One of us is a bit twitchy and one of us is a Bitch Kitty

But only one of us can blame our issues on our bipolar meds.

In which I whine like an entitled first-world child

(Self-indulgent navel gazing ahead. Plus words. Lots and lots of words. With a tinge of judgey misanthropy. Plus some legitimate stuff so I don't come off as some asshole judgey misanthrope. If I've already bored you by this point, you're gonna be hating my by the time I get to the closing parenthesis. Assuming I ever get there. I'm clearly in a cranky mood though, so I can't help you. Or is it won't? Anyway, abandon hope all ye who read from here. You've been warned.)

• Everyone at Kohl's tonight was either moving too slowly, chatting in front of the extra-large clearance shirts so I couldn't get to them or stupidly looking in the wrong direction as they bumped their carts into me.
• Stupidly.
• Plus Kohl's didn't have anything I wanted. At least that I could get to.
• The cute guy who waited to hold the door for me at Barnes & Noble and circled the CD racks with me and ended up right in front of me at the checkout told the clerk that the CD he was buying was for his wife.
• Dinner at Cheddar's was accompanied by a full 30 minutes of bloody-murder baby screams to my right and a bellowing right-wing redneck hawking up gallons of phlegm and emitting an almost visible effluvium of cigarette stench in the booth behind me.
• I got a Facebook memory reminder this morning with my dismayed post about just having shattered my iPhone screen. Which means I've been using and squinting through and whining about my shattered screen for a whole year. The Verizon guy tonight told me I had to get the screen fixed before he could do anything related to my warranty, so I let out a long dramatic sigh and reluctantly decided to suck it up and give up my phone for 24+ hours to finally get it fixed and I drove over to the fully lit screen-fix-it store just as my phone clock ticked over to 7:01 pm. Guess why I'm telling you this. Just guess.
• Aside from a few blips, I've had at least three full weeks of good and engaged and productive and present and functional and relatively happy days. Which is an almost unprecedented record over the last 4-5 years. So the new bipolar med cocktail that initially made me black out and sent me lacerated and bloody to the ER seems to be actually working. But the uncomfortable and frustrating and embarrassing side effects have steadfastly dug in their heels, and I spent the morning wiping miles of spider webs off my face and loudly chomping on invisible gum. And trying everything in my power to sit the goddamn fuck still like a normal fucking adult.
• Plus I seem to have stopped peeing. Both in frequency and volume. Plus I just told you about my pee problems. Which just compounds the embarrassment. Nice going, me.
• Our lying, petulant, willfully ignorant man-boy of a horrifying national embarrassment of a president gave a morally and intellectually infuriating press conference packed with accusations and excuses and insults and tantrums and laughably implausible generalizations yesterday that continues to send shockwaves through the media and the educated class and the reasonable voices that he's well into his second year of attacking relentlessly with a conspicuous and alarming and desperately pre-emptive level of defensiveness. The last four weeks have made my family and my ex and many of my friends almost physically ill with worry and discouragement and deep, profound concern. And yesterday—when I heard a staunch man-boy supporter sum up the press conference with a thoughtfully nuanced "he sure told 'em"—it finally broke me too.
• I have so many shoes and shirts and shorts and pants and belts and socks and probably layers of flattened desiccated cats piled up in my bedroom that I don't even know how or where to begin sorting and inventorying and letting go of any of it. Sometimes it makes me feel all cozy when I climb into bed surrounded by jumbled mountains of all my stuff. But mostly it makes me feel paralyzed with panic and shame.
• All my real-life and Facebook crushes are pairing up and getting engaged and getting married and are mostly straight anyway. Fuck.
• When I blacked out and cracked the tile floor with my face last December, I bit most of the way through my lip. It's still swollen and hard like it's healed as scar tissue and I have a difficult time drinking through a straw or eating without getting food all over my lips.
• Hey, paired-up and engaged and married and mostly straight anyway crushes who've been bored enough to read this far! How ravishingly sexy am I right now? You should date me! It'd be fun!
• Actually, dumping all this whiny shit out of my head and posting it here after everybody's bedtime where it probably won't be seen has alleviated most of my crankiness. Thanks, Internet!
• Except I'm still furious and incredulous and devastated about the petulant, inarticulate man-boy.
• And frustrated and embarrassed by the spider webs and invisible gum and whatever fresh indignities tomorrow has in store for me.
• Plus Bitch Kitty will sleep contentedly on my clean laundry but won't exist in the same room with me unless she can draw blood or crush spirit. And sometimes it just quietly destroys a little bit of me.

