I should be writing. I should be doing laundry. I should be reading and reviewing. I should be interviewing. What I am doing is shopping for juicers.

In the words of Inigo Montoya, “Lemme ‘splain. No, there ees too much, lemme sum up.” I may have mentioned previously (as I am too lazy to go back and check, I’ll assume I have not) that I am blessed with bipolar disorder: thrill-ride highs and Black Dog lows, mumbly-jumbly mixed episodes where I’m sickly blue but wound tight, a storm cloud brewing angry melancholia . It’s a lot like being played across Cthulhu’s noodly appendages; one minute he’s waving you wildly above his squid face and you’re sailing spread-eagle through the air with your limbs windmilling, and then he’s plunging you into the green-black depths to give you an abyssopelagic swirly (Opening soon: the Cthulhu ride at Seaworld!). As a bonus: in between, he curls you up next to his swampy torso to give you the world’s nastiest snuggle, causing migraines, stomach aches and the brain-chem explosions known as panic attacks. It’s no surprise, then, that a great number of bipolar people commit suicide: throw all of the above into a nice internal soup and how comfortable would life be? For as many as 1 in 12, it’s too much to bear.

(side note: before you worry, I’ve never personally been suicidal. I’m terrified of death and plan to live to 9,000,000 yrs old. As soon as telomerase is ready for human testing, I’m on it–you know, after secretly dosing everyone around me to double check for adverse side effects.) 

Why would anyone with bipolar disorder call it a “blessing”? Well, the relationship between genius, madness and creativity is well documented. No, I’m not calling myself a genius (not today. Ask me in a week or so when my ego returns and I may correct this with a careful application of self-depreciation).   Brilliant, prolific spurts of art have come from nutballs curled up on their cold, unforgiving bathroom tiles, wracked with self-loathing and self-medicating with booze and drugs … mentally unstable yes, but creatively glorious (new commercial for Bipolar Conditioning Shampoo–Shampoo today, Conditioner tomorrow! Smells Like Crazy! “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Creatively Glorious”). Some see pain so frequently and bliss so sharply, that they’re able to express the human experience in fresh and meaningful ways, ways that touch people deeply. I hope this will happen for me someday, that this ride I’m on will pay off, that I’m not just crazy for nothin’. I medicate (so I can be a mom, and a wife, and a not-completely-shitty friend, so I can have a job, and be semi-normal) and I plug away at my keyboard and wait for my turn to experience moments of creative high.

Until then, I deal. Because even with the meds, I have days–small d days, where capital letters have no meaning, where joy tucks away and won’t come out to play, where I mourn though no one has died, where I stare in a trance though no spell has been cast. My thoughts turn strange, swirled up like someone took a bendy straw and slurked-out my senses then stabbed at the frozen bits at the center of my mental milkshake. I’m cold and can’t get warm. I’m numb and can’t find comfort. I don’t want to talk, I don’t want to share. I want to throw up but there’s no food in a stomach whose mouth will not eat.  I’d be upset about all this, if I could lurch past apathy to get to angry. Those small d-days are coming. The early warning system has already been tripped. I hear the Black Dog sniffing around my windows.

The good news is, I’ve been dealt this hand so many times now that I have ways to recognize the early signs and have protocols for handling it. Fall-back positions, if you will. Curling up in a ball on the couch and watching favourite sitcom reruns. Playing video games in which I get to do simple, repetitive things like fishing or gathering (yes, I’m talking about Warcraft again, shaddap–you have your drugs, I have mine). Upping my dose of Epival, or–if I’m getting stuck in OCD loops and can’t break free from scrubbing the tub–a handful of lorazepam. Hot cocoa. Reading something I’ve read a bunch of times, old favourites: Piers Anthony’s Rings of Ice, the pages falling out and held together with paper clips, or Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew, the cover so faded you can barely tell what colour it was.

But step one? Step one is always orange juice.

Pulp. Yes, pulp. Thick, full-pulp orange juice. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s chemical. Vitamin c?  The sugar rush? Could be. Psychological? The taste of summer, and sunshine? Could be. Maybe I accidentally pulled a Pavlov on myself and don’t remember? “Whenever you chew OJ, you will be happy!” Whatever it is, it works. I rarely drink juice, but when I’m sinking fast, OJ helps. However, full-pulp orange juice isn’t nearly as popular here as the low-pulp or (horror of horrors) no-pulp. So I’m shopping for a juicer. I’ll make my own goddamned OJ, and it’ll be so pulpy I’ll have to spoon it out of the glass. Maybe I’ll just peel a bunch of oranges and punch them into a soup and then slurp that.  Hrm …. *imagining Viking Sasquatch coming home to find his wife punching oranges in the Tupperware Fix N’ Mix bowl, then having me committed* …

OK, so a juicer it is. 

(editor’s note: worrying is not permitting here. This is a worry-free zone. Worry Warts will be tossed alive in the gibbet to be pecked to death by crows. Don’t worry about the lack of smut talk, either. It’s merely symptomatic of a loss of interest in, erm, everything … consider it a vacation from the wanton sex kitten, and trust that AJ will be back to her raving pervert self in a few days)