This story is completely true, and describes the worst night of my life.

It was three a.m., and I was sitting outside the Omni Hotel in Los Angeles, racking my brains for another way to force their security to call the police. I’d already tried bellowing, assaulting a bus-stop, and faking a mid-road heart-attack.

An idea struck me. I grabbed a luggage trolley, and trundled it towards my car. Sure enough, the weasel-faced head goon blocked my path; when I kept going, running the cart into him, all three guards launched at me. I slammed my fist into weasel’s mouth before I was wrestled to the ground. Now I knew they’d call the police.

I assumed the police would take my side; but the guards said I’d started it. Thirty minutes later I was handcuffed in the back of a cruiser.

It was hard to believe that just that morning I’d woken up with Ben in our house in the Hollywood Hills. It had been three months since I’d emerged, seemingly miraculously, out of an adulthood-long depression. I was beginning to believe I was capable of more than I ever imagined, and had developed an almost messianic view of my own destiny.

Ben correctly recognized that I was, albeit unknowingly, in the grip of the manic phase of a huge bipolar swing. He kept trying to reign in my wilder impulses, and, on the morning of the Omni incident, I blew up at him, telling him to quit hovering. I’m an imposing, muscular 6’6, but nonetheless, I was shocked to see him almost gibbering with terror; my heart was broken to learn I could do that to him. I held him closely until his shaking subsided, but we both knew we needed a temporary separation.

Freed of Ben’s influence in the afternoon, I was like a zeppelin dragging its moorings. I didn’t get to the point of trying to find a hotel room until almost midnight.

After many frustrations, borne from an exhausted mind, addled with mania, I drove downtown, eventually finding haven at the Omni. They wouldn’t accommodate me though, when it became clear I’d lost my driver’s license. Completely wrung out, I collapsed, weeping.

I refused to leave the lobby when they asked me, and, in the end, they had to carry me out, to the accompaniment of my laughter. But things became very bizarre when they refused, at length, to give my car keys back. My only resort was to try to force them to call the police. This is where this story began, outside the Omni at three a.m.

After my arrest at the Omni, I was taken to the downtown lockup. They took all my personal belongings except my commitment ring, and allowed me to make a phone call. I couldn’t recall any number except Ben’s, so, very reluctantly, I had to call him and let him know where I was.

They made me sign something, and gave me a pink copy, which, since I was so tired, they stuffed into my pocket. They un-cuffed me, and took me through a door, saying I’d be given my cell-phone.

I sat patiently in the adjacent holding cell for an hour before asking an officer what was wrong.  The pink ticket, he said. I scrambled through my jeans and thrust it at him, through the grille, asking why nobody had told me earlier.

Something was obviously very wrong. He got angry at me, insisting they’d told me about the ticket. Out of fatigue and despair, I started to cry, and nothing is more likely to aggravate a cop. They locked me up in a remote cell.

I hadn’t slept much all week, and with my mind racing maniacally, every minute lasted an hour. Sometimes I heard keys clinking and my heart leaped, only to sink again as the sound dwindled. I wept, roared with frustration, and rattled the bars. Once, a cleaner went past, and, again, I faked a heart attack; she didn’t miss a single dust mote. I felt intolerably alone.

I was beginning to think bitter thoughts: why hadn’t Ben freed me? It would be a few weeks before I’d understand what Ben went through that night.

After telling somebody that my heart was skipping, I was assessed by a nurse, and then stowed back in my original holding cell, this time with my hands cuffed behind me. It was at least an improvement over my previous cell, and probably closer to Ben.

Hours seemed to pass. I wanted desperately to reach Ben, and engaged a Hispanic cop. I used every ounce of my ingenuity, mustering a fierce, almost daemonic trance. By constant intellectual argument, perfect body language and manic intensity, I convinced him that I could see his soul, and that he could rescue it from destruction by one simple act.

I’m aware that this story would sound more convincing if I could recall the conversation. But when you’re manic, a lot of what you say vanishes into a black hole never to be recalled except for the momentary brilliance as it vanished past the event horizon.

Finally, I purposefully let slip my commitment-ring near him, and told him that he could save his soul by giving it to Ben.

“But that would be breaking the rules,” he said.

I didn’t want to hurt him, but I had to get out of that cell. He kept gripping his head, saying, “Oh man, you’re fucking with my head.” Other people watched, transfixed, while I attempted to force this man to my will from my position of apparent helplessness.

His partner, a nasty-looking German-American called Weh, full of bravado, tried to goad me; but I told him I could see inside his head. When he asked me what I saw, I said simply: “Nothing. You have no soul.”

He tried to laugh me off, but would no longer meet my eyes. I continued:

“Do you knew any German? Do you know what your surname means?”

He shrugged.

“It means ‘empty’,” I told him. (It doesn’t).

A chill entered their eyes, and I tore into them relentlessly. Almost unbelievably, I soon had them convinced I was the Anti-Christ. I told them:

“You have two choices: hand the ring to my partner; or put it on my finger. But if you put it on my finger, you’ll loose your souls. “

They were saved from eternal damnation when the sergeant, realizing how dangerous I was, reassigned them.

