Splunky's Life
My Manic Monday
Zap! Crackle and pop ....
It was Monday, mid-December 1999, right before the holidays, when my brain - the Pentium processor encased in bone and housed upstairs, my human analog computer wadded into the shape of cauliflower - started to take notice of itself. It seemed somehow different, transformed, its own independent self, entirely detached from my body. My mind began to race. faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster - supersonic at first, then light speed, 186,282.34 thoughts per second - even faster: 35.6 trillion calculations performed in the blink of an eye. Thoughts exited my mind before entering. Thoughts existed in multiple states simultaneously, superpositioned. My information processor, my data cruncher went on overdrive, hyperdrive.
The alacrity of my thinking simply knew no bounds. No earthly laws governed my thoughts. My mind felt as if it had been lit on fire, torched, a forest of grand ideas in flames, ablaze. Match to tinder, the sound of milk poured onto Rice Krispies. snap, crackle and pop. snap, crackle and pop, snap, crackle and pop. A brain, my brain, refusing to obey, out of control. Mental fissures cracked as loudly as broken bones. Flames of thought leapt from one wick to another. My incited neocortex exploded in a primeval Big Bang, having reached a critical mass. I could feel the shock of axon-to-axon information and almost taste the calcium ions as they flowed across synapses, charging through my head at 220 miles per hour.
Oh so many thoughts-delicious thoughts with a different charge, spin, strangeness and charm: so, so, so many tasty thoughts, almost infinite in number! Thoughts teetered then toppled into the many facets and many contours of my scrunched and noodled gray matter. I felt the velocity of my thoughts, but knew not their position. My frontal lobe, my brain's conductor, my brain's leader led the charge-it raced like a swinging monkey moving through the forest, ranging from branch to branch to branch; it sped along as a bird flying through the air, perching only for a moment, then taking wing again. Absolute fluidity.
Glitch-free. Snag-less. All parts of my mind working together flawlessly, a magical reshuffling of the mental deck. Perfect neural firing. Perfect neural processing. Supersymmetry. This must be what genius feels like, I remember thinking-an avalanche of individuals snowflakes of insight.
If I listened closely, I could almost hear it - neuromancing - a glorious ruckus of my spontaneous brain, my automatic mind, hypnomantic, a manic reach of mind. Neurons whispered. Glial cells conversed. Synapses shouted. My mind swimmingly at home in a liquid ocean of absolute celerity. Kinetic energy. Free radicals. Qubits. 281,421,906 million Promethean sparks. Flowering connections blossomed as my mind performed its 20 million billion calculations per second. Star Trek-like, tribble-trouble in my wanderlust mind, I had: massive parallel throughput in my phrenologically-split, 360-degree brain-discombobulation, cross-pollination. Thoughts jumped the fence of the corpus callosum too easily, way too easily, almost supernaturally. Quicker than the eye. Instantaneous transfer. Spillover.
A chaos of neural connections, zigzagging around, wildly, pinwheeling and pirouetting. A cacophony of electromagnetic vibrations. Swift shorthand. Glowing snatches of words. Flashes of intuition. My mind chattered away as if I'd triggered an executable file: humanmind.exe; it carried on conversations with itself, wholly uncontrolled, uncontrollable, my brain almost rewiring itself as if that of a baby, mutating and morphing into something smarter, more complex, more advanced. Unlike as is written in the Book of Joshua, in which the Sun is ordered to stand still by God, presumably because it had been moving too quickly, racing along, my mind, this blazing Sun, could not stop; instead, it rose and set quickly, feverishly-cycling-as sagacious Solomon wrote when describing the Heavens.
The language centers of my brain-Wernicke's and Broca's Areas-lit up like a summer lightning storm. My planum temoporale erupted, causing verbal splendor. Blasts of energy, fireworks, exploded in a vast and varied array of patterns and colors. Bang! Bang! Bang! Brodmann's Area 10 came alive; neurotrophins fed by pumping blood spurred the growth of millions of new dendrites, forming a slippery neural wetware. Bang! Bang! Bang! Thoughts bounced around like flubber-ricocheting everywhere-left to right, right to left, top to bottom, bottom to top, side to side, corner to corner, never in one place for any amount of time, moving too fast for that; at any given moment, a single thought existed in many places at once.
An unbelievable, near supernatural quickness of mind. No positron emission tomography nor functional magnetic resonance imaging required, I knew it, I felt it. New nerve cells grew, sprouted, flowered; new estuaries of thought formed, then flooded in volatile volleys, a fury of electrical impulses. My IQ ballooned, mushroomed; members of Mensa would be proud. My brain's topography came to life, alive, so alive, never so alive. Such a sensation! Frenetic mentation. anything less magical would have been an insult to my brain, contemptuous. That is how my plastic brain, my electric mind began to feel, to function-a blaze, a blitz, a blur.
The mundane took on particular significance. Every face on every street corner; every word in every newspaper, in every magazine; every thought of every moment-each caught and held my fancy, fanciful. Nobody became somebody. Nothing became something.
I remember that mid-December Monday night, while watching a movie in a darkened theater, scribbling childhood memories on a single 3 x 5 index card and then cramming more thoughts in the margins of a New Yorker magazine. My mind could not turn itself off. The spigot had broken-so much rushing and gushing, flotsam and jetsam, a waterfall of ideational activity. Such were the goings on in my tireless brain.
Later that night, while folding warm clothes that had come right out of the dryer (nothing feels better, except maybe warm sand between the toes), I remember writing down on yellow stickies idea after idea after idea for a book, my book, a book about me and only me. I must have gone through close to 50 of them across a 10-minute span. My savage brain cannibalized my mind for ideas. Mobbed by images, my mind was-stories came to me like wraiths in the night.
I slept little. I found myself waking up at all hours of the night, sometimes on three or four separate occasions, with thoughts rushing, churning, threshing, suffering the philosopher's disease-a kind of insomnia: too much thinking about thinking. I burned with ideas; a dense tangle of thoughts enveloped me.
Words showered down upon me, intersecting at every conceivable angle: dendritic, almost fractal. Word after word after word, sentence upon sentence upon sentence, soon a crowd of language, pushing, jostling, fighting to get to the front of line, bristling with protest, all in an attempt to be recognized, chosen, by my mind-loyal disciples. Soon one, two, three then four complete and complementary sentences would form, strung together, a paragraph of the mind born too quickly, premature. I rushed to give it life, to put it down in writing on the pad of paper I kept at my bedside on the nightstand.
In such a way did my mind continue its onslaught, a relentless lemming-like rush at battle with my body for supremacy. Each energetic dash of creativity left me exhausted. The berserker in me finally spent. Often I felt as if I had run a 26-mile marathon in 10 seconds flat. My injuries sustained: headaches, eyestrain, fingers that ached. But I forged ahead, forward, onward, upward into an ideational bliss. The yield-the quality of the memories that I uncovered, the quality of the language that I penned-was too great for me to stop. Some moments had to be captured in-the-moment or they would be lost, gone forever in a whispy puff of smoke, forgotten.
Such was my introduction to mania, a full-blown bout of it, and later, a formal diagnosis of manic-depression.
Published eary 2000s, reviewed Feb 14, 2008
Splunky's Life
Zap! Crackle and pop.
Only a miracle could save him. Miraculously, it happened.
Knowledge is Necessity
Copyright 2008 John McManamy Contact
My Book
“The perfect book for those of us living with mood disorders.”
Sue Bergeson, president DBSA
Order nowStay Informed: McMan's Report
