I can’t control it.
The year after it happened, when the anniversary came round, I planned on taking the day off work. I ended up going in for just a couple of minutes to help get a writer set up for Eastern Europe, making sure the laptop had dialup numbers in Budapest and could use the right voltage. A couple of minutes turned into nine hours, and in a way, I was oddly comforted, because I’d put in a good day’s work and done the best I could and not been a horse’s ass, and that was all the old man would have wanted as a memorial.
The next few years were turbulence incarnate. There was enough free-floating ambient rage that any other emotions around that date kind of got swept up and burned in the same fire that was propelling me forward. The first seven or eight years were surpassing chaotic – hell, the eighth year after is more memorable now for being the day I sat on my bachelor party glasses in the course of moving my surrogate big sister in with us.
By the next year the darkness had started. I don’t know if it was a byproduct of the year-or-so spent under the black cloud, or the assorted health nightmares of that summer, or just an increasing awareness of my own age, but it seems like every passing June is worse than the last. It took a couple of days to catch me in 2008, but it got there. In 2009, it salted an open wound of work issues and knee troubles. In 2010, I was actually in Germany, with my mother and her new husband (about whom I have ranted elsewhere) and the days were fraught with enough peril that any angst about the date was tough to separate out. And last year, I thought I was fine, right until the mere act of biting into a strawberry caused me to have a complete breakdown right in the middle of the farmer’s market. And where did I go to be alone and clear my head? Oh, how about a movie theater showing Thor, because a film about family issues and lost fathers is exactly what I needed that day. Fucking brilliant. A lot of people say I’m smart, but I say the evidence is suspect.
And now.
I’m going in for an MRI tomorrow, to see what’s going on with my neck. Two years ago, there was a pinched nerve and a bulging disc, and there was a brief discussion of surgery, and then some painkillers and some prednisone (and isn’t THAT drug emotionally triggering for me), and eventually it more or less went away, right up until the day last month when I lost my shit at work – and it’s been bad ever since. Post hoc ergo proper hoc, although who knows which one caused the other or contributed to it.
The cloud is always there this time of year. I never seem to think about why I feel like this in June until I’m already under its spell – which doesn’t make any kind of sense, but these things never do. It doesn’t take much to start pushing the buttons, as the last couple of posts probably make clear (although being the son of two public employees will probably contribute to the snapping). That’s the insidious thing about this…condition. It doesn’t adhere to any rules that make sense, it doesn’t respond to things that would make a person of ordinary circumstance feel better, and you can never tell if the drugs actually work – you can only tell when they’re not working. And it’s hell on your loved ones, who can do literally nothing to help, so you end up spreading the badness around without actually ameliorating the symptoms in any way, and maybe get a nice soupçon of self-inflicted guilt to go on top of everything else.
So in the end, ride it out. Seek out some distraction. Try not to drink, or at least not too much. Try not to watch or read or think or dream anything that’ll set you off. Just tell yourself that it’s only for now, that this too shall pass.
Then, for fun, try to believe it.
Miss you, pops. You sure left us in a hell of a fix.