Hotel Heaven

The pain is overwhelming today. I thought I was really onto something with my last post, and maybe I am, but that doesn't console me right now.

Pain like this is ruthless, brutal, cruel. A few days ago I was on top of the world, which makes this crash all the harsher.

It's hard to know if those insights were real, or if they created just a temporary placebo effect, which has happened to me in the past. The muscles and tendons are still very relaxed, but the localized jaw pain is fierce.

Regardless, I've applied to NYU's psychoanalytic institute. I've got to keep trying, but this sharp increase in pain is crushing; it makes it hard to think let alone take some kind of action.

Last night, I took an oxycontin (10 mg), an advil, a xanax and a few drags of pot, and the pain went away completely. When moments like that occur, it's like the pain never happened. I immediately snap back to myself and my joyousness soars. Instantly, I begin enjoying just normal life stuff, normal life thoughts.

Today, I find myself threatening God, saying that if someone up there doesn't help me soon, I'll be checking in to Hotel Heaven in the not-too-distant future, not out of despondency but logic.

Many people with my condition have killed themselves. In fact, when this first struck in 1999, I joined two different online support groups, which was a disaster. People were so devastated by their pain that all they could manage to write was their misery. It wasn't a true support group, where everyone is helping and uplifting each other, but instead a dumping ground of human agony.

I tried to be cheerful and upbeat, but then one of the patients in the first group killed herself. Her husband wrote in to say that she'd just reached the end of the line and took herself out. Needless to say, I immediately opted out of that group.

But then the following week, a patient in the other group also killed herself, and my blood ran cold, mainly because I so completely understood why she did it. I understood why they both did it, and I realized that this pain was potentially fatal.

What's a little spooky is that a few weeks ago, I had that awful premonition again, the type where I suddenly can't see my future. I didn't tell anyone because I talked myself out of it. But I have to be honest; it happened, and now here I am feeling that I just can't go on. I'm not sure I want to. There's nothing left in me; no hope, no will, no motivation.

In my 20s, when I first began therapy, strange and wonderful things began to happen in my life, where something would meet me halfway in terms of the things I wanted to accomplish.

The first instance was my desire to find a music studio, so that I wasn't doing it in my bedroom all the time and potentially bothering my three roommates. When I thought about what I wanted, I thought of a small, separate room in my building that a writer had been renting for years. When I opened the paper to look for rental space, one of my roommates joked, "Are you looking for a new apartment?"

When I told her I was looking for a space similar to the one rented by the writer downstairs, she told me that she'd just seen him moving out three days prior. I thought it an incredible stroke of luck, and took over the space.

But then these "coincidences" began to multiply. Over and over, I was startled at how doors were opening up for me, and I began to tally up these experiences. I didn't know what it was, but there was a true force at work.

In The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell call this force the "helping hands" phenomenon. The only explanation I could come up with at the time was that when we follow our bliss, we tap into something extraordinary, and I began to understand the notion that "God helps those who help themselves." It seemed that when I took risks to follow my dreams, there was something there to help me, and it was something I knew I could actually count on.

I suppose my problem now is that I have no dreams anymore. There's no bliss to follow. I'm caught in some kind of negative vortex where I'm completely left to my own devices. The helping hands are gone, and I don't know how to get them back.

The writer in me wants a happy ending to this story. I would love to find my way out of pain not just for myself, but to provide a type of road map for others who come after me. But I'm beginning to feel clubbed to death. At some point, I just won't be able to stand up anymore.

Prayers are welcome, because right now, I can't even pray. Please see my future for me.


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Chaos Theory

I have a piece of paper taped to my wall next to my drawing desk, on which I long ago scribbled the definition of chaos theory: "The more complex the pattern, the simpler the underlying reality."

I heard it on TV once, and I read it often, as science and the human condition always seem to be so relative. Truth is truth, whether it be a mathematical formula or a divine insight. I find comfort in this definition of chaos theory these days, because deep in my soul, I do feel that there is an underlying truth in all this pain, and it's my job to figure it out.

Of course, I'm sick to death of trying to figure it out, and often come to the conclusion that I'm just unlucky--that there's no grand design to all this--I'm just a single human who drew the low card and nothing will change until I get a lucky break--when I'll find the right treatment or the right doctor who will help me get well. And that'll be that. No divine involvement whatsoever.

But then another one of those strange interventions happened again the other day, which challenges my notions of nothingness. I've talked about them in previous posts, where I'll get a strong premonition or warning that alerts me to danger and alters my behavior to the extent that I actually avoid disaster.

