Part 1

For me, I think, I have discovered the problem, the root problem, or at least the symptom, the symptom that would have me bled out and therefore may as well be the root. The disorder and the virus that creates it are not the same thing, let's be clear, but agents of the mind are ill-defined entities and it's hard enough to puzzle out epidemiological causality in the visible world, let alone these swamps.

For me, the issue is what happens on a Sunday afternoon when I have nothing planned, nowhere to go, and a hundred possible low-to-mid-level needful tasks to perform, each one urgent in its own right and each one revoltingly futile when placed alongside the flooding truth that a Sunday afternoon unveils, which is of eternal loneliness and death. I have a car headliner that's falling down bit by bit, obscuring my driving and drizzling a horrible ocher foam of heat-degraded adhesive onto heads and into eyes. I have a tutoring session to prepare for, with a student I enjoy and on a subject I'm interested in studying. I have an article to write about a thing I want to write about. I have okra to pick and a garden bed to build. I have an endless stack of magazines to read. I need to find a good doctor. I need to call my mother, my soon-to-be-married friend, my in-the-hospital friend, a dozen friends I barely keep in touch with. I have a list of discrete and pleasant obligations to perform, none of which are the least bit overwhelming or intimidating.

It starts slowly. It starts with coffee. I drink some cups in the morning and read the paper. That's a good start to the horror -- there's so goddamn much of the paper and it's all goddamn important, I don't care what you say, but is it more important than those magazine articles? Than my vehicle? Than my own mother? Then it's noon. It's noon and I'm still in my house. I fidget the paper down to the floor and decide to do something with my hands. I walk up and down. I pick up tools and books, trying to start on anything at all and leave them laying inert and sad on horizontal surfaces. My roommate leaves to do good things, worthy things, things outside the house. I stay home because I have things to do and the day is ticking away and away and I have things to do and my god. Outside, the afternoon heat peaks and the air conditioner helpfully keeps me in a comfortable external stasis, all the better to ramp up brain temperature to a boil from the inside. Thoughts and worries loop in on themselves, knotting up tight and generating internal heat with their own frantic friction. I get on the Internet. I get off the Internet. How many of the semi-important tasks have I accomplished? You guess. It's less than one, that's for sure. A thrum has started at some point -- I didn't notice it before, but now it's rising and rising. I pick up the tools and books I dusted my furniture with earlier in a frantic attempt to triage myself with housework. It's at this point I usually start talking to myself.