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

Bullying, as it turns out, can literally make your brain change for the worse.   This is how bullies extract their toll on the bullied forever…

The Brain: The Switches That Can Turn Mental Illness On and Off

This month’s column is a tale of two rats. One rat got lots of attention from its mother when it was young; she licked its fur many times a day. The other rat had a different experience. Its mother hardly licked its fur at all. The two rats grew up and turned out to be very different. The neglected rat was easily startled by noises. It was reluctant to explore new places. When it experienced stress, it churned out lots of hormones. Meanwhile, the rat that had gotten more attention from its mother was not so easily startled, was more curious, and did not suffer surges of stress hormones.

The same basic tale has repeated itself hundreds of times in a number of labs. The experiences rats had when they were young altered their behavior as adults. We all intuit that this holds true for people, too, if you replace fur-licking with school, television, family troubles, and all the other experiences that children have. But there’s a major puzzle lurking underneath this seemingly obvious fact of life. Our brains develop according to a recipe encoded in our genes. Each of our brain cells contains the same set of genes we were born with and uses those genes to build proteins and other molecules throughout its life. The sequence of DNA in those genes is pretty much fixed. For experiences to produce long-term changes in how we behave, they must be somehow able to reach into our brains and alter how those genes work.

Neuroscientists are now mapping that mechanism…

This is interesting on a number of accounts.   Firstly, as a gay man, it concerns me how the question of nature verses nurture is dealt with, as it has been a trip point in the culture war for decades now.   And as it seems to be turning out more and more, it’s a combination of both.   The story here is that genes may say one thing, but the effects of the environment, the physical environment, you grow up in, can overrule them all the same…

Two families of molecules perform that kind of genetic regulation. One family consists of methyl groups, molecular caps made of carbon and hydrogen. A string of methyl groups attached to a gene can prevent a cell from reading its DNA sequence. As a result, the cell can’t produce proteins or other molecules from that particular gene. The other family is made up of coiling proteins, molecules that wrap DNA into spools. By tightening the spools, these proteins can hide certain genes; by relaxing the spools, they can allow genes to become active.

How this plays out in terms of one’s sexual orientation fascinated me less then this…

…the influence of environment doesn’t end with childhood. Recent work indicates that adult experiences can also rearrange epigenetic marks in the brain and thereby change our behavior. Depression, for example, may be in many ways an epigenetic disease. Several groups of scientists have mimicked human depression in mice by pitting the animals against each other. If a mouse loses a series of fights against dominant rivals, its personality shifts. It shies away from contact with other mice and moves around less. When the mice are given access to a machine that lets them administer cocaine to themselves, the defeated mice take more of it.

Something, probably my body’s low tolerance to intoxicants, has kept me thankfully clear of addiction.   But I know its temptations.   There are days when I think if I could only drug myself out my my misery, life would be so much better.   But my body simply won’t let me do that.   I have no escape.   Well…I have one.   But it’s one I’ve not reached for.   So far.

I have the job of my dreams.   A house of my own I never in my wildest dreams ever thought I’d have.   My dream come true car.   And I am miserable.   Single, lonely and miserable.   If you don’t have love, nothing else matters.   You can be rich.   You can be living in the lap of luxury, and if you have no one, you have nothing and you know it.   You will always know it.   And at some level I have always known my brain was stacked against me in that struggle.

I was brutalized in grade school.   It was only   by shear luck that I lived in a tiny neighborhood that was diverted to this little expansion high school in a well to do neighborhood and away from my tormentors that allowed me to have at least a good final three years of grade school.   Woodward was paradise compared to my Jr. High School years and my elementary school years were only slightly less brutal.   When I wasn’t getting beaten up by the other kids, I was getting emotionally battered by the teachers, nearly all of whom dumped me in the problem child category, simply because mom was a single divorced mother.   The few in those days who actually took an interest in me and gave me a chance to learn have always had my eternal gratitude.

Woodward, I have said time and again, was paradise…absolutely the best years of my school life.   But even paradise could not undo the damage.   It wasn’t until my senior year that I finally started peeking out of the shell my tormentors had locked me into.   And by then it was, really, too late to start figuring out that dating and mating thing.   And besides, I was a gay kid, and it was 1971.

And I’m 57 now, and still single, and if anything surprises me it’s that I’m still alive.   I really shouldn’t be.   I honestly don’t know why I am still alive.   It’s your own fault Bruce.   We had to do it to you.   You were so weird we had to.   It’s your own fault Bruce.   You need to get out more.   Friends don’t help friends find a lover, they rub it in that it’s their own fault.   People who look like that, want people who look like that.   The more things change, the more they stay the same.   Why am I still here?

[Edited a tad…]