Life Crisis

So selling a house long distance isn’t so easy.  Especially if you have our fax machine.  I don’t know why we haven’t gotten a new one.  I guess because we got very few faxes, but when I started doing the real estate stuff I started getting faxes all the time, what with papers to sign and so forth, and that meant you had to be right there when the fax came in because the damn machine wouldn’t load the paper properly.  You have to stand there and assist the paper by pushing it down a little to make sure the machine drags it through and does its printing thing.  What a pain!

 

delridgeback

 

 

I was feeling really tired somewhere in there last year in March, April, May, June, July—somewhere in there, so much so that Carol started wondering aloud and frequently if maybe my sleep apnea mask wasn’t working.  The sleep apnea mask really worked; before I started sleeping with that damn thing stuck to my face—the apnea mask I mean—I had begun to feel really tired.  Saturday especially got to me; the idea of going out to stock up on groceries gave me a bleak feeling, like when am I going to get a break.  But after I started using the sleep apnea mask that dark feeling went away and I had a bit more energy.

But back then in those months Carol felt maybe that energy had gone away since I had started to seem pretty bleak again.  Certainly WB’s death and Joan’s health and the equity line and selling the house, as well as what I do for a living, had built up to a good deal of stress.  But Carol’s sense was that this wasn’t stress exactly but something more physiological.  Like the sleep apnea mask.  So I got another one, and it didn’t help.

 It wasn’t until just last November I realized that I was especially tired, not only because of the pneumonia I got around that time, but because, sometime in February, I had decided to go off Effexor.  I mean I was doing 375 milligrams of it per day, plus 300 Welbutrin.  Like that’s 675 milligrams of anti-depressant, so I decided to get off the Effexor, very gradually as people suggest.  Like a drop of 37.5 milligrams once a month.  Looking back I now see that on top of being stressed out I was going through withdrawal from Effexor. 

So underneath all my conscious strangeness and feelings of weirdness and fatigue and sort of out of body disassociate experiences, beneath all that I was going through withdrawal from a real mean anti-depressant and I didn’t know it.  I told people, when they asked, that I was going through a life crisis.  That’s what I thought.  I didn’t have a life crisis at 40 or at 50—but 60 was turning out to be one hell of a life crisis.  Well, maybe it was a life crisis, but one aggravated, agitated and irritated by an undercurrent at the physiological, biochemical level of a really nasty withdrawal. 

No wonder then that I nearly threw that fax machine through the wall one day. Damn, just getting a piece of paper into that machine felt like an overwhelming chore of unspeakable proportions.  Or something like that.

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That’s the back side of Delridge on the same foggy day.

 

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