This journal was born on June 28, 2025, the day I was released from my overnight stay at Kaiser’s Sunset Medical Facility campus to step me down from a prednisone-induced psychotic episode (think acid trip) that came on abruptly after a month’s straight regimen of 40 mg/day, the latest threshold in my prednisone diet with the attempt to protect my left eye from becoming blinded from GCA (Giant Cell Arteritis), the disease that took out my right eye virtually overnight nearly a half year earlier. So logically, that’s where this narrative begins.  

It’s certainly been a long strange trip getting to this point though, and my temporary mania that has unnerved us and our friends since the episode began has unstuck me in time a bit and I keep being thrashed around chronologically.  I’ll have flashbacks or make wild, interesting-to+myself associations that throw me back to many earlier times of my life, including all the way back to my earliest childhood memories back in Charleston, West Virginia.  I’m still coming to grips with how to deal with this in the journal, because on the one hand there’s an actual chronological narrative underlying it that’s more or less my personal life history; but the pieces as they come back to me or associations I discover for the first time during this fantastic crazed period are decidedly non-linear.  I want to capture both aspects of this psychosis here, because it’s unlike any other experience in my life; just as is this entire context within the larger dramatic narrative of Rachael’s and my lives together: What’s our fate in this medical/life saga anyway: blindness, perhaps an end to bike travel and so on, or a short sighted life that ends prematurely at a young age, or; 

Wait, let’s stop right there and note that it’s much too late for this old warhorse to die at a young age.  I’m reminded of something mom was prone to say from time to time - that it was a mild disappointment when she turned 40 and realized she’d missed the chance to be seen as someone who died young with a great potential.

So yes, at 78.5 years of age it’s too late to complain that I haven’t been blessed with a long, full, unreasonably lucky and almost embarrassingly privileged existence already.  I can’t complain about my lot in the great lottery, but still - more, please..

So let’s begin here, in the Autum of 1974 because it is what comes to mind.  I’m in the White Rabbit, a somewhat psychodelic coffeehouse or maybe tavern on State Street in Salem, about a block east of 12rh, a N/S lighted arterial, listening to Grace singing one of my favorite songs at the time:

Carol, Shawn and I were living at the time just a few blocks away in our first owned home, an early 20th century two story affair near the corner of 20th and Chemeketa, directly across the street from McRae Park, a house we got at what for me now feels like the almost mythologically cheap price of $17,000.   just be forewarned that as we go along in the coming months the narrative is going to whip around chaotically in time, because that’s a piece of how I’m experiencing life at the moment; but underlying it is the smooth laminar flow of time’s arrow, relentlessly going forward toward our personal end and beyond.  Many, many gaps to fill, and many more to come.  Hop aboard the train, there’s a wild ride ahead.  I doubt it’s bound for Marrakesh, but who knows?  Stranger things have happened.

Let’s go ask Alice though, I think she’ll know.  And maybe let’s chase along with her and follow the bouncing ball, the fluffy white tail of this cute little guy.  Should be a trip, I imagine.

Heart

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