next step.

Fortune cannot aid those who do nothing.
- Sophocles

I am recently returned to my home after a two day stay at the hospital. Rather than going in because I’m bipolar, I went in because I have sleep apnea and needed a full evaluation. This was a pretty significant thing for me, as I have an aversion to hospitals that stems in part from having seen too many family members die in one, and in part from a fear of being confined to the whims of doctors. I don’t like being hooked up to monitors at all, and the idea of turning myself into Locutus of Borg with cables, sensors and other stuff had my stomach churning in slippery knots. Go I did, however, and I must say that I’m a happier man for having done so.

For starters, the people at the hospital weren’t as bad as I’d feared. They didn’t pull out pitchforks and start turning me over and over in boiling perdition. Even if they had been demons, they would have been far too busy to torture me. My room was not a double room, but a single room, and had a sort of hotel quality to it … it was nearly twice the size of the largest dorm room I ever had in college, and was complete with sink, lockable closets and a table with two chairs for relaxing with a guest. My fear of being confined was also quickly diminished as I learned that in the afternoons, we could leave the hospital grounds and spend the day as we chose.

Getting hooked up to all the sensors wasn’t something I changed my mind about – I don’t like cables hanging off of me, and I especially don’t like it when I sleep. My first night there, I had the impression that I didn’t sleep at all. It was more than an impression, I lay there and looked at stuff for what felt like hours on end. I did battle with a mosquito for at least an hour, the little beast constantly buzzing around one of my ears, then flying away as my hands moved, then coming back to repeat the process. Every movement I made, with cables dragging along behind me, I felt like Jacob Marley. These sensors, however, told a different tale: I did sleep, enough to snore over a thousand times; my oxygen saturation went pretty low; and I never entered the deeper stages of sleep.

The next night I was cabled up again (after making sure I found and killed that mosquito during the daytime), and I was hooked up to a CPAP machine. For those who don’t know, the purpose of the CPAP machine is to provide positive pressure in the airway, to keep it from closing down at night and thus blocking one’s ability to breathe. It took a little getting used to, but I seemed to take to it pretty quickly and found myself sleeping through the entire night. The nurse woke me up at 0530, to take me off the cables and machine, and I felt something I haven’t felt after a night’s sleep in over a decade: rested and ready for the day to begin. Rather than go back to bed, which was an option, I chose to stay up. I looked after my hygiene, then I packed up all of my stuff and made the bed, then I sat down and read for two hours without falling asleep (something that I can’t remember ever managing before, especially that early in the morning). Throughout the rest of the day, I felt positive, energetic and simply ready for whatever was to come, without any sign of these feelings stemming from the hypomania or mania of bipolar disorder. The next days after, I slept the old fashioned way and, despite feeling all my usual grogginess, I somehow managed to still feel more motivation than usual. What was prominently absent was the feeling of any common task overwhelming me. Last night I slept with my very own CPAP machine, this time without all the sensor cables, and slept quite nicely. The 13 millibars of pressure I have to have to keep my breathing passage open took a little getting used to; but as before, I woke up early in the morning (this time before 0500), and felt ready for the day to come. Today I’ve managed to move around quite a bit and get some stuff done, even a few things I didn’t necessarily have to do, but just felt like doing anyway.

I don’t know whether or not I’m feeling the way I should ‘normally’ feel, or whether this is just an effect that wears off in time. At the hospital, I was warned that the CPAP machine usually takes some getting used to, and I’m frankly a little nervous at the fact that I seem to have taken to it like a duck to water. However, if this is the way I should normally feel; then I would highly recommend that anyone out there who has a snoring problem talk to a doctor about having a sleep study done. For a number of years, I’ve been fighting against what seems to be a treatment-resistant depression. I’ve sampled one or two medications from every major family of antidepressant, and am currently dealing with my third therapist and second psychiatrist. Up to now, hypomania and mania have been the only things that have broken through my depression, and even then it’s usually still a mixture of mania and depression. I will continue to write about my progress with sleep and my CPAP machine; but based on what I’ve felt from just my second night of treatment with this machine, I think it’s possible that my previously unresponsive depression just might become responsive. For people dealing with depression or bipolar disorder, this might be something of interest.

A roaring fireball
hurtles through space, giving life
to a wet planet.
- Fallingleaf

Hope, to resist tides.
Stability, foundation.
Steadfastness am I -
yet sometimes a stubborn snare,
holding to the wrong things.
- Fallingleaf

Obama clinches!
- headline from numerous news sources

I also read a news ticker that, at one point, said Obama was ‘clinching’. While I’m aware of the meaning of the word, and am aware that it’s a perfectly legitimate word to use for this situation, I do wish the media would have pounced and settled upon a different word. I am, however, quite happy to know that Obama will be the Democratic candidate in this election. I would like to know what a good man can do, that war heroes, experienced and savvy politicians and those ordained by religion can’t – I would like to know if he can put America (and thus the rest of the world) on a good path. The Republicans have failed these past eight years – blame Bush though they may, they failed to stand up to him when it was clear he was leading the world down the wrong path. When Americans and people around the world were tasting the bitterness of loss, the Republicans stood behind Bush – it wasn’t until the Republicans tasted the loss of power that some of them ‘bucked Bush’. I would have more respect for McCain on this issue, in that he has been a maverick in his party for a long time, if he hadn’t suddenly picked up the party line just so he could get at those all-precious right-wing conservative fundamentalist Republican votes. I liked him better before he sold his soul.