Here's what happened this time: Every day I get a digest post from the online blood support group I joined years ago. I read it faithfully for years, but as the posts tend to get repetitive, I haven't opened or read any of them in a good six months or more.

Last week, though, something made me open the email, and in the list of topics was a warning about a drug that I'd been taking for nausea--Reglan. It said that new studies had shown that Reglan can cause permanent damage to the nervous system when taken in high doses or over a long period of time, the latter of which applied to me.

As the drug cocktail I take every day can sometimes bring on nausea, I was taking Reglan every morning whether I had nausea or not, just as a precaution, so that I didn't find myself out and about somewhere and suddenly need to vomit.

Yet when I read this warning post, I was shocked at the damage Reglan can do, and immediately stopped taking it.

Later, I thought it extraordinary that of all the posts to open during the last six months, that was the one I chose, and once again, I felt like something "other" had intervened. I suppose I could just call it a coincidence, but when similar coincidences happen over and over, a pattern emerges that challenges logic.

I feel like there is something out there keeping me alive, which frankly feels somewhat cruel, considering the state I'm in. In the last few weeks, the pain level has skyrocketed to the extent that it's there when I go to bed and there when I wake up. My despondency feels like a ten-ton weight, and thoughts do cross my mind lately that I could always just end things. I do have that choice, and I know things are bad when I begin considering such a move as an option.

I love life so much though, and then I think of my little nieces who adore me (and who I love more than words could describe), who would be left without their nutty aunt for the rest of their lives. And so I hold on. These "interventions" are keeping me around for some reason, and I'm trying to have faith in that.

I'm still swirling in a state of chaos, though, trying to believe that there is a simple underlying truth to it all that will set me free, as truth always does.

But my energy is fading, to the extent that I've completely lost my appetite. When eating feels like a monumental task, the other things I know I must do to try and get well feel like lifting cement boulders.

It's time to reach out for help. Friends have offered assistance constantly, and I know they mean it, but I suppose it's tough for me to admit that I'm actually this weak right now, and that I can no longer do this alone.

I don't know that that particular truth is the simple one that can explain all this chaos, but it's the truth today. Time to make some phone calls.


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Ghost Stories

Today is one of those days when my vitality, my life force, is just so low. I'm so worn out by the pain and the pills that I have little motivation to do anything--even the basics, like paying bills and grocery shopping. It all has to get done today...it HAS to. All that's in my fridge is butter, apple sauce and maple syrup.

But pain sucks the life energy right out of you. What little of it is left I use for flamenco classes, the occasional painting, even volunteering at the local shelter when I can. But activity of any kind, particularly dancing, can flatten me for a day or more. Maybe the fatigue is from the pills. I've actually been a little spooked lately that I may take one pain pill too many and inadvertently check out of this existence long before my scheduled departure.

On the one hand, a permanent rest sounds lovely, but there's also this sneaking suspicion that I'm supposed to meet this challenge, and I have absolutely no evidence as to why I feel this way.

Like other times in my life when something deep within my psyche was speaking to me, either overtly warning me of grave danger (to the extent that I made a decision that averted catastrophe) or providing me with a general premonition that something cataclysmic and unavoidable was about to occur (and then it would), there's something now nagging at me from my center that's telling me that there's more meaning to this experience than I'm willing to admit, and I wonder why I'm fighting it.

I'm guessing it's because it means more work on my part...more silence, more journal writing, more reading, more meditation...and frankly, I can't be bothered. I'd rather watch Ghost Hunters.

But if I'm ever going to get out of this mess, I've got to follow hunches and at least be open to the possibility that something else is going on in the dimensions all around me (hence my interest in shows about the paranormal). While we humans live in three, science has now mathematically proven the existence of nine (last I heard), and something is going on there.

Whether that something can be of any use to me is a mystery, but I need to review some crucial paranormal events in my own life, as they were as real as the hands I type this post with, and maybe they're the evidence I need to find some hope in this hornets' nest of pain and misery.

While I'm trying hard here to be a good newly-born atheist (letting go of all notions of inherent meaning to terrible events and the idea of any master plan), if I'm to give up my beliefs in an afterlife, then I basically have to erase certain experiences from my brain, and, of course, I can't.

There haven't been many, but they've been memorable. Here they are:

1) The first happened when I was 17. I was driving my dad's big old Cadillac at around 2 a.m. after dropping off a bunch of high school girlfriends at their respective homes. I remember being at a red light and feeling agitated, like I wanted to run it as there wasn't a soul around. But it was a main intersection, right by Seton Hall, and I figured it would be just my luck to run it just as a cop car came along.

