Week 10 -- Double Digits!

For the past couple of weeks I've been doing pretty well. "Pretty well" is relative, of course. It means I haven't had to punch out and lay down on the couch in the middle of most days. I am blessed to work from home and can do that now and then. Nobody on a conference call knows whether I'm laying down or not.

I have noticed that I'm pretty foggy. That's a fact that was not lost on a project manager at work when I asked him a couple of questions I already knew the answer to. Yesterday I'd have sworn that my wife came in and talked with me.

"Where'd your mother go?" I asked my daughter.

"She's working late today."

Sheesh! I was recalling a conversation from the previous day. It's all running together.

Emontionally, this is a strange time. I caught myself getting really angry over something trivial last week. I realized I was being stupid in time to stop being too much of an idiot. It seems like my emotions are right on the surface. I wonder how much of this is chemical and how much is circumstantial. I'm also cursed to work at home. This is like house arrest. All I need is an ankle bracelet.

My son and I are going to the range tomorrow to shoot a round or two of skeet. Saturdays I'm usually pretty good until mid- to late afternoon. I need the outing.

It's shot time. In Frank Herbert's epic Dune the main character is tested with something called a gom jabbar. "It only kills animals," says the tester. The gom jabbar is a poison needle that the tester holds to the lead character's neck. As long as he keeps his hand in a box, the tester doesn't stick him. "What's in the box?" he asks? "Pain." He puts his hand in and thinks his hand is being burned away, yet he has to endure. To do the instinctive -- the animal -- thing and avoid the short-term pain is death.

There's a parallel here. As long as I keep sticking myself -- and taking the little blue pills (shudder) -- I have a pretty good chance at a normal life. Skipping meds proves that I'm not smart enough to be a human.

So with that thought, I'm off to endure another round with my gom jabbar.