Counting Blessings through the interference

The bus was one of those double deckers from a few years ago, the ones I think of as new, even though they're not new. But they're one of the best on our shoddily-provided bus route. They are shiny with pale plastic and lots and lots of chrome handholds, but they have a major flaw: when the engine idles in traffic, noise resonates through the rear of the bus and echoes from the back seats off the shiny plastic walls and off the metallic handholds and gets into your ears as if swirling water was pouring from a jug or basin over your head. There is a rumble from the engine and the air vibrates and then you hear "Shrrshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" and every second or third syllable in any conversation is masked by a strange, white-noise-like, Doppler effect.

"I was in The Square and we_ oo_ eh_curt_es_an_as_eh_dy_..."

It only happens when the bus has stopped in traffic. Once the revs increase, the sound returns to normal.

I often think it can't be good for you.

How is it a health inspector has never condemned these buses as a hazard?

Half-way up the bus I was sitting feeling sorry for myself and feeling depressed over what a lousy job I had to work at. In the back seat a mobile phone rang and a young, well-spoken man answered it and chatted unabashed. I gazed out at the buildings going by, half listening, tuning out when the bus halted and the shrilling, swishing noise buzzed about the cabin.

"...There's no problem at all. I just decided that living in the house with the lads would put me back into a place I didn't want to be again. So I'm on the bus now and I'm on the way over to...."

"...and I'll sleep in the car."

"....was taking 40 mils of Methadone and gone off it. I'm doing okay. There was one day I was sick but it's okay now.."

"...one day just blow yourself away with a needle, so I thought it would be better if I got out of there..."

"...you're right, you're right. Your man asked me to mind something for him and to have some for myself if I wanted. So, of course, I fucked myself up and my mother saw me and said she'd seen your man's car and if she saw it again on the road she'd call the police.

"So I told him and he said he didn't want any trouble with police and I told him I couldn't look after his goods any more..."

"....course is a year. A whole year. They retrain you. I have the literature there. But she said I knew as well as she did I'd never do the day course. She said, the best thing you can do is hang on for the house and get away from everyone. You do better on your own. She told me a lot about myself, more than any other counsellor ever did..."

The bus moved by the playing fields in Old Bawn, half-a-dozen gangly youths clad in T-shirts and shorts kicking a football back and forth on a football field. The sun shone brightly through the right hand panes of the window glass, making those passengers in the offside seats squint and sweat.

"The best thing you ever did was tell me to get out."

"...I'll have to knock on the door, though, and ask for a blanket..."

"No, no. There's nothing you can do...."

"I had three pillows on the bed. Can you get them for me...?"

"Oh, no bother. No bother...."

I stepped down from the bus and shuffled home. The young man was still speaking away on the mobile phone as the bus pulled out from the kerb going off down the road to who knows where.

Crocks

"Arrrgh!" I say.
"What wrong with you? " Herself asks.
"My feckin' sciatica is playing up."
I clutch at the right cheek of my arse and hobble about. The pain shoots down to my ankle and back up again.
"I think my uterus is pressing into my sciatic nerve. I read that on Wikipedia."
Herself would normally laugh at this, but her knee is giving her trouble today.
"Are we still on for lunch at Captain America's?" I say.
"Oh yes. It's our anniversary, after all."
Sixteen years. We've been together sixteen years for about the past five years, because we lost count and have to keep asking Herself's daughter what year she moved out so we can count it up again. This year in 2008 we're absolutely certain we're together sixteen years, although that leaves the age of the cat a little doubtful. She's been sixteen for about the past five years as well, we think.
We get in the car with many moans and groans and head up to The Square, park up and then head across the new civic plaza (still under construction) to Captain America's.
Herself limps along with her wonky knee. I stick my beer belly out and try to lean backwards without having to grab a piece of my buttock.
"You know something?" I say.
"What?"
"People will think we're real mountainy people walking like this. Each with one leg shorter than the other for walking across hills."
Captain A's was good, but the tables were smaller than I remember. We ate and limped back to the car with our various bits draggling along behind us.

