THIS Rhett Butler Will Never Die

These are the choices I'm forced to choose between. And by sleep, I mean either be knocked out by heavy doses of psych meds for 12 hours at a time (and then need two hours to stir out of the drug hangover before I feel stable enough to move about in the world the next day)... or to take minimal doses of meds and stay awake for 18-20 hours before my busy little mind finally exhausts my body so that I'll get 3-4 hours of sleep (before embarrassment settles in that I'm wasting daylight hours away and that I must get the eff out of bed and act productively like normal people do)... which is just an extension of burning the manic candle on both ends of my minds capabilities. I can't do that longer than a week at a time before I crash hard and end up needing 12+ hours of sleep every day for up to two weeks straight. It's an ugh dilemma to the max. Complicating this matter is that I slipped out of my meditation routine about a week ago. I had just started meditating agai...

Not drinking any caffeine is a harsh adjustment. The softening of mental acuity, for one thing, is a blow that's more difficult to adjust to than one might expect. The nudge up out of depression from the boosts caffeine gives you too is a hard sacrifice. But for the sake of keeping my blood pressure in check, I've been forced to do this. Been switching up my bipolar meds too, from one cocktail that makes me sleep 12 hours (including up to 2 hours of good REM sleep) to an opposing cocktail that keeps me awake till dawn and gives me only 6 hours sleep... I enjoy the early morning manic, creative thinking that I get into but pushing myself to actually make that productive and useful time is something I've struggled with for years. Maybe now I'll start to get better at getting things done during those hours. Yesterday I had an epiphany of sorts. Realized that if I am not getting my work done, i.e. working on my projects, actually spending time on a daily basis making prog...

When I had my palms read, the main thing that was revealed to me was hope to believe that if I follow the path of my heart and do the things that I love doing, and pursue them with full abandon, everything I need to survive will come to me. I've been aware of this rather new-age sounding philosophy since the time I quit my computer analyst job with Chevron to become a massage therapist; that if you follow your bliss, the Universe will provide and support you. And quite literally, I have survived all these many years since I left that suffocating career field over 30 years ago. Maybe not as abundantly as possible, but I would blame that on my own lack of fully committing to any of the heart-led tasks that I have chosen to pursue. I have had personal doubts and fears, as well as doubters around me that have detracted from my ability to fully engage in the visions I have of what "work" really should be for myself. But now, that I'm at this especially late stage of my lif...

I haven't spoken my thoughts or ideas here in quite some time, and as some of you that know me personally are aware of, a LOT has changed in the past 6 months of my life. Namely that my mother died in January of this year. Yes, that sounds like a long time ago, an especially long time to let pass for me to say nothing at all about what my feelings are about losing her, missing her, and trying to pick up my life to move on... but it's been an extremely busy and tumultuous 4 months since she's been away and I literally have not had freedom of time or mind to begin to gather my thoughts to put them down on paper like this, until now. I'm not going to go back over everything that has happened in all of the months that have passed in this entry, there is just too much and I'm not feeling lucid enough to think through it all right now. I wish I could have had more presence of mind all the while along the way to have thought out loud here like a proper journalist would d...

Relatively, I am not sad these days. It seems that as I keep up a regular practice of meditation - that is meditating for at least 15 minutes, once a day - I am able to refresh my spirit enough to cast off the creeping shadows of sadness and depression that approach my consciousness every day. There are things happening in and around about my life that could lead to a pretty strong episode of depression but the joy that clearing my energy via meditation is relatively saving my life right now. Fuuny, but I thought that I'd spend my time writing this blog energy talking about the things that are not going right that could bring on a depressive episode - but I didn't. I jumped right to the good part of the story and talked about what is working. I'm kinda proud of myself for doing that. And happy that this happened. All the same, just for the sake of clarity and record, I do want to talk about these things because they are not going to go away on their own, not very easily a...

This is my annual, typical, probably getting boring blog entry about my relationship with my dad. Dad's birthday was yesterday (October 5, 1932). He was born in Springfield, Ohio and that is where he is buried too. He died on September 7, 1969 in San Leandro, California). 36 years, 11 months and 2 days of living in this world was all the time he was allotted to figure things out with. His last couple of years, he became very quiet. Well, he was a pretty quiet man all the time that I knew him - he was not a big thinker or talker (the total flip side of how my step-father was - he was a huge talker and very extroverted. probably the greatest influence by an extrovert I ever experienced was from him.) no, my dad was very introverted. and where I was going with that thought was that the last couple of years of his life he was more quiet than usual - and I think that was because of the physical pain he must have been in. He died from lung cancer. 75% of his lungs were eaten up by the ca...

Continuing on from what I was talking about in my last posting, I've come to realize that I've just experienced what I call, an existential realization that doing anything at all with your time in life is futile. How I recognized this happening was because it happened to me once before. 20 years ago. I was at UCSC and discovered a new manner of creative self-expression which I felt could lead to ultimate discoveries of self-awareness.  That was when I was taking playwrighting classes and my mind was open to so many avenues of creativity. I felt that becoming a playwright was the grandest calling I had ever experienced. I began to work on ideas for several plays all at once. My mind was in constant motion and truth be told, I was the most manic I had ever been in my life. After about two weeks of this high anxiety and very little sleep, I had an epiphany of thought. In the flash of a second, I realized that no matter how different my work could be, compared to any other playwrit...