So I decided to sit and wait, but when the light turned green, something bizarre occurred. Fully formed sentences in my head told me to not move, that someone was going to run the light, and I froze in position--not out of fear, but more as if I were paralyzed into a type of powerless obedience.

Sure enough, after a few long seconds, a large white van ran the red light at about 50 mph. Had I not listened to this voice, I would have been broadsided and killed instantly.

What's so striking about this event, other than its obvious strangeness, is that I thought nothing of it at the time. I had a type of "of course" response, like, "Of course someone would run the light; I knew it would." And then I just went home and never spoke of it until 20 years later, not because I feared anyone thinking me nuts, but because I just forgot about it.

What reminded me of it was my friend Lynda's very similar story, about an internal voice telling her (when she was a teenager) to step back from a curb. She obeyed and averted getting hit by an out-of-control car.

It was her story that awakened this very clear memory of my own. Perhaps not coincidentally, Lynda and I went on to become very dear friends in our adult lives, meeting all kinds of joys and challenges together. Did something intervene for us both at the same time in our lives to make sure this adult friendship would happen?

Weird.

2) The next biggie wouldn't come until I was 43, quite a long time after my teenage experience. Interspersed in these years were extraordinary occurrences of synchronicity, but I'll leave that subject for another post. Synchronicity is very different from predictions or premonitions, which is what I'm sticking with here.

It was in August of 2002, just after the release of my second album, My Life of Crime. As I was planning for a trip to Los Angeles to do some shows, I remember being in the kitchen on the phone with my mom when this all-pervasive feeling of...well...nothingness wash over me.

It were as though I could no longer see my future, and the experience was so startling that I remember exactly where I was standing when it struck. I simply wrote it off as record-release jitters and the anticipation of travelling to L.A. and London to perform. But about two weeks later, I was overcome by abdominal pain, only to find out that the main vein in my liver had clotted, as well as the liver itself, and that my life was in grave danger.

I remember the doctor coming in to tell me the news with this look of shock on his face, as doctors almost never see this condition; one told me it's something they only read about in their medical textbooks.

Having been introduced to the works of Florence Scovel Shinn around this time (an author who first wrote about the Law of Attraction and the power of words in the 1920s), I kept a vision of myself in my head as an old lady planting tomatoes as a counter-measure to the premonition.

As for the feeling that I "couldn't see my future," years later I was to read an article about author Lucy Greely (Autobiography of a Face), who had told her best friend of those exact same feelings in that exact same language just weeks before she died.

Creepy.

3) This same futureless sensation overcame me about two years later, after having been in and out of the hospital for three months with an esophageal hemorrhage and its accompanying complications.

I wondered why in the world I was getting this feeling now, as it seemed that the worst was behind me and that I was now on the mend. But there it was...the feeling that there was no future before me. Nothing...just a blank slate, neither dark nor light, good nor evil, and nothing to be afraid of. It was just...empty.

Unlike the previous premonition of '02, which I didn't utter to a soul, I did tell friends and family about this one. And sure enough, a few weeks later I was in a psychiatric hospital with depression and suicidal ideation, which was to be the biggest threat to my life EVER.

Of all I've been through, I can attest that severe mental illness is the cruelest cut of all, as it so blights our subjectivity. When serotonin and dopamine aren't getting through, you can no longer choose your response to anything, and you feel like the walking dead, truly. The trick is to just HANG ON until the meds start to work.

What was particularly challenging at this time was to keep that positive old-lady image of myself in my head to again counter the premonition. It was so difficult, though, because every cell in my body was screaming to die, if for no other reason than just to end the screeching, untreatable pain in my face and jaw. I didn't want to live anymore, which made me feel that perhaps this current futureless feeling was more prediction than premonition.

The real point, though, is how did I know this was coming? How did I know any of these events were about to happen?

There've been other things, I guess, but nothing as big as these three. (I know there's a fourth, which escapes me at the moment.) While technically I haven't been visited by ghosts, I was certainly visited by something in these instances, or perhaps tripped on some space-time warp that gave me a vision of what was to come.

And then there's my mom, who just last month heard someone whisper her name late at night right next to her bed. She says in all her 75 years, she's never had a single thing like that ever happen to her. Suffice to say, she was freaked.

I watch science shows about phantom matter, dark matter, dark energy, black holes, etc., all the time. Will the paranormal all be scientifically explained one day by the mysteries of the universe that still baffle us? Even if it is, will we ever know how or why the universe was even created?

While there are no answers, I do know this: if I ever actually see a ghost, I'll crap my pants. Premonitions I can handle, but full-bodied apparitions? Get out the smelling salts.


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