October 2024 – ☆ STARSAILOR ☆

DARK HAVE BEEN MY DREAMS OF LATE . . .

. . . made darker by the sleep demon that in desperation I invite inside of me when I cannot get my body to shut down! The creature comes in the form a little white pill from my stockpile of deadly Trazodone, which was given to me by my psychiatrist back in Berkeley. This guy looks like an honest-to-god wizard and sounds exactly like my Uncle Ned, and whenever we talk, he’s always quite concerned about how much sleep I’m getting and the quality of it. I’ll say, “Doc, it’s not much, and the sleep I do get is downright bad.” I said this to him enough times, just answering truthfully because he’d asked and all, and one day he wrote me a prescription for the stuff. On the label it says “take as needed” and lately I really have needed it. Trazodone is The Nuclear Option on account of how massively powerful it is, and I treat it as such. In fact I don’t like taking it at all if I can help it . . . such is its strength! Even a quarter of a pill, which is what I take, will send you straight into the abyssal lair, and it is there you stay until the drug releases its hold over you. Only the drug knows how long this will last.

Upon waking, I feel like I am made of lead and sinking into a morass. It takes a great effort to raise my head and my limbs and climb out from my bed, or more often than not, my couch . . . I keep sleeping on my couch, though I don’t exactly know why. The heaviness does not end with the body. It extends to the brain and the parts extreme. Really, this part is even worse, the psychological component, because of how real it feels, and how difficult it is to get out from under it. Trazodone casts a shadow upon you. Sometimes I cannot shake the dark dreamy feeling until hours later, and sometimes I blow the whole day. So why do I take it at all? Because otherwise I will stay up for two or three days at a time, which is a fate I consider to be worse. And why can I not sleep? Because everyone I love keeps dying.

I have written before about my right eye, and how every few years I will spontaneously develop a distortion in the center of my vision. This first happened to me in Portland when I was absolutely losing my mind on account of how godawful my circumstances were. Namely, the moment I realized I hated living there occurred precisely when I realized I was dead broke with no end in sight, effectively trapping me there. And so my body began to destroy itself, and I had phantom pains and illnesses both real and imagined. At one point I convinced myself I had syphilis, which later turned out to be a UTI, and which went away after two weeks of imbibing cranberry juice and whatever homeopathic potions my girl friends gave to me. Another time I accidentally mixed two OTC flu medications and thought my throat was closing up, so I called 911 and a truck full of EMTs showed up at five in the morning and told me to stay off the internet. But the fucked eye remained.

Earlier that summer, a long time ago now, I had developed a sort of TV static in the center of my right eye, and it blurred and warped everything around it . . . I could only focus on something if I closed my eye. I felt a stinging in the blood vessels around my retina. I slept during the day and only went out at night so as not to be blinded. I bought an eye patch and wore it to work. I ignored the advice of the EMTs. Everything I read online said I would permanently destroy my vision if I didn’t get it checked out immediately, so in vain I went about getting it checked out.

With negative thousands of dollars in my bank account, I pleaded with the state of Oregon to give me health insurance so I could see an ophthalmologist. Their system was ancient and byzantine. I could not mail nor email them any documents—they had to be faxed. I called every day for a month to check on the status of my application, my eye getting worse by the day, but they could tell me nothing. In tears, I told a particularly sympathetic agent that I was going blind, and she pulled some strings for me in order to expedite my pending account.

Finally I received a medical card in the mail. I visited an ophthalmologist’s office and a team of specialists performed dozens of tests on my eyes over the course of eight or nine hours. They shot a red dye into my veins and took thousands of pictures of my retinas within seconds. The dye turned my urine nuclear yellow. Finally the ophthalmologist himself sat me down and asked me, essentially, if I was a junkie. I told him that I was just having a really difficult time, and could he please tell me if I was going to go blind? He assured me I was not going to go blind. The only thing he could find was little dots around my retinas, like freckles. He said they were hereditary and that other people in my family probably had it. And he repeated what the optometrist in St. Johns had said, the one who had referred me to him, that I had very little pigment in the backs of my eyes which, in addition to my having green eyes, made me quite sensitive to light. He told me to take it easy. I drove home with blown pupils. I had not slept in days. Somehow I did cause any major car accidents on my way back.

Fall came and I felt a little better about everything. Mostly it was because I was in the Pacific Northwest in October, which is the most beautiful place I can think to be round that time of year, even if you’re making minimum wage and being slowly poisoned by the black mold growing in your basement, such as I was for a time. Kerwin moved in with Matt and me in order to hide from the world for a while, and so my rent went down a little as well. We bought a cord of firewood from a weird old guy in a weird old van and kept the fire going day and night from then on. At night we went on long walks once the rain had let up, or else we walked beneath it unfazed. We developed a Sunday ritual where we ate together at Tom’s Diner near Reed College. For Christmas we gave each other Tom’s mugs. It went on this way for a while, the three of us hiding from the world, and in turn my body began to relax and stop killing itself. I even managed to get laid a few times. And somewhere in this little cozy time in my life, the TV static in the center of my vision faded and was gone completely, and I could see.