Despite what your lying eyes might tell you ...

I am not an internationally famous pout model. I'm a PERSON. And I deserve to be treated as such. Except for apparently a few more weeks while what remains of my stand-up-and-black-out-and-crack-the-floor-tile-with-my-face scars continue to dig in their little scar heels and slow the healing process to a glacial pace. Fortunately after three weeks they continue to itch and sting an creep creepily and all spidery into my visual periphery. But now they're also—and I swear I'm selecting my words judiciously so I don't get all graphic and horrifying here—more stickey-outey on my face and tiny sections of them are clearly starting to follow gravity but with a stated mission to never let go—how am I doing so far?—but I still can't be a big boy and bravely pull them off like a band-aid because—and I'm sorry but there's really no delicate way to put this—my absorbable stitches haven't finished (or even started?) absorbing and the damn things are still stitched to my face. 

And you can open your eyes now; I'm done writing about gross things. I think.

So I'm trying not to be all-bipolar-all-the-time because despite my long and verbose and thoroughly documented history of being all bipolar all the time I'm actually fucking sick of it: the free-falls to despondency, the impermanent triumvirates of normalcy and clarity and energy, the endless and clearly more and more arbitrary attempts at changing meds that eventually and predictably fail one after another after another, the new wrinkle that I'm apparently apt to stand up too fast and black out and crack the tile floor with my face, and the endless worry and frustration and exacerbation I cause my family and friends as I cycle through all of the above and ultimately end up sleeping through life. So I'm actively trying not to think about it. But while we're here ... speaking of all of the above, I'm (I hope) finally emerging from a rough four days of hairpin ups and downs and canceled plans and missed uncling and a weekend where I've barely left my bed and never left the house all as a prelude to point out my soaring bedhead. Honest! I just broke my promise to myself to drastically minimize my bipolar talk with the honest intention of providing a few words of context beyond "I haven't showered all weekend" to help you laugh at my lofty locks with a more informed sense of derision. You're welcome.

And you can open your eyes now; I'm done wallowing in emotional and tonsorial self-pity. I think.

Actually, no. In the last few months, four—four!—guys I've had long-ago, too-shy-to-ever-tell-them, clearly unrequited crushes on have announced their happy gay marriages on here. I haven't seen or even thought about some of these guys in over a decade. I didn't even realize we were Facebook friends. And I'm not sure what to do with all these weird, long dormant emotions these four rapid-fire revelations have awakened. And I'm not sure why I'm being all Duckie and weighing down this already ponderous post with this information except to get it out of my head. Which I guess I've done.

And you can open your eyes now; I'm done brain-dumping all the vaguely whiny, I-don't-know-what-to-do-with-all-of-this emotional noise in my head. For realz.

So it's a relatively quiet night here at the Stigers Home for Bitchy Cats. Mom is reading, sometimes aloud to my mostly blind dad; Sibelius' watery, disciplined, asymmetrical, shamelessly triumphant Second Symphony is on repeat in the background; Dad just accidentally stepped on the cat, an incident I will be neither amused nor disquieted by; I downloaded a Gaither Vocal Band southern gospel song for my folks and now iTunes is trying to sell me all the desperate tatters of the inauguration entertainment lineup; we're all waiting for the dire-warninged but now rudely late snowpocalypse that has kept everyone pre-emptively hiding in our houses all day; and one of us is obsessively typing a seven-mile Facebook post on his shattered iPhone screen. But I won't say who.

And you can open your eyes now. Or close them with me; I'm going to bed now so I can get up at six for a much-needed ass-whupping by my trainer. And I'm not taming my hair for her.

My little New Year's Eve gathering fell through tonight

So I'm sitting home alone (well, my parents are snoring contentedly in their bedroom down the hall) by the light of the tree with Bitch Kitty glaring at me from across the room and a LOT of oh-my-god-these-are-AMAZING Hy-Vee fudge brownies on the counter. And if you don't live in a Hy-Vee state, it pains me to tell you this but you have wasted your entire life eating really shitty brownies.

But from my safe, cozy—albeit admittedly lonely—perch on our extremely comfortable couch in these last hours of an emotionally contentious year where our country seems to have lost a disproportionately high number of beloved celebrities but I landed a job I love in practically every way and where I have continued to ramp up and ramp down and suffer side effects and endure withdrawal effects of countless psychotropics in my ongoing struggle to beat bipolar depression but in the process my love and appreciation and respect for my family have grown stronger and deeper and more joyous and hopefully more reciprocal, I can't help but harbor grave concerns about the coming year.