I was increasingly desperate. I announced that at the count of ten I’d commit suicide. I counted down very loudly, but at “one”, cuffed, and too weak to make a convincing effort, I collapsed and wept more bitterly than ever.

But something had worked; I heard the words I’d given up hoping for: I was to be released to a hospital; they’d believed I was suicidal. I congratulated myself for getting myself out of jail, not knowing that it was mostly due to Ben’s tireless efforts behind the scenes. In any event, it had all ended, wholly unexpectedly, with my being strapped into a gurney.

As I was wheeled out, the Hispanic cop came to the gurney, and, averting his eyes, slipped my ring into my pocket.

“Find a new partner!” I whispered.

All my adult life, I’ve craved to live somewhere quiet and peaceful. Now I have that in the house where we live in the Hollywood Hills. As I sit here in our living room, you could hardly call for more peace.

And yet …

a distant dog bark,

a plane high overhead,

the sound of my hard disk in my study as it runs a backup,

our wind chimes moving softly,

the sensation that I can hear through my neck bones as I rotate my head,

the scraping of the hard edge of a low palm tree against the window and the flutter of that same leaf as a waft of wind hits it,

the rustle of the wind in the big trees in our back yard,

a passing car,

wind chimes from neighbors’ houses in the canyon,

squeaks from my own stomach,

bird song,

the sound of my own swallowing,

the occasional tearing noise as the bare skin on my back rubs against the leather sofa,

the crack of the paper in the book on which I’m writing as it snaps into place when I move the pen

the scratch of the ball of the pen on the paper,

the swich of my hand against the paper as I move the pen,

the occasional sigh from our big dog and the lighter sigh from the little one,

the lightest sound of my own breath,

once in a while a rumble from the freeway makes its way through the valley,

a noise as of sudden and minute metal expansion from the kitchen,

and behind it all the background high note of silence which is always in my hearing when I pay it attention.

All of a sudden it feels as if I’m in a symphony of sounds. Then the moment passes and it’s just the sound of peace again.

Monday, September 04, 2006

Who Was Jesus

I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with Jesus, mostly off. I grew up in a good Church-of-England family, but my parents were wise enough to keep their religion inside (not even attending church), and left us free to form our own beliefs. Mine trended towards atheism. My crowning argument was, okay, so God created the Universe, so who created God? By answering that God is responsible for the imponderable event of Universal Creation, you’re merely replacing one unknowable event with another.

In my early twenties, I suppose I had a sort of spiritual crisis: I was led astray by Christian friends in college, and “gave my heart” to Jesus, worrying my parents immensely with my new devotions. I thought I believed. I certainly converted two of my best friends, and like everything I’ve ever done, I put my whole self into the effort, even spending a month in a tiny village in the eastern part of Austria living on a “mission”.

Suddenly, one evening, alone in a cold flat near Buckingham Palace, I suddenly realized I no longer believed in God. A sort of relief flooded through me as the consequences took hold. I’d become, if you like, a dead-again atheist and that is pretty much where my beliefs remained through my twenties and thirties.

I’ve written recently about a near brush with insanity a few Fridays ago. It seemed a little strange to me that the first piece of music I chose to play on my car stereo the first time I drove again after that Friday was the opening theme from “Jesus of Nazareth”, a striking, painful invocation of the violent rupture created in space/spirituality by Jesus and his followers. I played it over and over again, letting the shrieking chords and the measured gravity wash over me, and I found myself crying. It had not been an ostensibly deliberate choice. A few months earlier, I’d recalled I used to like the soundtrack as a kid, and had ordered it on Amazon.com.

But now it struck me as an entirely apt piece of music to be the first choice I made after my near approach to insanity. It was an indication of the Integration that lies behind every life spiritually lived, where seeming coincidences play such a large role.

Now you could call it coincidence, or even fate. For myself, I term it life experience, growth, observation and the power of the human soul. I still don’t believe in God. By “the soul” I mean the moral, emotional and intellectual part of you. Not all souls are created equal. To me, becoming spiritual is akin to the Integration of these three dimensions. Some people will only make it a short way along this path. Even Los Angeles celebrities may enjoy fame and riches, but be entirely stunted in their spiritual growth. But if you grow all the way, and keep on growing, you can reach enlightenment, and that’s what the soul means: to me. If you get a soul, and you combine its strength with those of your life experience, your friends and family, and Karma, you can be a powerful figure indeed.

Now we come back to Jesus Christ. I don’t for one moment think he was the Son of God, nor that even he himself thought he was. He was probably talking in a parable best calculated to have the most positive effect on the World that he could. For I do believe that he was undoubtedly one of the most spiritually alive men who has ever lived, and it’s for this reason that his teachings guide many if not all of us today in our moral choices.

When spiritual growth occurs in somebody, it affects everybody around them, and they start growing too. Through a lifetime, this effect can be exponential, and can start a movement. Notice that Christ himself left no writing, so we’re receiving his ideas second and third hand, in writings written decades or generations after his death, during which time his actions have been translated into terms people were more likely to accept and understand: miracles.

