THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

There is some kind of hush in this drawing. Like a pool of warm sunlight lighting your wellington boots in the eye of a perfect storm.
A silence, maybe - a quietude, yes, in this piece.
Yet I painted it whilst manic as a hummingbird party with free energy drinks and speed where everyone really needs the bathroom but we can't find one despite the doors that line every inch of the shining room.
I have chronic and pretty extreme bipolar disorder.
It sucks. It is not romantic. It sucks. It is not good.
To have.
A mental illness.

At all. It upsets people. It upsets people. Worse! It upsets my cat!!
I can force myself to keep working through mania... most of the time.
There is some touch some flicker some fever of quietude in almost all the work that I produce while I am really, quite obviously, frantic with either disphoria and euphoria. Manic is what I mean. Mad.
So, despite running around talking reallllly fast about rapidly, rapidly changing subjects and hitting on everything in a skirt or even a slightly feminine tie, stillness somehow slips its cool fingers into the paintings that I paint and rub and curse and stare at with my head on a funny angle.
It happened in this piece.
As if I was babble babble boiling trouble in the ecstasy of high euphoric mania and someone clamped an ether handkerchief around my hands and gave each of the fingers on my left a meditation course and a nice hot cup of tea.
i should write more about the fun parts of mania. The sex drive that rages and races around and around your body with clutching fingers of sensuous heat. Ah...
I get to have periods where i have to masturbate three times at an absolute minumum to even think about going outside the house without...
hm how should I say this?
Pitching an enourmous tent in my pants.
A persistent, sedulous and unflagging tent.
Am I happy to see you or is that a CANOE in my pocket?
… add fearless manic confidence to that and… well there are many stories.
Moving right along… the subject turned out to be a Sarah (i have for some reason been out with 11 girls with the name sarah. one of them was nice.) this one turned nasty but still we had a lot of fun.
The downsides kinda outweigh the up. A lot. Thought I would mention that in case you think i am being a braggart and a dickhead and blowing my own horn (I used to be a gymnast you know so for me that was actually possible. At twelve. Age is a curse!) –
Bipolar also has a major clinical depresion component with the opposite effect, and the last one left me impotent for almost six months.
Even without the despair, psychiatric medication’s most common side effect is sexual dysfunction. Then weight gain. (They don't mentuion that when they give them to you.)
Also i think it is only fair that the high euphoric bits of mania feel fantastic.
It makes for a nice relief from all the torture parts that come with chronic bipolar. I also suffer from chronic pain.
The torture has been the defining feature for the last eight years, in a manifestly physiological sense.
More recently, after yet another attempt to stop my moods from charging around like a bull suffering from intermittent explosive disorder (IED - it's actually a thing now) with something unpleasant stapled to its testicles, I tried another anti-depressant.
Stunned, I realised that I had found a psychotropic drug that actually works.
This next bit is going to be hard to believe, but it's true!

This anti-depressant drug - duloxetine - actually treats depression!
So! I don't have depair anymore!!
Between that and my breathtakingly beautiful genius wife Kitty, I am beginning to think that the way I am now might be like most folks.
I fucking love it.
Still have the pain from the broken brain every day yeh but it is nothing compared to the depression.
Yeah.... ramble much?
Sorry.
anyway. hope everyone likes the painting.