I’m stressing more and more lately, and not just about the economy and the future of JWST and my livelihood.   Every little thing it seems adds to the stress level, every bit of news I read, every little thing around the house I see that needs fixing or working on…little worries about bills I shouldn’t have to worry about because at the present time I am making more then enough to pay my bills and there is plenty left over to plan the next vacation with…every little ache and pain, even though I just got the best possible result on the colonoscopy…everything.

I am a little tightly wound ball of stress lately.   Though nicotine has been a stress blanket I haven’t smoked a cigar in months, worried that my body just can’t take it anymore.   Though a drink or two will calm me down I haven’t had anything for days because if I so much as touch glass to lips in my present state I’ll be convinced I’m on the road to alcoholism.   So I just do what I have always done when I’m completely stressed out.   I sit on it and just wait for it to either go away or kill me.   So far it hasn’t killed me.   Probably, it is making me crazy.   Although some friends from my grade school days would say I’ve always been crazy.

Yesterday I indulged in something I know relieves stress without drugs: I took a drive around the Maryland countryside.   I love to drive.   I didn’t spend the money on a Mercedes-Benz because I wanted a status symbol.   Driving is a favorite pastime.   Just get in the car and go find a road I haven’t been down yet and see what’s there.   The lovely rolling green hills of the Piedmont are very relaxing to drive through and after some miles of it the stress began to loosen its grip on me.   I could feel it letting go.   It was nice.

I turned for home and got back on the Interstate, heading back into the city.   I wasn’t in a hurry and so I just sat in the far right lane at about the speed limit while to my left everyone else was zooming past me, on their furious way to somewhere.   I didn’t care.   This was a section of the Interstate I have driven hundreds, if not thousands of times before….in a part of the Baltimore suburbs I used to live in, and still frequently go shopping in because it is so easy to get to on the Interstate.     Traffic was light, and I was relaxing.

Suddenly in the rear view mirror I saw a Lexus blasting toward my car and I swear it nearly clipped me on the passenger side rear bumper.   It blew past…figure it was doing a good fifty mph faster then I was going and I was doing the sixty-five mph speed limit… and into the deceleration lane of the exit I was coming up on.   Scared the steaming shit out of me.

So I catch my breath and…

…and suddenly I don’t remember where the fuck I am.   I look around.   I don’t recognize anything I see.   I’ve been on this section of highway a zillion times before and it feels all of a sudden as though I have never seen any of it before in my entire life.   I don’t know where I am.   I don’t recognize anything.   I don’t recognize anything. I am in a strange place and nothing looks familiar.   Nothing.   I look around for a reference point.   There is nothing here I recognize.   Nothing at all.

My logical analytical mind is still functioning enough to get me out of it.   I pull a trick I’ve done ever since grade school when a teacher would catch me daydreaming…

…and what would you say the answer to that is Mr. Garrett?

Daydreaming doesn’t cause deafness.   You’re still hearing what the teacher is saying, you’re just not paying attention.   So, and quickly, I would mentally walk it back to the last thing I remember hearing, and then quickly walk it forward until I get to the question I am being asked, and then give an answer, usually pissing off the teacher who thought for sure that time they’d caught me day dreaming.

Where the hell am I???

So I walk it backward to the last thing I remember, which was getting on the Interstate.   The rest pops back into view.   Ah…right…I’ve just passed the Padonia Road exit and some jackass nearly hit me… And then it’s like the visual memory suddenly pops back also, and everything looks familiar again.

That has never happened to me before.   And so naturally I begin stressing out that I’m getting Alzheimer’s.   My brain is going.   I can feel it Dave…I can feel it…

I stress about it all night and all morning today.   Then while I’m discussing something with my current and former branch managers I do something I almost never do, because I don’t like bothering my co-workers, and especially my bosses, with my private worries, and particularly my private health worries.   I tell them what happened.   I ask them what they think is happening to me.   Has that ever happened to you?   Is it time for me to see the doctor about my memory?

And one of them says oh yes, that’s happened to my brother and you hear it happening to people all the time because of stress.   Stress does that he tells me.   Don’t worry, it isn’t age.   A lot of stress can make you loose the zone and you forget where you are for an instant and what you’re doing.   It happens.   It’s stress.   Your brain isn’t rotting…brains just do that when enough stress is applied.

In other word’s it’s expected behavior under certain conditions.   I hear this and the worry just melts away.   The relief for a moment is overwhelming.   Yes…yes, that makes sense!   And…I’ve read about that elsewhere.   Yes!   It’s kind of like when you get smacked in the head hard enough you loose a fragment of short term memory.   Stress does adversely impact memory.   I’ve read that.   The explanation makes sense.

I’m a geek.   I’ll probably dig around a bit more and research it some until I’m satisfied and can put it to rest.     But in the instant of that worry melting away I saw something else, something I’d seen before often enough, but this one time it really hit me.

Because, really, I”m not under an unbearable amount of stress all things considered. What’s bad is the level even minor things can build up to with me.   And that has been the case, for nearly all of my adult life, and particularly since Mom passed away.   Stress doesn’t go away for me like it does most other people.   I can’t manage it as well as other people can and do.   Because nearly every moment of my non-working life I am alone.   It’s not the stress, it’s the solitude.   It’s a lifetime spent in emotional solitude.

We are not solitary critters…we are social beings.   We need our packs, our tribes, our families.   We need most of all, in our adult lives, that other half.

It’s not the big issues.   It’s all the little day to day ones. All the little minor day to day things that happen and get discussed and hashed out in the casual chit-chat of lovers.   All of that just grows and grows inside of me and I can’t really stop it from doing that all by myself.

If only I had friends who cared that Bruce shouldn’t be so alone.   If only I’d grown up in a world that understood that some boys like boys and that’s okay as long as they find the right boy.   If only.

Oh well…     Artists are supposed to be crazy anyway.   It’s what makes us creative, and our works valuable long after we have died miserable and alone.

Self Portrait with Better Medium
1982