Years later, back in Oakland, I was trapped once again . . . this time it was not a city, but a woman I should not have been with. I knew it and yet I could not get away. One night I was out walking by Lake Merritt near my apartment. I felt rotten as hell about the whole thing and, for the ten-thousandth time in my life, I supposed my life was over. I had convinced myself it would have been easier to die than to break it off with her. I happened to look up at a street sign and realized I could not read it. I held my hand over my right eye and the words upon it became clear again. I then held my hand over my left eye and saw a shadow over my vision, like a veil, and the words on the sign were swirled and distorted. I groaned. I knew immediately what was happening: my body was so sad that it was malfunctioning again. I was manifesting stress deep below the surface rather than outwardly. I wondered if that was worse. When I got home, I started looking up ophthalmologists in Oakland. I groaned again when I remembered that this time the state of Oregon would not be footing the astronomical bill.

A few days later, an ophthalmologist on Telegraph Avenue repeated many of the same tests I had undergone in Portland. After many hours of performing A Clockwork Orange-level vision tests and being injected with retinal dyes and having my dilated eyeballs photographed by machines that almost certainly cost more than every car I’ve ever owned combined, the good doctor sat down in front of me on a little stool and asked if I considered myself a Type A sort of guy. I assured him I was the complete opposite of that guy, which would make be a Type B sort of guy. He asked me if I worked in finance and I said no. He asked me if I had a high-stress job of any kind and I said no. I told him the miracle of my life, which was that I basically did nothing all day and still get paid twice a month anyway.

He pulled out a laptop and showed me a series of photographs of the back of my right eye.

“Do you see this black area here around your retina? This is a liquid that has pooled there, and which is causing the distortion in your vision. You have something called central serous retinopathy. Typically we see it in males with stressful jobs.”

“I am none of the things you have described, so how do I make it go away?”

“You just have to figure out a way to stop being stressed out in the way that you are stressed out.”

I can’t fault the guy for not having an immediate solution to what is a mysterious and poorly-understood ailment, though let’s face it: he may as well have just burped in my face.

The doc sent me home with a magnet I was to put on my refrigerator. The magnet was a black and white grid, and in the center was a big black dot. Per his instructions, I was to cover my left eye and focus on the black dot with my fucked up eye and make note of any bending or waving in the grid surrounding it. If the grid became more and more warped as time went on, he told me to return. If the grid appeared to look normal, then I was cured.

I did the test every morning for two months. The grid was always warped and spotted with borderless grey blobs. I could not make my body obey me. And somewhere in that dismal time in my life, when I lived alone by the lake and despaired at how much space the world had put between me and the happy highways where I went and could not go again, I cut this woman loose, the one who had brought me so much pain, and was on my own once again, just as I should have been all along. Within days the shadow veil was lifted not just from my vision but from my entire life, and the grid on my refrigerator became solid little squares with sharp lines of delineation rather than pulsing wormholes that absorb even time itself. The dark liquid which had once oozed from inside my skull to encircle my retina like a curse had now receded back into a secret place. For a time I would be drained of its menace. Intending to be rid of it for as long as possible, I began planning my final escape from the Bay Area. I packed everything I owned into plastic bins and put them on an airplane and sent them to the East Coast. And then I got on an airplane with Dante and we left forever.

Exactly one year later, my best friend Dante died, and my right eye once again became clouded with darkness. I was and have remained so sad about it that my eye curse never really goes away for good . . . the shadow globules simply migrate around the center of my vision, change shape, lessen and grow large again, vanish for weeks at a time, only to return . . .

In vain I saw yet another ophthalmologist in Tennessee. She took pictures of the inside of my eyeballs and showed me the inky fluid that is choking the central retinal artery and optic nerve in my right eye. And she repeated the old adage that I saw coming a mile away: “Just figure out a way to stop being so stressed out.” Back in the lobby, a receptionist asked me if I would be using a debit or credit card to pay my $700 bill.

When I began writing this, I was still living like Nosferatu in my high tower in Berlin. I was trapped in an empty hell where Dante is gone forever, and where I can only see him in my Trazodone dreams. And just as I did right after he died, I fled my city and flew across the ocean so as not be anywhere at all. Now I am once again in the United States, traveling hundreds or else thousands of miles across its broad expanse every few days, sleeping on the floors and couches and in the extra beds of my many friends who are goodly enough to put me up when I’m in their city for a night or two, and not being able to have any sort of normal life on account of what feels like an insurmountable despair. Whenever I am alone driving down a dark highway at night to get to the next place, wherever that may be, I put my hand over my right eye so that I can read the road signs.

Tomorrow I am flying back to Los Angeles for the weekend to see Amissa and Cera and Nina, and then I’ll head to New York to stay with Monty and Lauren in Ridgewood for a little while. I don’t yet know where I’ll go after that, but I do know that I can count on the shadow veil following me there and rendering my eye useless.

Odin the Wanderer had one eye, now that I think about it . . . but he gave his up voluntarily in exchange for divine wisdom. All I got was a hospital bill.

Well: Until next time, I wonder, as always . . .