Greg Correll's Open Salon Blog

pill hell

Fri, 25 May 2012 02:05:13 -0400

First, and we'll find out as we go, maybe it's this brain pill, right? It accounts for all this dislocation, in how I think and write. But let's look at how I get you and me safely away, to the place where I tell you about brain pills, the whole shocking story, as it were, and tell it my way. These are my letters of transit: how does a writer go from prose to prose poem? What if I want to express what is really real, from within my skin?

I get right to it, I hear music. Is poetry inside-out, through and through, from the get-go? Or is poetry simply an after-the-fact frenzy of carriage returns? Do I just look at the whole piece and choose lines, hit the key, hit the key? Can even one artful line-break speak, penetrate, humanize?

No.

It takes insouciance. Brio, too, or great suffering. In this, the mean time, I go deep inside. I grunt, or sigh, settle in, admit all, and then just say. I listen for lyric. Maybe the thought, the idea, the whole work, or even the waggle of the busy blue pen will suit a tune. When I hear music, I do surrender.

Plant my feet, look you in the eye, and tell you the truth.

Got it. A breath. Another one. OK.

Now that I've had time with this PD in me
and have practiced the six hour tarantella,
morning, noon, and night, thrice daily,
for the last two weeks, towards 3x Mirapex,

oddly enough, I have
one near-continuous run of thought, one tangle of desire:
To see, and never turn away from, all masked and open grief.
To foment love, everlasting.
To help us all help each other.

Every which way,
and for as long as it takes.
For as long as I can.

I walk hard miles, with patience, for the sake of my beloveds.
I love the woman hiding in a plaid shirt.
She is every woman I have ever known.
I love the man who blunders in a slack jacket.
He is each and every man, me, and all men.
I love how sisters quarrel like larks in the understory.
I love their hesitation, swirl, and momentum,
how they become adults.
I begrudge all blithe others.
I shrug at blather and disregard.
I rate my self, fair and square, all my good and bad,
and I re-build – hey: building! Life is building blocks, OK!

(Is this the brain pill that mis-connects, and pours out this drek, from the crumbling crag of me? Do you see what time it is? Why can't I sleep?)

Every day is a quivering stack of moments in rooms and open spaces,
and each moment a living cube of reality jell-o, authored by time,
real and then gone.

Time is the reinvention of opportunity. I see it now. The opportunities are everywhere – ahh! Damnit. Look at this mess. My wandering lines. The pathos. The over-reach. My chutzpah. What if I can't write anymore? What is this?

Help each other. That's all.

Oh... Wait.

You came for the details. The pill hell and all. OK.

Well, the anti-meanderers left a dozen lines ago.
It's just us now, so I can tell you.

Here it is: I'm doubling the time frame. My titration. As I enter 2 2 2 territory, six pills a day, I get hours of being spasm- and tremor-free. First time in nine months. I get authoritative and quick thinking again, for the work I know well. I get relief.

But every six hours also includes two hours of roller-coaster, an uncertain convulsion of nausea and dizzy, light-headed incapacity. I pass out, more or less suddenly, about eight times a week. On my first 2 2 2 day, yesterday, I passed out for three hours, at 4 PM.

If I can't get Mirapex to stabilize I can't have the six months to two years of extra drug time, and have to start the Levodopa now. Right now. So I teeter. So does my Mt. Sinai pal. Do I deal with the daily seasick routine, try to live with it, or do I give up? The doc wants me to build up, to nine each day, 3 3 3. That's 2.25 mg per day. She's ready to take me up to 3 mg when it starts to falter, months from now.

So I might get a year out of this. If I'm lucky. Then we transit away from Mirapex while we ramp up the dopamine agonist.

Which is why I wrote this. In a few weeks if I can't manage, or maybe a year or so if I can, I then start the final effective med, Sinemet, the musical brand name for Carbidopa Levodopa. It will be another round of nausea and dizzy but then a likely several years of good control. Then that's it.

I feel driven. I am on the irrevocable path now.

What? Sure, I know, later there's DBS brain surgery, wires under the neck skin, from a pump below the collarbone up into the skull to the substantia nigra. Do I want that? It's scary. Cue the hard-bitten gunnery sergeant from central casting, who growls: "It's funny what you can get used to."

Help each other. That's the main thing.

_{Julia Fordham, for the New Yorker
by Greg Correll}

Me, I have started the campaigns against full-body dyskinesia and food from a straw, or else full-body rigidity and food from a straw. Each campaign has a half-life, pairs of years with definable features. No matter what, I will diminish.