One can understand a similar thing happening again given the right circumstances. A man could have a huge effect on those around him, spiritually, and yet remain largely unknown at his death. But the spirituality spurred in others because of this man’s life and action would continue to sweep through circle after circle surrounding those who knew him, and perhaps they would put it into words, and a movement could begin that could change the world. Who’s to say that a few centuries after his death, people wouldn’t have warped his teachings into a new religion?

I intend to post here whenever I have something new to say about the subjects that concern me, principally mania and depression as they affect your behavior, thought patterns, dreams/goals, relationships, and most importantly, creativity. I’ve a wide range of intellectual interests, so will no doubt bore you with my tin-pot theories on life, the Universe and Everything! I will be excerpting some posts from my general blog. I’m gay, and sometimes my general blog covers matters that wouldn’t ordinarily be of interest to this community, which is why I’ll be posting them here.

Now here goes.

The other day, I met a guy, Michael, at Starbucks (my home away from home - I’m a software developer and work via email and phone), who recognized me from my general blog; he turned out to be also bipolar. We’ve chatted a couple of times now, mainly about our own experiences with mania and depression, and I suddenly realized today that this is something that has been missing from my life: the opportunity to identify with another bipolar person, to compare notes, to see somebody else’s way of coping.

We have very different experiences. Like most people with bipolar disorder, he was diagnosed as a young adult, in his late teens. (It’s unusual for somebody to get to their forties and only then have their first manic episode, like I did.) So he’s been living with this for most of his adult life (he’s in his late thirties now.)

I was curious about the symptoms he experienced when manic, apart from the obvious ones: rushing thoughts, grandiosity, lack of self-censoring etc. It turned out that we experience different things when manic (or, I should say, when I used to get manic, since my mood is completely placid these days.) Michael says his senses are all heightened, and his cognitive abilities actually improve. In my case, I used to find that I became physically clumsy, had problems with my speech, and, although I feel that I was “smarter” when manic, I also made lots of cognitive mistakes, and would often lose things. (At the height of my mania, I had everything fastened to my jeans with chains: my wallet, my keys and my phone.)

We agreed with one another that irritability was a common experience, but in many other areas, it didn’t seem that our experience was similar. I’m wondering, not for the first time, whether a pet theory of mine is valid or not: that mania tends to emphasize your own natural qualities. It would make sense, since it loosens your inhibitions. So when I was manic, my vices (impatience, a strong sense of justice, a desire to fix everything) got me into trouble, while my better qualities came to the fore and enhanced both pleasure and relating to others.

The thing is, I don’t know much about others’ experiences. The people you tend to read about are all people who’ve gone off the rails: I rarely read about anybody who’s fought the disease to a stand-still. So I don’t really know what the right way of “being” is.

For instance, there was an article in the science section of the New York Times yesterday, about a bipolar medical researcher, who, according to the reporter, used her periods of mania to fuel creativity. There was no mention, in the article, of the dangers of deliberately allowing yourself to become manic. I find myself getting annoyed when I read articles like this, since the writer is usually uninformed about all aspects of the disorder.

Believe me, I miss the creative ideas I used to get when I went through the many very minor hypomanic episodes through mid-2007. When I look back at the blogs I wrote back then, they were much more colorful and insightful (if a bit too ripe sometimes.) I’d be running, say, and start thinking about the way we perceive the world around us, and thought would jump upon thought until I had a full-fledged pot theory begging to be described in a new blog. I’d rush home, and scribble down my ideas before I lost them. A sample:

As I jogged further (I suppose I should say “as I perceived myself jogging further” but let’s try to keep this simple), I thought that maybe the mind is powered by an enormous computer. Maybe the universe really does exist in some form, but we ourselves are incorporeal. And what if I - or you for that matter - was/were the only mind? You’d have no way of knowing for sure: the computer could be mocking up all your friends and family right along with the Los Angeles cityscape and the daisies.

Since I’m no longer on a roller-coaster (I’m on more an infinite flat plane with a few valleys), I no longer have hypomanic periods, and I feel that much of my creativity has lost some color. Do I have the right to reclaim that by twiddling with my medication? I’m sure my psychiatrist would strongly advise against it, as would my partner, Ben. Yet I know that many bipolar people do that: is that a norm, or are such people an exception? Is it possible to allow yourself some minor mania and keep it under control? Certainly when I had hypomanic periods in the past I didn’t do anything crazy, spend money, or engage in any other of the self-destructive behaviors common to full-blown mania.

I’m asking rhetorical questions, I know. But at least I now have somebody to talk to who grapples with some of the same questions, rather than just get the opinion of a psychiatrist who can only speak from the stand-point of the norms of treating the illness, but has no direct knowledge of how it feels. I certainly wouldn’t toy with my medications without talking to my psychiatrist, and with Ben; but as the time when I’m on this flat plane extends into the future, I think I’ll probably ask these questions more frequently.