Q-Bombs And Kentucky Prozac

There's a Raymond Chandler quote I've loved since I first read it:

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen."

When I was younger, I lived in San Diego and Los Angeles and Chandler is right about the big desert winds from the East that blow down the canyons and dry everything out and make the cities smell slightly of sage. We'd get these winds a few days at a time, a few times a year. After living in Southern California for several years, you knew that when the winds clocked around, then crazy shit was bound to happen. Big grass fires lighting up the hills and earthquakes. They always correlated with the Santa Anas.

But more than Nature itself, there was something about human nature that came unglued with the winds and that's what Chandler's getting at. People went slightly crazy and got bitter with one another over the smallest things. A San Diego cop once told me that crime always jumped during those times and that if he could schedule his vacations around the winds, then he would.

In Seattle, it's not the hot winds. It's the gray skies without end and, this year, the rain that won't stop. We are already 40 percent or so ahead of normal rainfall for the season and lately people have been getting squirrely. When the rains keep coming a week at a time, you spend about 95 percent of your life indoors--at home, at the office, in a car or bus, at a coffee shop and so on. Five or six months of that straight will eat you up. Even the city's third places are no refuge from it. A few nights ago, I was at a bar and I damn near had to break up a fight between guys who weren't drunk, but were peeved at one another over an imagined insult. Do I even need to tell you that it was over a woman?

It took about 20 minutes for shit to settle down and, then, people who pretty much get along with each other started laying into one another behind their backs. Gnarly, chippy shit about how so and so behaves or how so and so is a cry baby or how so and so likes to go home and cut the back of her legs and watch the blood in a mirror when she feels bad. The kind of talk that makes me order a double. I'm not disgusted by it--that would be too easy--but sometimes you need a little help while watching our simian, tribal behavior go down.

I've run into most of the folks from the debacle over the last few days and everyone agrees with me that the endless winter has made us slip a gear or two. And that it's pretty normal to play the primitive and so on. There's no other way to get it out and it's got to come out. There's got to be a break at some point.

I mention this because a couple of weeks ago, I had one of the shittiest weeks I've had since quitting my job last year. It was dark and raining during times when it should been at least half-light, I was getting nowhere fast as a reporter/writer, my parents had just euthanized one of their wonderful 13-year-old cats and, well, life sucked big time. I felt awful psychologically, slept a lot (by my standards) for a couple of days and I knew that if I had a few more days of this slippage then I could wind up in a nice little episode of depression and who knows where that might take me.

When I was newer to the psych game, I'd be sitting up with the self-tests and psych books and making appointments with my shrink when I got that way. I'd go in and tell the doctor the score. Whatever dose of whatever meds I happened to be on at the time would get upped or sometimes switched to something else and, of course, I went along. Who was I to argue against science and medicine, both of which I hold in high regard? I had to break whatever horse shit was in my head and soul. The trouble was that the docs would never back you off the meds a few weeks later when things got back to normal. The meds had done their job at whatever dose you'd gone to and so it made good clinical sense to stay right there. Later, the meds themselves would go south on me, but that's a story for another day.

Over the years, I've learned that if I can engineer a break in pending depression for a day or two, then things return to normal much faster than with, say, Prozac back in the day and I go on fine for another three to six months, longer if I am lucky. I snap out of it, literally, although maybe not biochemically.

So, recently, I began to run through my options since I figured I was a few days out from having to drop a Q-Bomb. That's a smallish dose of Seroquel that just fogs the brain for a day or two and reorients the internal solar system, but I like to avoid that route because the fifth of whiskey head the next day is too much. My options at that point were limited and it had been raining too much to go sit in the woods or stare at the Sound or do like a friend of mine does and go shoot hand guns in the forest when he gets all wintery in his mind. I didn't have any Ativan and I hate Xanax and I was getting to the point where I couldn't listen to music of any kind. And that's always a bad sign for me.

So, I did something pretty unconventional (well, at least medically, but folks go this way all the time) and I sure as hell don't recommend it to anyone else. I scrounged around and found some old marijuana, shake in the bottom of a long-forgotten baggie tossed in a kitchen drawer, and I smoked it. Then I went out and bought myself a few bourbons at a bar near my neighborhood. Yeah, I caught a buzz and walked home, the streets empty because it was a Monday night.

I haven't been depressed since. Kentucky Prozac worked its magic. Somehow that feels like a better--or at least an equally-efficacious--tactic than slamming a Q-Bomb or letting things drift further and going to the doctor weeks later in such dire shape, as I once did, that I'd be begging for whatever he was handing out.

Or maybe I am a complete fool. But I've never run into an combination of meds that buffers me against similar bouts of looming depression, so I have a low incentive to stick them in my head long-term. Same as with whiskey and weed.

Posted by Philip Dawdy at March 27, 2007 12:03 AM
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