The doctor wanted me to keep a mood journal

So I have. And it's a wee bit disturbing...

Tuesday Dec 11 feeling of vertigo/dissociative experience

Friday Dec 14 feeling that horrible things were going to happen, panicking, then anger

Monday Dec 17 near panic attack at piano

Thursday Dec 20 anger then fingernails/knife on left arm, 1/2 Klonopin

Monday Dec 24 nightmare with There Is A Hell written on wall in blood, fires, dismembered bodies twitching in cages hung from ceiling

Tuesday Dec 25 nightmare with spitting out puddles of blood, being attacked, screaming, dissociative feeling, trying to slap self into waking up after realizing it was a dream. 

Wednesday & Thursday Dec 26-27 Yelling in my brain for hours, fighting with itself about wanting and not wanting to be dead, plus song lyrics and random other things, then about 2:30pm on Thursday it shut up and it's been peaceful all evening, much improved mood.

Somehow it all looks a lot worse written down, which is kind of strange. Maybe because then I can't forget how rapidly all these things happen. Time seems to blur together when I'm in a horrible mood, and all the days melt together into a black slurry.

I felt a lot better after the end of that brain-yelling business yesterday, and I feel positively healthy today. It's like the badness just evaporated for the time being. My arm is healing up, and everything looks much brighter for me. Yay! I wish this awful shit would just go away, but after 32 years of it I am not expecting it to do that anytime soon. Anyway, it's all a lot more manageable with Patrick around. I'm grateful for him.

This weekend we might see about going to get some trekking poles and packs. Patrick has quite a few gig checks coming in, and we want to be able to go hiking even when it's soggy. I want to climb up to Camp Muir by the end of next summer, so we need to go on a bunch of conditioning hikes first in order to get in good enough shape to not murder ourselves going up from Paradise.

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The Book of Lost Memories

Those of you who've been around here a while know that I'm a big fan of the Silent Hill franchise. Well, the first three games, to be exact. The movie wasn't terrible. It wasn't great, what with including miners and Pyramid Head where he doesn't belong, a whole bunch of people in what's supposed to be a mostly empty town.... but I digress. I was first drawn to these games because they looked like my nightmares. I could finally examine with waking eyes the environments I had to try to survive almost every night. After getting to know them, though, I began to enjoy them more for their own stories. And so, an obsession was born!

See the colors here? Same in the book I found.

 Knowing that, it should come as no surprise whatsoever that when I was in Powell's Bookstore in Portland a couple weekends ago and found a journal in the rare book room that looked for all the world straight out of Silent Hill 3, I had to buy it. In Silent Hill, there are basically three different planes of existence: the normal world, foggy world, and the Otherworld. The normal world is exactly what it sounds like. Other people are around, nothing is out of the ordinary. In the foggy world, almost everyone is gone and a few suspicious things are littered around, like significant newpapers and items for the protagonist. There are also a few monsters in evidence. ("Monsters? They look like monsters to you?") The Otherworld is what people think of when they think of Silent Hill. It's a dark, gritty place with a goodly number of creatures out of nightmares and an aesthetic that can be best described by combining rust, blood and black pits. This is what most resembled my nightmares, and what I found fascinating. Click for larger pictures below.

To me, with the exception of the flowers on the spine and the decorative gilding (both of which I also like), this book almost completely captures the feel of the Otherworld (although to be fair there isn't any blood on it, which is just as well). Accordingly, I decided to fill it up with my nightmares, snippets of writing I found here and there, art that makes me feel open to dreams, etc. I had better never lose this, since I'm sure that any person who doesn't know what's going on with it will think its author quite insane. Everything that isn't a dream or art is writing either from other crazy people or from games with crazy people in them, me when I was either depressed or manic, and so on.

I've been trying to compile items that I think will help me with my ongoing quest to write songs, and I had an idea for an album based around my dreams. I have all this material, collected over more than three decades, and I might as well use it. This project is not going to be done any time soon. I have only just begun studying songwriting and harmony, scoring, and so forth. I still have many pages left to compile of memories before I even try to begin crafting songs out of them. I expect it will be a multi-year project, so don't get your hopes up for anything in the near future.

I wanted to give my book of inspiration an appropriate name, so I thought of Silent Hill and remembered the Book of Lost Memories, which is one of four items needed to attain the Rebirth ending for Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams (the others are the Tome of Crimson Ceremony, the White Chrism, and the Obsidian Goblet). How very fitting...the Book of Lost Memories it is.

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Melancholia in the sunshine (fixed by Gaga)

I'm feeling pretty down and tired today. I'm sad about old things, from years ago. And it's irritatingly bright outside. This is the month and a half or so out of the year that we have blazing sunshine inflicted on us. It usually has the opposite effect on me as with most people. I always feel exposed and vaguely frightened with that cloudless blue up above, and the sun glaring down. No clouds to protect us or cover up the vast expanse of sky. It's better at night, when you see all the stars in the sky and the sun isn't hurting your eyes any longer.

I think after work I'll open up the house to get some air and then go hide in my darkened bedroom again like I did last night. Much more comforting than being out under the pounding sun. It's supposed to get up into the 80s this weekend here, and while that isn't very hot for those of you poor souls living in places with temperatures like 114F, it is very hot for us here. People here start dying when we get into the 90s. The vast majority of us don't have air conditioning and aren't acclimated to heat, so old people and babies succumb when it gets too hot. Much like Europe, if I remember correctly.

I can't wait for fall.

Update: Gaga made me feel better. It's hard to feel down when you have this to laugh at:

Gaga: The Anti-Depression Med

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