Today, it seems to be about zip lock plastic bags, and self-sabotage.
Well, first off -- how on earth did I survive before the invention of zip lock bags? They're sort of the Google of storage options -- when in doubt, put it in a zip lock bag. I even found, in one of those recyclable shopping bags of which I also own about a thousand, a zip lock bag filled with... zip lock bags.
So, today, as I was heading to Combat Paper, I slipped my afternoon medication -- two of one blue pill, one of another blue pill -- into a small zip lock bag. So that, at four pm (when I would be somewhere between Branchburg and New Brunswick, I could keep my regimen working operating in a timely fashion.
And, when I arrived fifteen minutes early for the afternoon recital at Christ Church New Brunswick, I looked in the shopping bag, to get my medication... and it wasn't there. I searched the shopping bag as best I could, in the bad light of the parking garage. No meds. I searched my pockets. No meds. And I was at least 25 miles away from another dose.
So, I sat though the recital (wonderful, though I kept feeling that dissociation I've been complaining about), and stopped into the post-recital reception, and helped John reassemble the sanctuary, all the while obsessing quietly about my medication. After almost everyone had left, John and I were invited to go out to dinner with the musicians and their spouses. Like a boob, I pleaded that I had to go home -- to take my medicine. John stayed and had a nice meal. I drove up the turnpike and Garden State, mildly obsessing about the three and a half hour lag in getting those allegedly antidepressant chemicals, stowed in a zip lock bag someplace, out of that bag and into my system.
Home at last, and a thorough search of that overstuffed satchel came up empty. I checked my little daily pill box, and of course, just as I remembered, the pills weren't there. Which meant that I hadn't imagined putting those little pills into the handy zip lock bag.
And here's where the self-sabotage part comes in. Clearly, I did put my medicine in the now-proverbial zip lock bag, so I could take it when it was time to do so. And just as clearly, I.. spaced out? Forgot where I put it? Sent it to Switzerland? Ate the whole thing? Who can tell?
Of course, this isn't the first time something like this has happened -- not by a long shot. It's almost as though I'm two different people -- one who is at least nominally cognizant of what he's doing most of the time, and one who is either utterly oblivious to virtually everything on earth, or who is determined to undermine the other one's sanity and general well-being. It makes me furious.
And the zip lock saga is only the very most recent iteration of this cycle of self-care alternating with self-sabotage. And the self-sabotage isn't strictly limited to losing things in plastic bags -- not by a long shot. Another more debilitating symptom of my predilection for undermining myself is my unfailing pattern of literally blocking my own creative process, by 'accidentally' stacking and piling and otherwise obstructing any of my desperate workplaces or storage areas, access to which would actually make it possible for me to be, in general, more regularly, and effectively productive.
I still don't know where that little pill-filled zip lock bag is. I took the regular dose, three hours late. I'm planning to search the van tomorrow, when it's nice and daylight, to see if the bag somehow migrated from where I (should have) put it. What will be more difficult to handle is the latest upwelling of self-loathing that generally accompanies the latest upwelling of self-sabotage.
God, how I hate it. I often end up screaming at myself -- Whose side are you on, anyway? The answer to that one seems still to be forthcoming.
Maybe I've stuck it in a zip lock bag someplace.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
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