So now, Mr. Obama, we stand at a crossroads. The millions of us who have been behind you want to reach out to as many others as possible, so that we can all follow you toward something better. You have the weighty responsibility of remaining true to your principles … you’ve hammered home the nomination, may your back never bend under the mantle of duty you seek to wear.

Life is only transient.
Youth, once gone, doesn’t return.
Days are not the same as other days.
So why are people cruel?
- Hla Stavhana

I’m still stuck in my spell of not having much to say – but a random thought crossed my mind today and I wanted to get it posted before I forgot about it (as so often happens). I found myself contemplating the winter today, something I tend to do on really warm, allergy-triggering days, and my thoughts dwelled on snowflakes. What really impressed me was the minute symmetry, intricacy, uniqueness … and transiency of these crystals. I thought it was sort of bizarre, that Nature would go through the trouble of creating something like this, only to have it melt sometimes only minutes after its creation – and that’s when the connection took place, when I realized that we are essentially no different from a snowflake. As we drift in the wind, we add to our individuality and intricacy; but our fate is to end.

Why Nature would go through such efforts, to create something unique and precious, only to bring it to an end is perhaps, after all, best explained by the snowflake: Nature melts the snowflake so that it can be taken back up to the sky and reformed into something new, and equally unique … which means that drifting is only part of the snowflake’s journey.

How dull it is to pause, to make and end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life!
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I wanted to post something here just to say that I’ve been trying to come up with a post or two over the past few days, and have had no success. If it weren’t for the bursts of energy I’ve had recently, I’d say it is likely I’m sliding into a really dreary sort of depression. I’ve had very little urge to do anything productive, and the things I normally enjoy doing seem to have really lost their luster. The worst part is that my creativity seems to have abandoned me outright, not that I was particularly blessed with great stores of it to begin with; and this means I’m not much of a blogger at the moment. I’m just going to bide my time for right now, and with luck, this will change in the next few days.

And I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation and in particular the Kennedy family was in any way offensive.
- Hillary Clinton

I’ve noticed several times that Hillary Clinton likes to use ‘reference’ as a verb, whether she’s ‘referencing’ moments of trauma, ‘referencing’ snipers on the tarmac, or just ‘referencing’ her childhood dog. It’s not incorrect to use ‘reference’ as a verb, Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary has ‘reference’ listed as a transitive verb; but it is incorrect to use it to replace the verb, ‘refer’. To ‘reference’ a moment of trauma means to cite that moment either in, or as a reference … or to supply that moment of trauma with references. If it were not for Hillary Clinton’s normal eloquence, I would be tempted to equate this to Bush’s ‘nukular’ issues, or my own father’s constant use of the phrase, “I seen”; but I find myself offended nonetheless at her, an attorney of all things, savagely butchering the English language in her apology. In apologizing for poor word choice, she exhibits further poor word choice … it’s just too much for me to bare bear.

Come, Boy, come and climb up my trunk and swing from my branches and eat apples and play in my shade and be happy.
- Shel Silverstein

While looking around for a few other things online, I stumbled across what has become an instant treasure for me, the text to a book by Shel Silverstein that I never knew existed, called The Giving Tree. I almost broke down in tears when I read it, and I wish I could say I grew up with the book.

The hunt is up, the morn is bright and grey,
The fields are fragrant and the woods are green.
- William Shakespeare

I’ve yet to find a definitive reference that explains the marking on my palm. The urge to discover its meaning doesn’t actually entail finding out all the possible meanings this marking might have (which I’ve already done, at length), but to discover an online source agreeing with what I’m pretty sure I read in a book several years ago … keeping in mind that I no longer have the book, or remember its title or publisher. And, while I have started to accept on some levels that I’ve either jumbled and confused information from that book, or outright created a memory to fill in a gap, I’m still hunting.

I have had success in another search, this time a car commercial that was playing a song fragment I could only just vaguely remember. It drove me nuts for a month, because I knew that song, I knew I’d heard it as a child, and I knew I had to get it figured out. My strategy was simple, to listen to the commercial and pick out a few words from the song, then plug the words into a lyric search on Google. That proved to be no easy task: the song was an oldie, and picking out actual words was a challenge because the words were sort of muddled and in some places covered by the announcer’s words; then there was the added challenge of being quick enough with the remote control to get the volume up at the beginning of the commercial to actually hear the lyrics before they went into their typical oldies “ah-ah-dooby-dooby-dum-dee-dee” refrain. Keep in mind that I detest commercials on principle, and tend to turn the volume way down when they come on. Around here, we think commercials are a good time to carry on a conversation (especially since commercial breaks are pretty long). So, while trying to ignore commercials in general and filter my attention for that one particular commercial, while carrying on a conversation and not wanting to be rude by interrupting, I was determined that I would manage to pick out a few real words and then catch the song that taunted my childhood memory.

As you might imagine, I had some disappointing moments; but after a month, I finally managed to pick out “two left shoes” from the lyrics and I’m happy to report that the song from the new Opel commercials is none other than “Don’t You Just Know It,” from Huey Smith & the Clowns. This is a song I heard my mother play a lot when I was a kid; and as a kid, it wasn’t important to me to learn titles or even pay attention to lyrics with music – which is why my memory of the song was no more clear than what was being played on television.

So now that I’ve found the song, what am I going to do with it? It’s a time-honored tradition in humanity that hunters take trophies, typically to take on some of the power of the prey or the hunt itself. Well, this hunter of forgotten stuff is no different, and so I’ll be playing this song while I hunt through more palmistry pages online, so that the information I seek will hear me coming and tremble!