It’s been a while since I’ve experienced a full-blown anxiety attack — a year or so, maybe longer. Well, tonight was the night. Shallow breathing. Claustrophobia. Cold sweats. Free-floating heebie-jeebies. The works. And it’s not over yet. I’ve got it mostly under control, but I can still feel it lurking at my back.

I’m guessing I brought this on myself.

Last night, I made an attempt to accelerate the love –> indifference reaction with a kind of musical purgation therapy. I drowned myself in a list of songs that I knew would unleash a torrent of emotion. It did *that*, all right, but it may also have left me a little too shaken, a little too vulnerable, a little too susceptible to vestigial stimuli from the physical environment I’m forced to inhabit for a little while longer.

Ironically, even as my mind corrodes, my physical condition seems to be improving.

Ah, well. Can’t have everything.

(My tears are falling like rain from the sky. Is it for her or myself that I cry?)

Talk about unhip. Right now, I have a Boston Pops medley of old television western themes playing on my headphones — *Rawhide*, *Bonanza*, *Have Gun Will Travel*, *Maverick*, plus half a dozen others many of you have probably never heard of. I never really watched westerns as a kid; I found cowboys boring. I was always more interested in rocket ships and ray guns and guys with capes who could leap into the air and keep on going. But I always liked the theme songs.

Especially *Bonanza*.

The version recorded by David Rose’s orchestra for the television series is a 39-second revelation when you hear it in digital stereo. The guitar picking by Tommy Tedesco — who, incidentally, was also the guitarist on the the ’60s *Batman* theme — is extraordinary. And there are instruments in there no one could possibly have discerned through the crappy television speakers that piped this ditty into America’s homes in the late ’50s/early ’60s: harmonica, Jew’s harp, even a few notes on a goddamn *flute*. (Or maybe it’s a fife. Or an ocarina. Whatever, it’s unexpected.)

I know. I’m going on and on.

I keep that theme on a very short Winamp playlist with a score of other songs I never tire of hearing. Stuff like Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher”, Steve Allen playing “Gravy Waltz”, the Belle Stars’ version of “Iko Iko”, and “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” by Sounds Orchestral. That last one never fails to bring a tear to my eye. Really. It’s irrevocably linked in my mind with summer nights in 1965, and with friends and times that are gone forever.

I know. I’m still going on and on. I’m working on it.

I ain’t got no matches, but I sure got a long way to go.

Today I was going to write about the mental process of metamorphosing love into indifference and how difficult it’s turning out to be. Sometimes I attribute the difficulty to my advancing years, but it’s not true. It was every bit as hard the first time, and that was almost forty years ago. It’s just taking longer now, because I don’t have the distraction of college classes, Vietnam protests, nubile hippie chicks, and the occasional joint.

Anyway, I’m happy to report that’s it’s not the only thing on my mind.

Over the next ten days or so, I have to write the script for *Hard Time Season 2*, #5. I’m thinking about that, and an odd element I added to the story, a character’s ability to displace the sensation of pain and dump it into the nearest available psychic receptacle — i.e., another person. Sounds crazy, but I’ve seen it done. I’ve even been the other person. That, too, happened almost four decades ago. St. Louis. Biker chick. Long, weird story.

I type the following sentence with extreme caution and trepidation: I’m feeling a little better today. I got my third dose of a very powerful medicine on Wednesday, and I’m wondering if maybe, just maybe, this time it’s going to work.

* My life would be a soap opera if there were anyone else in it. As things stand, it’s more like a soap monologue.

* Beware Foster Farms Turkey Meatballs. I bit into one and broke a tooth or a filling or something. Bits of bone. Or beak, maybe. I’m very pissed off about this. I already need about a grand’s worth of dental work that I can’t afford.

* Caught a few minutes of *Alice’s Restaurant* on television the other day. Couldn’t help thinking this movie must be utterly incomprehensible to anyone born after the time it was made (1969). The clothing, the irreverence toward the military and the police, the condemnation of only *certain* drugs, the treatment of illegal trash disposal as a joke, the depiction of kids who wear no logos and carry no personal electronics — they all combine to make the film seem like a document of some alien culture.

As I just wrote to an editor: “I’m feeling a little better but I’m not out of the woods yet. I knew there was a reason I’ve always hated camping.”

Want to know what else I hate today? “Texas Hold ‘Em.” Not the game. I don’t give a shit about the game. I’m just appalled by the phrase itself. All I can think of when I hear it is George Bush groping his own crotch. The very sound of the words induces existential nausea. Maybe next we can have a game called “Texas Knead ‘Em.” Or just “Lubbock ‘Em, Bitch!”

Isn’t the mind an amusing little toy?

Can anyone give me a brief (one- or two-paragraph) summary of Mark Millar’s version of the Defenders in *Ultimates* Vols. 1 and 2?

(No, there’s no problem with Mark Millar. No, this has nothing to do with suing anybody. It has to do with a potential future project and the wish to avoid accidental similarities.)

I wish I could concentrate.

There’s a post I’m dying to write about how utterly laughable “dark” comics have become. I have this vision of a villain who skins his victims alive, debones them, shatters the bones and uses the splinters as toothpicks with which to eat their eyeballs as hors d’oeuvres while reclining in his epidermally upholstered Barcalounger. Oh yeah, and he wears Dr. Martens.

I can’t help it. I read these comics that try so hard to be so cool and edgy and grim, and I just laugh my ass off. No, no. Wait! I *hack* my ass off with a dull hatchet and feed it to my cats, who upchuck it in the park where innocent children play…

This would be a lot funnier if I could think coherently.

Truly — I haven’t abandoned this blog.

I’ve been ill all week, and though I seem to be improving a bit, I’m still functioning at a *lot* less than optimum.

I’ve been to the doctor. I’m doing what’s necessary to deal with the problem.

I appreciate your concern and your patience.

*Something* good had to come from feeling this shitty. I’ve lost eight or nine pounds in the past week.

For the first time in too many years, I’m under 200.

Probably won’t last long, but I figured I should try to enjoy it.

It’s a strange time. A lot of people I know are in trouble right now — financial difficulties, computer disasters, marital debacles, medical woes.

The gastroenterologist wants to put me on a steroid that makes you inflate like a dirigible. I told her no. I’d sooner take one shot in the arm and go to sleep quietly.

There’s got to be another way, for me and all my storm-tossed friends riding this sea of troubles.

Anybody got a sextant?