Poetry & Blindfolds

As I enter Week Three of taking Chantix to quit smoking, I haven’t written much of anything.  I have told various people that I have been merely giving myself a bit of a break – after all, I’ve produced upwards to three shows a year for almost the whole of the decade.  In truth, I’ve just been in those murky depressed waters and my inspiration has been so dismal that I daren’t put it on paper.

This last week hasn’t been as bad as the week before – I haven’t found myself sitting at the train station after work, watching people go on with their lives and gradually feeling smaller and smaller to the point where I’m sure I will disappear, forgotten utterly.  So that’s good.  I do have a heaviness that is following me around, though.  I’m not sure if that has to do with stopping smoking or just getting my sense of smell back and discovering that Chicago stinks a great deal of the time.

I remain irritable.  Purposefully, I am avoiding Facebook.  Unfortunately, I have too many actor friends who use Facebook as their own free public relations firm, and I am inundated with how happy people are – CONSTANTLY – and how they have the best friends OF ALL TIME or have had the best weekend EVER.  Being on Facebook is like being in Stepford, though it must be said that even Stepford had trees and even the trees had shadows occasionally.

It got me to thinking that maybe I should whittle my Facebook time and friends down to something more manageable.  After all, I have reasoned, really successful people – the kind I would like to be – aren’t on Facebook.  They just haven’t the time.  I should be like that, I figure.

The irritation has levelled off and is sharing my mental stage with a sense of humor again.  Last week, I was unfunny.  Completely.   I would catch my reflection here and there and not instantly recognize myself.  This week is better, and I’ve taken to editing my play “Touching Base”, as well as looking at various databases to scope out some potential cast and crew, including director.  Everyone wants to be a director, but I seem to be losing that goal.  It’s such a shitty, shitty, shitty job.  So if I can write (and take a small role in the process) and have some other person direct…. cool.

I’ve also taken a good look at my piece entitled “Lilac”, in which a memory comes to terms with who he/she/it is while roaming the mind of a female character.  It’s the kind of play I would have avoided in earlier days.  Too Charlie Kaufman.  But, as it is coming together, and different memories interact with each other – as memories do in real life, merging and editing each other – the more appealing the project has become.  The standard arcs are in place (the memory character has a definite goal, and is transformed by the realization of what/who he/she/it is) so I’ve taken to exploring the shading of the piece, which for me is the most interesting bits of a play.  The plot points are all well and good, and well needed, but it is the casual observations or furtive glances that go unspoken — that’s the good stuff.

Personally, I think I’d rather write about playwrighting, songs, couples’ therapy or work BUT my personal tickertape that runs across my thoughts like the little news thing on the bottom of the screen on MSNBC keeps mentioning Chantix.  So I’ll go with that.

I want to write about this because I am surprised by the lack of good blogs I’ve found about people going through Chantix.  Either they’re really brilliant – you can find video testimonies citing such on Chantix’ nifty website, including the guy who smoked for 576 years, just to give it up one day while on Chantix – or it’s really depressing – like one article where the woman basically lost her mind on the stuff.   My story so far is neither of these.

Let’s touch on depression.  I’ve got a slight history of depression – sometimes it is horrible, sometimes it’s a badge of honor for being in the arts.   So when my doctor, when considering a prescription of Chantix for me, asked if I had a history of depression, I naturally said no.  Of course not.  Come on.  Look at me.  So I knew I was setting myself up a little bit.

This is an important point: I’ve never been one for thoughts of suicide.  If I would classify myself as any kind of nutcase, it would be the ”arsonist” kind of nutcase.  If I cause damage, I do like to see what happens afterwards.   That’s why I’m a playwright.  Being suicidal with an “arsonist”-type personality would be like setting fire to a house and then staying inside to see who turns up.  By the time one would hear sirens, one probably wouldn’t be hearing anything anymore.

Last Monday, April 8, the depression hit me the hardest.  And, because I knew it was because of the Chantix, it was like I was observing it.  Like an author watches a couple in love when he’s writing a romance novel.  But somewhere along the way, it tsunami’ed right over me and took me over.  In a matter of minutes, between 5:30pm and 6:00pm to be precise, I went from casual observer to walking that half-drunken feet-dragging stagger with splotchy tears coming out of my eyes and hopelessness spewing out of my mouth in the form of half-constructed words.   This hit me when I was in the alley between the train station and my house, so it was very inconvenient.  I hid in my office for a couple of hours that night.

The second wave of depression bubbled up around Friday.  Instead of hitting it straight on, I went to bed at 11pm.  Woke up at 1130am on Saturday, went to couples’ therapy, came home, went to bed until after 7pm.  It worked.

For the first week, I smoked a pack a day, same as any other day.  Yesterday, I kept forgetting to smoke.  I had four, possibly five, cigarettes.  Today, I have had four as of this writing.

More later.

At present, I am on Chantix, the magic blue pill designed to help you stop smoking.  I have dabbled with the idea of quitting smoking for some time, but since I have surgery coming up next month for an almost-double hernia, it was recommended strongly that I be smoke-free.

I am at the end of my first week on the stuff, and find, apart from finding cigarettes mildly less enjoyable, not much has changed.  Oh yes, one thing has changed – my body has turned into an insane asylum and the inmates in my brain have figured out the locks and are running around setting off small bombs all over my mental facilities like a bunch of suicide bombers.

These little Hiroshimas are going off with the frequency of weather changes here in Chicago: as soon as I’m finally used to being nauseous, I suddenly break out in a mad lust for cottage cheese and light French dressing.  As soon as I’m delighted to be heading home after a long day’s work, as I was on Monday, I suddenly am struck with a depression so heavy and slowing that it is like wearing ten full-length leather coats – and feeling bad about it.  And serenity!  Oh my yes.  My personal serenity is like a calm, blue, lightly rolling ocean – that can only be set off by something like the way the cat meows at any given moment.  Then it’s tsnunami time.

So either I’m stopping smoking or I’m pregnant.

All of these thrills and spills are because the drugs have entered my system and my system is freaking out about it a bit.  Kind of like when half a dozen black kids walk down the street in a very white neighborhood.  While my body is going through convulsions that tap out Morse code for “not in my back yard”, I am still smoking away at the regular, near-pack-a-day rate. 

A friend of mine who has gone through this already listened to my tale and gave me that grin.  You know that grin.  You get the same grin from people who have been married when you are about to walk down the aisle.  The same grin that says, ‘oh you poor idiot – you have no idea what you are in for.’  My friend gave me some good advice – basically, ‘keep doing what you’re doing’ – and then waved me off with a chuckle-laden, ‘Come talk to me next week.’

I anticipate the weekend with extreme fear.  Normally, I like to have things planned, but if nothing’s planned, I wind up sitting around the apartment for the duration.  And that drives me fucking nuts.  My girlfriend quite likes sitting around the apartment, and if she were paralyzed, there’d probably be little to no difference, except in the positioning of the television.  But for me – I go nuts if I’m not doing anything.  And I have nothing planned this weekend (except for Easter at my girlfriend’s family, which is conservative heaven – pity I’m a liberal atheist).

My mind is in some bizarre overdrive about it, too.  Should I write?  Should I jog?  Should I clean?  Should I work on that song?  What about that video?  Having so many thoughts is like being DeNiro in ‘Awakenings’ – my thoughts make me shudder so much, that there is no movement left.

I’m in trouble.