Not normal

For three weeks I did nothing. 

OK, that's not entirely true. I cleaned about 90 percent of my house, getting down on my hands and knees to scrub spots on my kitchen floor or dust off the crown molding in my living room, getting up on a stool to clean nearly two years of dust off the ceiling fans, moving furniture around to vacuum, discovering cat hair seven months after Lucy left this mortal coil. I'd call that something.

I wrote places other than here, filling an old college notebook while revisiting my 2011 job search that landed me back where I belong (mom said I should keep a job search journal, but she never said when precisely to write in it). I wrote in another notebook, musing on my failures at love and pondering in my training journal what was next physically after figuring out what was wrong with me physically.

I didn't shower very much because I had no reason to, not when I felt paralyzed by my own body. In three weeks I showered maybe three times (and can document each one); my co-workers never complained, not to my face anyway. I didn't shave, either, but that's not news because I constantly work on about two weeks' worth of scruff.

I read a few issues of five years of Sports Illustrated and three years of Esquire magazines, but back issues of Inside Triathlon and Lava remain unread; in my state I couldn't bear to read about those pursuits on hold.

I ate like shit, when I bothered to eat. After checking out the Monsanto shit list I decided to make some changes, though I'll finish off the GMO-laden crap I already bought. The changes went out the window that day in July. Breakfast was no more than one bowl of cereal and a couple swigs of apple juice to wash down my multivitamin and my ecinacea. A Starbuck's foo-foo drink often constituted lunch or dinner, and when it didn't I ate the minimum. What was the point, I figured, when I wasn't burning calories anyway?

One night, in a span of three hours I talked myself into and out of climbing Mount Evans. I decided I would make the hike, started assembling the minuscule supplies required for one of the easiest of Colorado's 14ers, but then assessed my mental state and figured I'd fuck it up somehow, ending up a cautionary tale meriting a brief in the print media and 20 seconds on the evening news.

Just for the record, I decided on my own to take time off. Fresh in my mind, that feeling of an ice pick jabbing my back kept me from running, my travails with the bike — which include a wreck — kept me away from my two-wheeled implement (though I did my share of around-town work on my mountain bike, which affords a relatively comfortable upright position), and the prospect of rotating and lifting my head kept me out of the water. So mere fear kept me away from those things I loved.

Now I have an idea of what junkies on the nod feel like, walls closing in, heightened senses,  muscles twitching involuntarily. It was some of the worst sleep I've ever had, and I can't remember a single dream in that time. I laid my head on the pillow, feeling some electric jolts through the jumbled and frayed nerves in my neck, and woke up to some of the same sensations. I felt like my heart and lungs had been amputated. I never cried and I never thought about hurting myself, but I found myself with even less patience than normal and in the kind of funk that scares the crap out of a truly mindful person. 

The few things I did remotely construed as social meant nothing. I was a zombie, sitting there on the patio at the brewery and trying to crack wise with my friends. I didn't talk to my parents for about three weeks, and I normally call once a week. I didn't really go out, except to fill one of my two beer growlers. Twice I drank 64 ounces of beer in one sitting (good microbrew, lest you think I go for the cheap stuff in times of trouble. I just didn't feel like talking to anyone. I felt as vacant inside as I-80 across Nebraska. Yet I just had to deal with this on my own, without my normal coping mechanisms and with a lot of thoughts swirling around in the vast recesses of my mind.

The light at the end of the tunnel was the green scrawl on my refrigerator greaseboard: a doctor's appointment at 11:30 a.m. Monday, August 19.