Why the cat smells marmalade on my leg

I've a head-cold.
Herself has a dicky shoulder.
The weather has been Arctic cold.
This morning Herself knocked over one of our small, cheap, glass salt cellars and broke it into pieces. Bad luck was definitely supposed to follow.
As I'd been promising Herself we'd get one, we bought a small, flat-screen telly for the kitchen today and I couldn't get the thing to tune in until I disconnected all the cables from the grown-up telly and DVD and video player and the digital box and the PC and possibly the service for the whole road. But it tuned in, eventually.
In the meantime, Herself did everything possible to find jobs that would aggravate her sore shoulder.
"Aaargh!" She shouted from upstairs.
"What's wrong?"
"I'm washing the bathroom floor."
I watched the snow on the screen and pressed another button.
"Use the other arm," I said.
There were barely audible murmurings from somewhere upstairs.
There was a twanging, crashing noise from the landing.
"What was that?" I shouted up, as a fuzzy Irish rugby team made heavy work of defeating burly, blurry-blue Italians.
"Clothes horse," came the reply. "I'm putting clothes on the bannisters to dry."
"Use the other arm," I said. "By the way... Did you tell the doctor about that shoulder?"
"No."
"I see."
I fiddled with coaxial cable and started tacking staples into the side of the door saddle. The vacuum cleaner started up somewhere behind me.
"Aaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaaa-aargh!"
I stopped tapping, momentarily.
"What is it?"
"My shoulder! I can't finish the hoovering! It hurts!"
"Leave the hoovering then!"
"I can't!"
"Why not?"
"Because it's Saturday. I have to have the house clean on Saturday."
"Okay, I'll finish the hoovering later."
I tapped in some more staples, crawling about on the tiled floor, backing into the dining room and bumping against chairs and one hot radiator.
I hear another "Aaaargh!"
"What....?"
"I'm mopping the living room floor. The bucket is heavy and hurts my shoulder when I pick it up!"
"Use the other hand to pick it up then."
Sweat is dripping onto the floor as I pull cable along behind the radiator, twist it in behind the computer desk and twiddle it under the dining room door into the living room and the TV signal outlet box.
I say:
"Have you taken any anti-inflammatories?"
"No."
I plug in the plug and the picture tunes in on Herself's new early-morning putting-on-makeup-in-the-kitchen piece of telly technology.
I say:
"It's working."
Herself meets me in the kitchen and reaching for a glass of lemonade with her right hand -- the one that is attached to the arm that is swinging on the dodgy shoulder -- she knocks it all over the counter. She says something nasty and starts mopping up the spill.
I pass her the rolling pin. She's going to make a meat pie for dinner if it kills us both.
Opening a cupboard (with her right hand, the one that has the dodgy shoulder) she ducks as a half pot of marmalade sails out and falls to its death on the floor tiles below. Apart from the bits of glass glued together by the marmalade, the rest of it goes into a hundred little pieces that scatter all over the place. A large wodge of peel sticks to the side of my leg. We stand looking at it as it slowly slides down the cuff of my trousers, slithers down my boot and finally comes to rest.
"You know," I say. "It's been that kind of day, hasn't it?"
"Yes," she says, through gritted teeth.
Pastry gets a pounding with the occasional accompaniment of a loud
"Aaargh!"

Back to work...

...and my back is playing silly buggers. My workmates diagnose Sciatica. As someone is always suffering some ailment, I don't doubt their collective opinion and it's saved me €60 at the doctor's anyhow. I spent last evening with a heat pack strapped to my arse and walked everywhere like Elvis in his 68 comeback special, but without the leather gear. The pain is gradually easing, thank you for asking.

Good things: I forgot that my Christmas pressie from my chums was stashed under my desk and when I found it again today and looked closely, it turned out to be a box full of beer.

As I said, the pain is now gradually easing.

I shall not hazard the chilli flavoured peanuts that accompanied the beer in case the lack of bowel control that I read on the Internet can be associated with severe Sciatica should kick in.

