9:16 a.m. - Saturday, Jan. 11, 2003
MsLeslie's mean machine
Something else I own is a Eureka Whirlwind Electronic True HEPA, Bagless Cyclonic, vacuum cleaner with a 15� path and indicator light to help ferret out hair and dander so as to focus a full 12 amps of uncompromising cleaning power on it.
I got the sexy basic black. It should be great for picking up guys. No wait.. that�s not right. I meant picking up guys in the sense that a red convertible is good for picking up women. Not that my 12 amps and fifteen inches could hope to literally pick up a guy. I think it COULD lift his bowling ball though.
It has lived mostly behind my bedroom door. Not that I forgot I had it, I just never remembered I had it. Occasionally, I�ve dragged it out and gone over what we euphemistically like to call the �traffic areas�. Mostly, I just meant to get it out. Real soon. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe after the mailman comes. Maybe after Seinfeld. Maybe when I spy a mouse wearing high swamp boots.
I told my prescribing psychiatrist a few days ago that I still have trouble taking my Prozac. It�s not that I�m being non-compliant, a fovorite term around VA centers, it�s just that I seem to be going along just kind of OK, but not great, and I don�t know� I guess I just lose interest or something, and so a day goes by and I forget to take my meds, and then another day goes by, and so on, until I find myself spending days at a time without leaving my apartment and thinking about my life and how it�s pretty close to over now, and how I�m not afraid to die and in fact, I�m ready to die. And so begins the slow swirl that leads into a sucking black hole to nowhere.
I�ve been lucky so far. I get moments of clarity and I think� �what�s changed?� �What was I doing six weeks ago?� It�s only then that I remember that I was coming and going. Cleaning my van, washing my clothes�.. going places and doing things. And then I remember that by the purest of coincidences, I was taking Prozac too. And so I make a new commitment to take the meds every morning no matter what for four weeks before I allow myself to make shall we say, a more �permanent� commitment?
We agreed to double the dose of Prozac on the theory that I�ve been taking just enough to maintain a kind of little depression, but not enough to really do me any good. I came home that day and began my new dosage. I wasn�t sure, honestly, how, if one pill made me think everything was fine enough to start forgetting to take it, two pills could do anymore than make me feel that way twice as fast.
That was a few days ago. A week? Maybe.
All I know is that yesterday, I found myself with that big black cleaning machine running full hot. I had the attachments out; cleaning under the bed, dusting the blinds, moving furniture, clothes, chairs, out of the way of a major sucking operation. My God! You should have seen the hair and the dust I collected in the see-through bin. The red dirt indicator light never so much as flickered, but I think I must have gotten a few pounds of dirt out of there anyway. I was in the middle of an all out cleaning frenzy. I was reminded of a dairy cow.
I worked on a small dairy farm in the early 70s. I milked morning and evening in return for a small house for me and my young wife. Days, I went to college, usually with bits of cow manure still sticking in my red beard. Occasionally in the cold early morning when I went out to get the cows for their milking, I would find one laying on the ground. Mastitis, the bane of a dairy operation. The poor thing�s udder would be infected; red, hot, swollen and tight. Once a cow took to the ground, she would not get up and was soon to die. So I would have to go get farmer Al, and tell him to bring his medicine. He would come out to the field and draw a huge syringe full of adrenaline. Usually, by now, the cow would be in some other world. Not unconscious, but just dreamy. When Al injected her with the adrenaline, she would barely notice. Well� not for about two seconds, anyway. It didn�t take much longer than that before she would kind of shake her head and look at us as if we had just appeared out of nowhere. Then she�d look at the barn and just kind of heave herself to her feet and go running off to be milked. We would, of course, have to milk her ropy curdled milk into the gutter, but that�s not part of this story.
Standing there, looking at the running vacuum cleaner in my hand, I felt something like that cow. Like, �how did I get HERE?!� And this is how I know the Prozac works. It�s never about how I feel. It�s always about what I am doing at any given time. Please, please.. someone help me remember that because I�m really getting tired of discovering it for myself over and over again. Bad publicity to the contrary, Prozac works, at least for me. Maybe I have to write that down and stick it on the fridge with my Thai butterfly magnets. It works, but only if you actually ingest it for cryin� out loud.
OK.. I gotta go now. I see a dust bunny hiding under the table.
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