I am losing my ability to draw.

Compared to losing my art, my natural hand and fine limns, well, shit, plain old pill hell? Nausea and disorientation and blackouts and all that? That's nothing.

And it's worth it, besides. Maybe. An extra year might make the total four not three for all meds, or I dream of nine, even twelve capable, medicated years. I'll take it. I'll take life, whole or part.

Mirapex works, so far. But the price might be too high. We will know in less than a month. It's freaking me out, the pill, throwing up, fainting. But the weird part is this love poetry, alive in me and insurmountable, love for everything and everyone. The swerve of my obsession, my determination to improve, and to understand and love all human beings, is really something.

Yes.

I will see where this goes. I embark.
I am alone, in a boat of bread and honey,
lost on a coast of lonely callers.
The mist is coming in, OK,
but you wade out, you need me,
and I man the oars, and bring her in.

We get close enough for me to share what I have,
and I see grief, and I see love, everlasting.

Let us begin a beautiful friendship. Help each other.

Then we are gone. That's all.

OK.

_{portrait of my daughter Molly, pastels}
_{drawn from life in 1983, when she was seven
by Greg Correll}

I read Found

Wed, 23 May 2012 01:05:23 -0400

_{My friend Tobe Carey, an award-winning filmmaker (http://www.documentaryworld.com/),
recorded me reading "Found",
my piece about learning I had Parkinson's Disease.
Originally posted to Open Salon
(http://open.salon.com/blog/greg_correll/2012/01/18/found),
it has had over 4,600 views.
It was reprinted by Salon (http://www.salon.com/2012/01/21/parkinsons_diagnosis_open2012/).}

^{Behind me is a pastel I made,
of a pine tree above a lake in the northern rockies.}
^{I am currently unable to draw like this.
But I can dig manure and plant tender seedlings.}

the Bains of existence

Fri, 11 May 2012 02:05:50 -0400

Precision, what morality is, really, that's the issue. Not the fable kind or magic kind or pompous, polemic, or promised kind, but real morality.

Morality means evolving governance over our vanity, and increasing our awareness of other's suffering. You know, human values. Understanding and forebearing so we can work and live together in peace. Prosper.

Willard "Mitt" Romney is a bully. His morality is relative, flexible, self-defining, every moment. He was given too much. It ruined him.

The school days assaults never stopped, really. They became commercial pillaging, worker screwing. All because the Bain Capitalists were swaggering rich fucks who made everyone they encountered their fag blonde bitch. Now this temporary right-fielder Mitt wants to veto regulations and run the Supreme Court line-up. Religious schools will be mandatory, and gay made illegal again –– and they are a generation or two away from just such a grand slam if Bishop Romney becomes President Pope. Pope-voters, that's what we have going on here. Every family wealthy, every man a Cardinal. Romney, the infallible Mormon pontificator...well, maybe not, but he'll have a hell of a security force to back up his proclamations, so who cares if he's fallible?

American conservatives, wake up. This isn't the rich guy who wants you to be rich, too. He's one of the chief assholes who absconded with your sacred relics over the last eighteen years: opportunity, fair play, a square deal, an honest game, the dignity of work––and replaced them with something about maybe a discount plasma screen someday and shut the fuck up, fag. He and his ilk rigged the game so money could be redistributed to the short list, so unions had no unity and overseas workers could be pittanced, the rest of the profit pocketed. Ca-ching! but the sound gets fainter every day for the rest of us.

And he means you, Joe the plumber and John and Jane TiPartay. Not us liberals. He tsks at us because we spoil the narrative, but that's ok, when he takes office it will be surveillance and new Guantanamos, tasers and sprays, cordoned demonstration areas and no-account detentions all over again.

It's all for you, all his pretence and shit-cicle lies, conservative America. If he can fool enough of you into thinking rubes are welcome, too, then he'll get Air Force One and the right to make shipping concessions with Putin that close the Panama Canal. All the world's frieght, across the newly unfrozen Siberian coast. The shorter route. The giant Russian ships are already kingdoms on the sea, without worker safety or union protection. The Bainists give away our industrial might, and our merchant marine. They give away whole industries. Watch that happens, when Willy boy gets here.

Let's not be held down and fleeced of our liberty and pursuit of happiness by Kettlejaw McDumbney and his golfing buddies, shall we?