There is only so much speed I can muster with one good leg and the other trailing a half-step behind and I should not like to shite circles around myself on the way to the loo.

Herself is making small prayers in the hallway, taking down Christmas decorations. The place is starting to look bare.

If it is fine tomorrow, I may attempt to paint the doorsteps, which need a blackening. Thus far, we have not yet found suitable tiles for the floor of the new porch. I suggested a temporary linoleum and two days of ice and snow resulted.

You can do it....

"Excuse me."
"And then she said... Oh hang on... Yes, sir?"
"Do you have any of the fixings for hanging this moudling on a cabinet?"
"You want a moulding for a cabinet? This type here is it?"
"No, thank you. It's just the fixing. Look underneath on the built one."
"Hmmm."
"See the little yokes with the screws in them?"
"John, do we have fixings for this moulding?"
"Which moulding?"
"This one. Look underneath..."
"No."
"John says we don't have any."
"You have none, then?"
"They'll be in next week."
"They will?"
"Yes."
"Do you have any of the items on my trolley?"
"No. We've never sold them. Look, here on the stock list."
"Even the ones with your logo on them, that I just took off the shelf a minute ago?"
"Sorry, no. Never had them."
"Where can I pay for these things you don't sell then?"
"I'll direct you to the check out. We accept cash or Laser."
"Thanks for your help."
"So, anyway... She said...."

Hovering to the shop

I hear this from the end of the driveway as I'm about to walk up and put my key in the door:

Paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaaaa-rp!

The only thing I can think of is that the new hoover has done something diresome. When I open the door, Herself is sitting crosslegged like a yogi, hovering about two feet off the floor.

"What's going on?" I ask, throwing my bag under the stairs and my cap onto the hook.

"Medicine," she says. "Have to have the camera job from the doctor tomorrow. He gave me this stuff to drink the day before. Want to try some?"

"Why not?" sez I, sniffing the contents of the proffered beaker. It tastes slightly minty and of horseshoes. In five minutes time, I too am slightly levitating.

Paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaaaaa-aaa-a-rp!

I hover as far as the counter of SuperValu where a woman is asking for sausages for her childrens' school lunch rolls.

"Oh they won't be ready for a while yet," says the assistant, as if the notion of cooking the hot food before the people want to buy it is ridiculous.

"Can I help you, sir?" she asks, as I bob into and out of sight on the other side of the counter.

"Ham, please," I say, throwing a doughy torpedo over the counter at her. I don't much like ham, but I like cheese and the other miscellaneous cold meats less. Then, when she has put the butter and the ham in, I see roast beef. Feck. Too late.

Paaaaaaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaaaaaaaa-rp!

I hover over to the top shelf of the display of tissues and take down some packets of designer snot rags. The run of the mill ones are sold out. I resent paying money too much money for tissue paper.

I hover against the wind back down the Avenue and into the Lawn and back home. Herself is no-where to be found.

"Are you about?" I ask the empty air.

"In the bathroom," she says from upstairs. "That stuff is beginning to work properly."

"Oh dear," I say, unwrapping my sandwich. "It's going to be a busy day on the stairs."

Home baking

"Have you ever eaten one of my sponge cakes?" Herself asks me, the other evening, as we are watching television.
"Nope," I say, swigging my beer.
"Didn't you know me when I used to bake sponge cakes and butterfly buns and flans and maringues?"
"Er... no."
"I shall make us a sponge cake at the weekend."

Come the weekend there was a crisis of ounces verses grams. I was entertaining my father in the other room and so I couldn't help much.

"Look it up on the Internet," I said.

An hour later I was eating.... something.... sponge-like....

"Do you like it?"
"Er... yes...."

I chewed at the lump of fruit-topped, cream-filled yellowish stuff. Having to chew or gnaw at a sponge cake is probably an indication that it hasn't come out right.

"I think I didn't get the measurements right," she said. "And I think there was something about folding the mixture rather than beating it."

