"Can't Help Falling In Love with You"
Of Demons, Memories and Moments of Common Sense
37.2° le matin...
Well, we drove that car all night into San Anton' | And we slept near the Alamo, your skin was so tender and soft. | Way down in Mexico you went out to find a doctor and you never came back. | I would have gone on after you but I didn't feel like letting my head get blown off.
Bob Dylan | Brownesville Girl
I really dug that movie. Not the one in the post below; this one... 37.2° le matin. I never did read Philippe Dijian's book, but the movie held my morbid fascination. It was our life, the legacy years, the shreds of "Jus' you 'n me, Babe."
Yeah, it was all so black and white then. We could overcome everything and anything and, besides, being otherwise was a jol. Our lives and everything else were cool. And Beatrice Dalle was something else to watch.
It [the movie] was a kind of warning, I guess, but I didn't give it the attention it deserved. They'd pegged you as a BPD way back then, at the outset, during your three-month incarceration at 19 or 20, but I didn't listen.
The Good Professor who pronounced the diagnosis all those years ago, and from whom we've heard nothing despite numerous incarcerations at her institution of higher medicine, phoned our doctor a couple of weeks ago to find out why my wife had missed an out-patient appointment.
My wife's doctor is the new urban drug lord, a Bible-toting purveyor of palliatives able to calm or cure anything and everything, and the respectable face of the international pharmaceutical industry.
In the suburbs, the doctor is God. He saw the priest off twenty years ago.
My wife's doctor thinks she's possessed by demons.
I kid you not. Demons. I must have expressed some reservations when she told me because she hauled me off to his consulting rooms the next time she visited.
As far as the doctor is concerned, my wife is incurable. He has seen her through three kids, countless illnesses [the kids], and her 'problems'. Although he 'cured' her alcoholism for a while, her mood's no less susceptible to vicious, unpredictable swings. She is, therefore, in his professional estimation, medically incurable.
And, because he is God, it was only reasonable for him to expect us to concur with his omniscient diagnosis. He diagnosed demons.
Big, black, wild, dread-locked, ganja-smoking demons swathed in great white shrouds of smoke with Caribbean voodoo monsters as pets. Well, not really, but I thought he'd been smoking something pretty weird to come up with a diagnosis like that. Or maybe he'd been spiking up on the cancer medicine. I don't know.
...and smoking by 10:00
Well, we're drivin' this car and the sun is comin' up over the Rockies, | Now I know she ain't you but she's here and she's got that dark rhythm in her soul. | But I'm too over the edge and I ain't in the mood anymore to remember the times when I was your only man | And she don't want to remind me. She knows this car would go out of control.
Bob Dylan | Brownesville Girl
He asked us if we would like to meet with a few 'people' from his church, but my wife is a sceptic and I'm a Catholic. Her thyroid has also packed up. So, being sceptical, Catholic and unreasonable [hypothyroidism], we declined his invitation. My wife was left to fight her demons alone.
I don't have much respect for the medical profession. They're on drugs.
At least I thought they were until the Good Professor had my wife's doctor phone me to tell her [my wife] she had missed her appointment. I assumed my wife knew as much. She might be possessed by demons but she is not dumb.
It was then that I remembered the Good Professor's diagnosis made when my wife was still a teenager. A personality disorder. Personality disorders were pretty weird and exotic things back then. We did not pay much attention to them. The shrinks didn't seem to know what to do with them either, so who was I to question their lack of follow up?
Besides, I had myself to deal with.
Speaking to the doctor on the phone, twenty-something years' experience in the psychiatric business came flooding back to my blog-rotted psyche. Hell, I even remembered sub-editing a psychiatric textbook about eight years ago. Neuroses, personality disorders and psychoses; the whole bang shoot rocketed to the front of my occipital lobe.
I thought I'd left that horrible stuff behind me, but it seems I had not.
My recollection of the DSM-III led me to RageBoy's site and on to the magical manual for diagnosing all things pertaining to those of us who refuse to bow to the god of the everyday, the DSM-IV.
I'd no idea just how far my wife had, without any medical practitioner raising an eyebrow in twenty-odd years, slid down the slope followed by those possessed of a Borderline Personality Disorder. Reading the official literature, I realised things had come to a pretty pass.
...oh, yeah, BPD rocks
There was a movie I seen one time, I think I sat through it twice. | I don't remember who I was or where I was bound. | All I remember about it was it starred Gregory Peck, he wore a gun and he was shot in the back. | Seems like a long time ago, long before the stars were torn down.
Bob Dylan | Brownesville Girl
Now, I'm reading all this shit that explains the past few years and it's heavy, a death warrant served on us in retrospect, served up in instalments. The Courtship Dance Of The Borderline, indeed. Look, BPD ain't all that bad but, when you get down to brass tacks, it's not a sustainable lifestyle. Somebody's gotta give and I'm suffering PTSD big-time.
Why is it that everything seems to fall apart or break at once?
Yeah, you, I'm not kidding. I'm fucked, stuffed, knackered and in need of clinicians myself. There's nothing I can do to get you out of there because, as long as you drink and cut and destroy, you'll never get out of jail, get past 'go' or get a life. These links point to a couple of articles, some professional, others not. Here's a pretty one-sided, colourless description of the household terrorist.
It's accurate, if badly written.
I guess I wish the situation didn't seem so fucking hopeless at the moment. Perhaps it's because I'm tired. I've always dealt with this stuff in the past. I am, after all a professional and a blogger to boot. Nothing phases me. I don't go down. It's a big downer to feel myself losing my grip this way. I must be getting old or something...
What is it that attracts people like me to people like you? Is it your seeming helplessness, vulnerability, edge, impulsive nature, danger, sexuality, or what? I'm a quiet guy. I want a settled life. No booze. You're a demon on booze. It's too much to handle. Yeah, I guess I could watch Betty Blue again, though. She really was something.
Y'know, 37° is 'normal'. 37.2° is a woman's average temperature when pregnant.
37.2° in the morning. What a fucking title. And in French too. Heh... But, jeez... yep, what a bloody price...
Way too much. Yeah. Shit… let’s just see how it goes.
My wife has shown inordinate interest in these articles ripped off the Web in 20 minutes. She shows all the signs of those who realise they are not weird freaks destined to live out a silent hell on their own. Yeah, the questions are the same. "But why did nobody ever tell me about this? Why didn't they do something? Anything?"
Unlike my wife's doctor, I do not have the answers to these skull crackers, but it looks as though the Good Professor's call came in the nick of time. They have this therapy called Dialectical Behaviour Therapy… I’ll check it out with my spiritual adviser, Father Christopher.
The last thing we can afford is to indulge yet another New Age fad subsidising a second-rate, photo-shopped TV personality living high on the hog in a place like Aspen.
Demons? Fuck. Tell me another...
Brownsville girl with your Brownsville curls, teeth like pearls shining like the moon above | Brownsville girl, show me all around the world, Brownsville girl, you're my honey love.
Bob Dylan | Brownesville Girl