Congressional Subcommittees, subpoena power, this way please, front and center. Let's start with the mortgage merry-go-round, to slow their flow of cash. Let's tax overseas holdings, personal and corporate, hell, just because, and we'll make it cheaper to keep the jobs and expertise here. Want to keep the wealth you accumulate using our financial system, infrastructure, raw materials, and good will? Then pay an inheritance tax to any public works or defense or tech dev entity of your choice. But pay you must. Vast rapid weath should only permit you a large measure of comfort and opportunity, the rest should be recycled, and all you get is the sacred privilege of shaping positive growth by choosing from hundreds of orgs, individuals, schools, technologies, commodities, or creative arts that improve, replenish and uplift us. It must stop being the pile that never shrinks, for a few greedy assholes, the pyramid of gold on the bleak, hot horizon. Let's vote in some transaction fees. Let's send accountants to the Caymans and Switzerland, with a Marine escort if necessary, and use the loot we find to staff and fund oversight with teeth.

Then let's see some bloody teeth.

a delirium in the undertow

Wed, 9 May 2012 19:05:53 -0400

Every day in every way,
I am a fearful New,
a moment-to-moment
rediscovery of uncertain Now,
and less a measured ration,
the settled-for plate of leftovers,
of all my ordinary Befores.

Who I am now is a discontinuity,
a delirium in the undertow.
I fade away, the I that is I.

Discontinuous has an eerie beauty.
Note this effort, here, these letters,
from the wrong hand.
See evaporous red, how it smoothes
into a mother Cardinal's ocher belly,
in the window feeder.
Hear how the pan tings against the grill top,
as my beloved prepares the soup.

Tomorrow is no more.
I guess it never was.
But I have a knack.
Someone said so.
I remember.

goodbye searchlight venus in the cobalt blue

Thu, 3 May 2012 00:05:17 -0400

All of this,
what we share here,
comes from real human fingertips, bothering to touch keys

as our hearts keep pace: too slow, too fast;
panic and I-want-to-go and I-am-done; tidal inhalations as I type.
I am full of thought. Then I am emptied of language itself.

Letters lie like spilled pins. So: you love me?
This kind of love, the easy, keyboard kind?
OK: I grab you, all you offer, all you spare, with broken hands and

hold tight, tap, tap,
deliberate me, my eye-mind-finger-abstractconcept-tap, more tap,
and you and I are real for a moment

r e a l

and some of us write in turn or just write,
breathe da Vinci's oxygen, refuse Torquemada's torch, and wonder:
did Lot's wife even have a name? We pretend everything.

Or are we mere stories, wanting to be awesome, settling for just collision.
Six degrees of text corrections.
One thin, last polish away from each the other, all of us, every day.

No? We are real?
And this, this here, is our what?
collaborative memoirish serialized nonfiction novel team project?

Are we in fact one shared identity here?
a fluorescing of human meaning and feeling, in aggregate,
with values like cold honey, sweet, stuck, slow to move, right here?

Distilled. Edited. We have greater clarity online, at times.
Galoot-colliding, plain-old reality misses the mark, goes a-kilter.
Sometimes this is better. This tap-tap.

And some rusted holes cannot be pitched. Our artful words alone
reveal the dark turn in us, the failure of damp matches.
Shh: you are safe, still safe, at your desk. Slow your heart.

Are we real?
Mindful, compassionate,
even here?

Would you endure my sleepless twisting?
No: I mean for real real, my slapping shaking hand, jerking arm,
bent jittering foot, all night? tap taptap tap talk to myself half the night

fuck allusion fuck couplets and stanzas fuck if this is any good or why today was sheer misery, my head sideways on my arm while i tried to type, my left hand holding my right hand steady enough to click each key, to meet deadlines. I want my ability back. Fuck consolation. Constant reader I am not a quitter but I am so exhausted by trying to talk, just making loud-enough words empties me by noon, just making words come out in logical order after dinner so tired of this I just want lie down lie down to lie down and not get up o if it wasn't for my wife o wife o my children my bright bell and weighed anchor and un-reefed sail children my regular returning lights on this broken coast my children I would I would I would I would just give up just lie down just one last look at the pure spring green and the sun snapping behind the red oaks and willows then gasp at searchlight Venus in the cobalt blue then go. I just want to go. I just want to go now.

Today I will say anything, pay any price, to make this stop.
No, that's not true. Flip the switch: it's a lie. I have bills to pay.
I live. I will live.

I love you all.
Thank you for bothering to be kind.
Tap, touch, send, quit, shut down.