I seprated my upper teeth from my lower ones with an effort, long enough to say:

"No, babe. It's fine, really."

There was a definite clunk when a piece of leftover spong hit the bottom of the kitchen bin. I could feel strange protestations starting up in my gut.

Herself Googled for sponge cake recipes.

"I know what went wrong!" she shouted in to the other room. "I'll make you a proper one tomorrow!"

So, today, I'm eating a wafer-thin sponge-cake that hasn't turned out either. But it is lighter than yesterday's.

"I know where I went wrong. I'll make another one tomorrow that will be right this time. I promise."

My gut is thanking Heaven that we're back at work on Tuesday. It might not have survived an extra day of sponge making.

"You can write about it," Herself said. "On condition you write a sequel when it turns out...."

Watch this space.

Hail fellow...

"Is that an MP4 player?"

"Yeah."

"What's the memory?"

"Dunno. 2,000 CDs, or something."

"How much was it?"

"I don't know. It's my sister's. €180 or something."

"You paid €180 for 2,000 CDs worth? That's good."

"I don't know. My sister got it. It might have cost more."

"Do I know you from somewhere?"

"You might have seen me around Jobstown."

A pause.

"Cloverhill?"

"D-wing?"

"Yeah!"

"Have you got a smoke?"

"Yeah. Here. Something better."

"You have some."

"No. I don't want any. You have it."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

The conversation turned to who knew who and who had prayer meetings every Wednesday because they were Born Again Christians. And getting out of jail.

"I spent three days in a bed and breakfast. And two days on someone's sofa. And two days in a hotel. And I went to them and said 'I need a place because I've spent three days in a B&B and two days sleeping rough and two days in a hotel.'"

"Yeah."

"What's your phone number?"

I just wanted the traffic to move so the bus could take me home.

I only have an ordinary music player. I've only been in a B&B on holiday. I've slept rough twice, because I chose to. To me, Cloverhill is on the way to Liffey Valley Shopping Centre on the back roads. Lucky.

Dogs don't talk.

Are you alive?

Yes.

Then prove it. Stand up.

Okay. See? I'm standing.

Proves nothing. Can you walk?

I think so. Yes. I'm walking. See?

I can change that.

Oh, fuck off! It's my birthday. Or it was when I started out this morning...

Bet you can't make it to bed in one piece.

Bet I can. And do you know what else?

What?

I'm not going to go to sleep just yet. That'd be just what you want me to do, little doggy. Sleep and dream and worry about things. I think I'll write a bit in my blog and tell the world about you.

So?

So nothing. It isn't all about you, Matey. I may even listen to some music and then go to sleep.

You're a fucking rebel, alright. But I'll still be here in the morning, won't I?

So will I.

Happy Birthday.

Same to you, pal.

A fine, flexi day Friday morning

"Yaaaaa-aaaaaa-aaaaa-aaaaaa-aaaaaa-aaaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaa-aaaaaaa-aaaaa-ay!" cry the kids in Scoil Carmel this morning as 11.00 o'clock break lets them out of the classroom for a few minutes.

They're running around the school yard as I step off the 75 bus in the sunshine and I feel like shouting something "Yaaaaah!-like" as well.

Called into my father's house this morning with the intention of maybe spending a morning with him. But no, true to his Lazarus nature he's off to prune a rose bush with his pal, Peter.

He proceeded to tell me how my brother brought him out the other day up to Wicklow and how the pub food wasn't to his liking and how the roads made his bones ache.

This is the brother who took several days off work in London to come over especially to visit him. He tells me:

"I phoned Dad and said I'd be visiting. He said:

""That's great. But try to drop in a couple of times while you're here.""

So I wasn't surprised when the father says to me today:

"You never got me my razor blades."

The generic blades he bought for the you-must-have-this-go-faster-boy-racer-advertised-on-the-telly razor do strange things to his beard, he says. So I got a packet in the pharmacy he won;t go into becaue he had a fight with someone over a penny or something. The girl was very helpful, and went through all the packets because the Super-Dooper razors I was picking out were different from the Super-Dooper-Turbo razors I'd been asked to get.

