manic depression
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It’s not the coffee
I am Captain Cortisol, The Amazingly Electric Man I start my day with the Heebie Jeebees and coffee. Imagine the visible veins in your skin as wiring now run an unpleasant current through yourselfas if your whole body was an extension of your tongue and you’ve just put that nine volt battery on. It’s that Continue reading
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It’s time to take Anxiety for a walk
It’s time to take Anxiety for a walk. He won’t take a leash; she only comes when I don’t call; to calm us both we need to retreat to the trees. This is my hof, my temple, my cathedral.Not gods exactly but simultaneously chthonic and a partof the heavens. Tree of Life Genesis and RevelationsKalpavriksha Continue reading
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Shinrin-Yoku (Forest Bathing)
Ten years ago, just as medication was beginning to rein in my outrageous and dangerous bipolar mania, I quit a job that almost broke me and fled into the park. Continue reading
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Spin the (pharmacy) bottle
The medication for REM sleep disorder, what leads me to occasionally smack Patrice with my left arm as I reach out to catch a baseball or assume yoga positions while asleep, foregrounds my amazing Technicolor dreamscape which I jokingly refer to as the Chase Light Calliope Fun House of Madness. It is overriding another medication Continue reading
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Down Into and Through and Out of Darkness
“this is the cold doing” — Charles Olson, “in cold hell, in thicket I do not know if I want another pill or a drill to trepan this malevolence that hangs like a dark shroud or a straight razor to slice life out of time. This is not a threat or letter in an unsteady Continue reading
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Divine Aphasia
title from a line in Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot—Samuel Beckett They took my hat. Yes I was rampaging mad drunken unsteady ever ready like an electric cat on a hot tin roof and glorious glorious the invasive Blakean angels and writing my God writing writing all the time writing. Some said it was Continue reading
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AWAKE
Brain: WE’RE UP! Body: What? No. We’re exhausted. Brain: There’s a war on, soldier. Rise and shine. Body: [Looks at elapsed time on CPAP.] We’ve only had six hours sleep. Deeply, physically exhausted. Can’t stop yawning.. Brain: We have to write this down. Body: [Deep, jaw-cracking yawn. Another.] Brain: RFK, Jr. wants to put people Continue reading
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Dymphna, Patron of the Mad
I am reading On A Wednesday Night poems from the creative writing workshop at the University of New Orleans, and discovered a saint story I don’t recall from my confirmation Book of Saints. That is likely because I had the boy’s edition, from which we were to select our confirmation name. I chose Thomas after Continue reading
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Just another manic Monday
Sunday Neurosis: Victor Frankl is thought to have coined the term Sunday Neurosis referring to a form of depression resulting from an awareness in some people of the emptiness of their lives once the working week is over. Psychology Wiki. Saturday’s are my least favorite day of the week. Allowed to just sit and drink Continue reading
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How It All Went Wrong
Confessions of a Pill Eater Continue reading
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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Well Bottom Blues 