I'm concerned to the point of being terrified of the pending horrors wrought from the blind nationalism and the arrogant ignorance of the inchoate and yet already alarmingly destructive Trump kakistocracy. I worry that the gloriously revolutionary American Experiment will fall way too early in its young life at the hands of a predatory, self-serving demagogue who stupidly let himself become a political puppet in a game of nuclear chicken that could precipitate national, international or global destruction. I also worry greatly that our educational systems and standards and our national and local infrastructures and our economy and our safety and even our civility will collapse in the process or the aftermath.

On a personal scale, I worry that friendships will end and loved ones will die and control will collapse and accidents will cripple and ideologies will interfere and dreams will fail and fortunes both monetary and emotional will fall and I know these worries are universal and though they can easily isolate us they can also unite and inspire and ultimately augment us, but they still compel me to hold my family and friends close and keep my guard up and my emotions girded and my world as calm and controlled and constant as I humanly can.

So much can change in 365 days. Three years ago I wrote international ad campaigns for a prestigious agency in Chicago. Two years ago I was in a locked psych ward, so pharmaceutically emotionless I couldn't even cry. One year ago I was somehow holding onto a job I wasn't even good at but I was apparently charming or earnest or possibly overlookable enough that I survived months of staff reductions. Now I'm proudly living with—and providing reciprocal care for—my septuagenarian parents, working happily as an online product copywriter for a gloriously high-end international retailer, regularly singing and dancing and acting and sometimes just smiling and waving in shows for three different theater companies, discovering the unimaginable joy and love and pride of playing uncle to two intelligent and kind and talented and responsible and remarkably tall young adults who thankfully possess an inherent and reciprocal and mutually straight-faced understanding of my meandering and maybe-just-a-little-bit-perhaps-over-the-line sense of humor, and still clinging confidently to the hope that I will soon find the right psychotropic cocktail to regulate my bipolar depression plus find a boyfriend who loves theater and Hy-Vee brownies and running and tattoos and underpants jokes and freakishly conspicuously indulgently long sentences and living in Cedar Rapids where hopefully our entire families are.

So I face this new year with great but guarded trepidation tempered by a glorious spectrum of hope and joy and gratitude and love and oh-my-god too many shoes and a fervent hope that the coming months are filled with peace and diplomacy and respect and common sense and a governance guided by a deep, profound, nuanced, reciprocal knowledge and understanding of who we are, what is fair, how we're responsible, and the selfish and bellicose and irreversible and potentially catastrophic options we should never even pursue.

And—you're welcome—to end this post and start this year on a far less cataclysmic note, I can report with complete confidence that (at the very least) the first months of 2017 will be filled with staggeringly long, shamelessly self-indulgent, thesaurusly verbose, hopefully thoughtful, possibly funny, relentlessly selfie-enhanced posts.

And since tonight's get-together didn't happen, the dawn of our new year will also be filled with Hy-Vee brownies. Lots and lots of Hy-Vee brownies.

Happy New Year, everyone.

The big picture

It's 11:30 pm and in this slightly dark and judiciously cropped tree selfie, Christmas at our house looks postcard-perfect. But in reality there are boxes and bills and blankets and coats and wet shoes and easily 20 bottles of meds and folding tables and stuff to clean up sick-cat barf and plates of half-eaten cookies and basically something that needs time and attention on every counter, table and square foot of floor space in sight. It's exhausting and defeating just to look at. And none of us is sure how it got this bad.

But in the big picture, it's small stuff. And it really doesn't matter. I moved home two years ago in part to take care of my dad. And I'm thrilled to do it. I drove him to two doctor appointments today and helped get him changed for an X-ray and we drove to the hardware store to get him a rubber tip for his cane and we had lunch and got some Christmas stuff and took our kitty—who is actually pretty sick—to the vet, where he proudly told the doctor that HIS dad had been a vet, and it was an honor and a joy that I'm here to take care of him. And tomorrow we start all over again with two more doctor appointments and more Christmas shopping and probably lunch and I'm going to remember and savor every moment of it because when he's no longer here I can look back and say "I took care of my dad. And we had lunch. And we laughed at dumb stuff. And he told me stories about my relatives and what cool old buildings used to stand where in the city and where he and Mom lived before I was born and which of his friends who've died he really misses and how he hates to be blind and I took care of my dad."