Next door, the locum doctor looked warily at me in the surgery.

"Just need my presciption renewed," I said. "And as I've not been here in a while, I need my bloodpressure checked."

She peered over the glasses.

"Shall I take off the jumper?" I asked, helpfully.

She hooked me up to an electronic gizmo that huffed and puffed and squeezed the life out of my arm.

"I'll just do that again," she said, as I was obviously about to go blue in the face and this was probably affecting the reading.

"Me again," I said to the girl in the pharmacy.

"Are you the Willie Walsh that's causing the strike in British Airways?" chuckled the pharmacist, handing me the tablets.

"No," I said. "And I'm not the bishop either."

I get asked one or other of those at least once a week.

Fun.

All those points in his Leaving Cert too.

An young African woman on the 77A bus was troubled that it wasn't going to the hospital.

"It goes around," said a man. He helpfully made a large circle in the air, makey-up sign-language stylee.

"Is it... far?" asked the woman.

"Five minutes."

She looked at him blankly. Possibly only in Ireland is distance measured in minutes rather than miles.

"You should have got the 77. This is the 77A. The 77 goes straight..." He made a straight line in the air. "The 77A goes around."

At the 75 stop a girl in too tight tights with legs like a capital X looked at the timetable. A young gay chappie with a twitch in his neck nearly jumped into my arms when an ambulance siren went off on his blindside. I was already halfway up the bus shelter with the fright.

I was the only one not listening to a music player. I wondered how many only had my cheeful non-trendy model in a pocket and were spoofing the outside world with expensive ear phones.

"Tsssh, tsssh, tsssh..." whispered a girl on my left, to the tinny noise overflowing from the sides of her head.

The sky was blue and full of magpies trying to bully each other.

My turn to get the dread Lurgy, or its cousin

Was quite happy to get back to the day job yesterday, until, as it wore on the pressure in my lower jawbone and around my left eye hinted at the return of a seasonal tooth-and-synus problem. Possibly the notion of being in the office led to some involuntary jaw clenching, but as I went through the emails that had accumulated over my prolonged Christmas holiday, I was comfortable enough with what I found there. My colleagues had looked after my mails and the procedures necessary to keep work moving forward admirably.

"Do you suffer with synus?" my boss said when I complained in passing that I was starting to feel bunged up. "Have you any Sinutab? People who suffer with synus swear by Sinutab."

"Well, I have some problems with my teeth that are adding to it," I replied. "Possibly the start of an abcess."

That was enough.

"There's nothing worse than an abcess. You know, the only solution I could find to one was to hold my head under a cold tap for hours at a time?"

I nodded. My boss is prone to migraine, sweet tooth, and other maladies as a result of stress the same as I am. His solutions and stories are always entertaining though.

"I went to the doctor," he said, "And he gave me an injection for the pain. Well, Jesus Christ! I don't know what the drug was, but if someone had two of them you'd have a serious drugs problem in a minute!

"You see that building over there? Well I got home and I was as high as it! Floating!"

He then proceeded to tell me how the dentist had to drill his tooth (without an injection, which, he said, might help spread infection. I didn't quite see that logic, but however.) to relieve the abcess. I was glad I'd already had my dinner.

I got home last night and the pain started up properly. I had a night of half hours -- half an hour covering my face with a blanket. Half an hour sitting on the side of the bed. Half an hour holding my head up. Half an hour lying down. Each new movement relieved some problem or caused another one.

So, no work today. Antibiotics, pain killers, lots of fluids instead. I hope to get back to the office tomorrow.

The Hare and Tortoise prepare lists

Herself is running mad about the room.

"Where's my Christmas list?"

"You mean, of all the presents you're going to get me?" I ask, innocently.

"No..... Of all the jobs that need doing before Christmas."

I find the list, which is something like three pages long. Lists are things that run other people's lives. I'm not a fan of them. My mother, for example, used to leave them everywhere for herself to look up later and wonder where they came from.

Make breakfast.

Something for dinner.

Then in her later life, she would leave them for me. And notes. I found one in a fold of an old armchair one day a couple of years back. It reads: "Fried stuff for Dad in the morning."

It was reminding me to make the breakfast I made every single sorrowful day, in case I forgot.

Bugger lists.

So, my Christmas list, faulty and all as it is, is inside my head. It consists of two major instructions:

"1. Buy presents (If you want to).

"2. Don't worry (If you want to)."

I'm getting there.

We're all getting there.

Merry Christmas, if I haven't wished it for you already. And even if I did.

You can wag your tail but I ain't feedin' you no more

Alluded briefly to the black dog in my post 365 reasons to take prozac and also in this post some time ago. In a good humoured, well-intended (and welcome) reply to the second piece, someone remarked "And you are depressed about something"? (my question mark).

Well, belatedly, the answer is: No. I'm not depressed about something. I'm just depressed. Depression isn't "Oh well. I wish I hadn't painted the room that colour." Or, "I'm feeling glum today."It's something that lives inside the head and trundles around and around without any triggers, without any reason and apparently without any magic-bullet cure. (Hey! No pun intended! LOL!)

This week and last I was watching the television programme hosted by Stephen Fry on BBC2 entitled "Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive" and I recognised many of the traits of the illness as described by the various sufferers, including our host. Stephen, a comic actor whose work includes the TV adaptations of "Jeeves & Wooster", and earlier in the "Black Adder" series was the subject of inexplicable mood swings in his early teens which saw him slap the school nurse for suggesting he tie his shoelaces a particular way, climb about on school roofs, engage in credit card fraud and ultimately get locked up in jail. It wasn't until he walked out of a play in which he was appearing in 1995 in the West End and disappeared that a diagnosis of bipolar depression was made.

In "The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive" Stephen Fry explores his own history in a frank and revealing way. Along the journey we are introduced to fellow sufferers, and, sadly, the families of sufferers who have taken their lives. Stephen himself sat in his garage for two hours contemplating suicide, his hand on the ignition key of the car and a duvet stuffed into the gap of the garage door before deciding that he couldn't go through with it.

In the show, we learned that he once owned more than 10 cars at one time and he now owns 13 or 14 iPods. His mania, or euphoric mood swing often manifests itself in compulsive shopping. When he is down, which can happen for about seven to ten days a month, he experiences feelings of self-worthlessness and he spends the time lying in bed looking at the ceiling in his home until the humour passes.

Since his diagnosis, Stephen has avoided the use of medication. The programme explored the pros and cons of various treatments but did not resolve whether or not he would choose to take pills upon which he would have to depend for the rest of his life.

An interesting phenonemon among even those who have suffered horribly with the disease is that given a hypotethical button to press which would mean that they would never have had the condition but would instead have lived an "ordinary" life, the majority of those interviewed said they wouldn't have chosen to press that button.

My own levels of mood swings were at their height (and depths) in my 20s, which co-incides with my most productive time as a writer. It makes me wonder what level of manic mood swing I was in when I wrote my earlier pieces for the roleplaying industry, a time when I had many manic episodes and lived the dreaded peaks and valleys I ascribed to creativity.

Funnily enough, I don't seem to have those wilder swings I experienced in my 20s any more. When I'm happy, I am reasonably happy, not wildly charging off about the place. Not, either, laughing out loud at something I've written that strikes me as uproariously funny. When I'm down, it lasts for maybe a few weeks at a time. I'm in one of those down periods at the moment, and it's reflected in a lack of any creativity. There is no work being added to the blog. No thoughts of writing anything of interest even to myself alone. No push on to get more flat-packed stuff for assembly and fitting in the kitchen.

Someone on the programme (I think it was Richard Dreyfuss, but it could have been Stephen Fry himself) mentioned how they don't think they'd like to commit suicide; they just sometimes would like not to be alive. I know exactly how that feels. There is no active wish to go fetch the bottle of pills or hang off the Dodder Bridge, but instead there is a well of negative energy that sits there in the background. I sometimes think that I'm waiting to get through this life so I can get a better shot in another. It is a strangely comforting feeling and no doubt alarming to non-sufferers to hear.