And that street runs two ways. I've been on a two-year emotional roller coaster of bipolar highs and debilitating lows and lengthy hospitalizations and miserable, crushing side effects of taking and withdrawing from maybe 30 psychotropics (which, all things considered, I still think is a really cool word) and quite literally sleeping my life away as we try to find a med combination that doesn't make me unstable and embarrassingly fidgety and relentlessly, overwhelmingly drowsy. And my mom and dad have been my super-advocates all along, organizing my ever-EVER-changing meds, making up a bed for me on the couch on the days I can barely crawl home from work, making sure my insurance is up to date and I'm not missing a dizzying array of doctor appointments with a dizzying array of doctors and making me pot roast and Jell-O with fruit in it and in general just being awesome.

But we're not special; millions of families are facing millions of medical problems, some easier than ours and some crushingly harder. And millions of families also have messy houses, especially around the holidays. And there's a glaringly obvious metaphor in there that can be interpreted in positive or negative ways. For me, it's all good. We'll get the house picked up and back in order soon. My mom will eventually forgive me for announcing to all of Facebook that we live in pestilence and squalor. I'll get my meds—and my brain—straightened out. Mom and Dad will or won't get sicker or better and I'll be right here to take care of them.

And my slightly dark and judiciously cropped tree selfie might not show our struggles and messes, but it totally captures all the warmth and joy and love and—I'm sorry—really ugly ornaments in this house, in this family, in this world of uncertainty and unfairness and hope and fierce, unbreakable devotion.

This is the face of near-catastrophic bipolar depression

This is also a brain dump of a blog post that may or may not be a shameless plea for affirmation or an embarrassingly disjointed documentation of my current inability to generate linear thought. I haven't decided yet. Because I haven't written it yet. And I don't know where to start.

I fell over getting out of my car this morning at work. I opened the door, grabbed the frame to pull myself up and immediately lost all sensation of the direction of gravity, spinning to my left, rolling against the rear door and hitting my head on the door frame on my way to the ground. I've felt a little off-balance all week since my doctor doubled one of my meds on Monday but this was the first time I went full-pavement.

My right hand is slowly losing its ability to function. Last week I couldn't push the button on the key fob to unlock my car door. Last weekend I couldn't hold on to a tube of chap stick hard enough to pull the cap off. Last night I couldn't pick anything up with my chopsticks at the restaurant where we celebrated my brother-in-law's birthday. This morning—after realizing I was plummeting faster than I could manage to control at work—I couldn't pull the key out of the ignition when I got home.

I have no idea if any of this is related to being bipolar, changing meds or something entirely unrelated, but it's the easiest to explain.

My depressive episodes are mostly about fogginess (I get lost physically and mentally, I forget stuff like things I promised to do or why my parents are gone for the night) and abject despondency (everyone I know hates me, I don't care if I live or die). Fortunately, I've been doing this a long time and I can look at it all objectively—no matter how acute or systemic or visceral or urgent the feelings are—and know with slightly foggy certainty that none of it is real and it will all pass and if I can just find a blanket and a dark corner and a couple of uninterrupted hours I'll be emotionally drained but highly functional.

I'm a 48-year-old man who after a 15-year advertising career in Chicago moved home to Iowa ostensibly to care for his blind father but more as it turns out to be cared for as a mentally ill person by his parents. On paper, I hate everything in that sentence. In reality, I'm currently sitting in the glow of the Christmas tree with both my parents and Bitch Kitty and I'm so thrilled I get to share so much of my adult life with them and that alone helps me rebound when I spiral out of control.

It has taken me over two hours of intense concentration to write this. But I'd already napped for five hours and writing this gave me something relatively constructive to do instead of stewing in self-pity. I know I probably spend way too much time on social media talking about being bipolar but it helps me clear my head and organize my thoughts and in some ways make myself accountable for my own mental health. And it's even helped me bond with a number of you who have confided in me about your own struggles with mental illness. You call me brave. I call myself unfiltered. But if any of us finds value in my ramblings, it helps compensate for the fact that I've probably scared away every eligible gay man in Linn and Johnson counties.

600 paragraphs ago, I said I didn't know where this post was going. Almost three hours later, I don't have a clear recollection of where it wandered to wind up here. And I'm not going to proof or edit it so when I emerge from this episode I can maybe see how the depressed me kicks through the brambles and strings together thoughts. In the mean time, I have my blanket and dark corner and I'm finally sleepy again. For those of you still with me, thank you for your friendship and support and kind words. And good-night.