It was interesting to find the stigma of depression is breaking down a little. Certainly programmes like this one will help non-sufferers to understand things a little better. We ain't moping around, sulking, being stubborn spoilsports. You wouldn't ask a diabetes sufferer why he was making a fuss about that jam doughnut. So why ask me to cheer up? I will when I'm able, okay?

Interesting television programme. I shall now stop trying the pulling of oneself up by imaginary bootstraps and just get on with things. This includes feeling depressed, for which, no doubt, the Lord will one day make me truely thankful.

365 reasons to take the Prozac

I nearly snatched the prescription out of the doc's hand.

"You've been through a lot lately," he said. "Would you like something to relax?"

So let's see... Diabetic father, recovering from colon cancer and prostate about to give up. Mother beating lumps out of me while I'm changing her nappy/ hospitalised/ dying / dead / cremated / lodged in a wall. Cat poorly. Going to rain later.

"Just give me the fucking tablets."

They said in a report a couple of years ago that fifty percent of tablets have absolutely no effect on fifty percent of people due to differences in body chemistry, genetic makeup, and so on. But these motherfuckers did the business for me. A few milligrams of Fluoxetine hydrochloride promised to iron out the wrinkles in the road for a while.

Naturally, being such an Internet animal, I read about the side-effects before I took any:

"More common side effects may include: Abnormal dreams, abnormal ejaculation, abnormal vision, anxiety, diminished sex drive, dizziness, dry mouth, flu-like symptoms, flushing, gas, headache, impotence, insomnia, itching, loss of appetite, nausea, nervousness, rash, sinusitis, sleepiness, sore throat, sweating, tremors, upset stomach, vomiting, weakness, yawning

Let's see. I already dream a Stephen King plot nightly. "Abnormal ejaculation" sounds interesting. Heh. I'm already blind and anxious: witness the spectacles. Sex drive is in "Park." I get dizzy when I play ring-a-rosy, so I'll cut that out. Dry mouth.. plenty of beer in the fridge. I get flu-like symptoms once a year. Flush when I talk about sex drive. Gas, headache, insomnia, itching, loss of appetite and nausea means its Sunday morning. Nervousness... that's what the Prozac is for, right? Rash: I always was too rash for my own good. Sinusitus, sleepiness, sore throat means it's Winter. Sweating accounts for the heating system. Tremors, the wooden floor. Upset stomach, means curry night. Vomiting, weakness and yawning means I'm sick and tired of reading these side-effects.

So I horsed them. The way they work (if I understand things properly) is to "encourage" the retention of the happy chamical occuring in the brain, namely serotonin. Basically the drug interferes with the bod's ability to reabsorb the serotonin, so when enough happy chemicals are made they stick around longer. Groovy.

I was one of the fifty percent the drugs companies love. Reckon I stayed on the 'Zac about a year, then decided that things were okay and started weaning off it.

When I was on it, those little bumpy bits were really smoothed over. It's a tough one to describe, but that kind of early morning feeling when you wake up worrying that something bad is going to happen, well it still was there, but I had a kind of mental switch which allowed me to figure out that probably things weren't going to be as elephantine troublesome as the mind's eye was making them. A sense of proportion was gradually learned.

For me, the best thing was going off them and finding that the effect lasted for the best part of a year afterwards. And after that, the memory of the effect was still there. Although it takes a little effort to do so sometimes, I can still switch that little "So What?" switch on in a stressful situation in my life and gain the benefits of chilling out without the prescription.

If you're head-wrecked, don't put off talking to someone about it. And don't rule out entirely the option of the prescription happy pills. There are more options available these days than there were. And, if you're in the drugs companies happy 50%, you can benefit.

Or you could walk a couple of miles each day. Or hit a punchbag. Whatever does it.