Too Much

"If you face reality too much, it kills you."

Or makes you think you're about to die.

The above quote is Woody Allen's, expressed to the Washington Post (which, thankfully, avoids reality as much as possible), linked to via Jon Schwarz, who chastises the Woodman for being too selfishly bleak.

All well and good. But I think that Allen, self-centered or not, is absolutely correct. Why? Because yesterday, while typing yet another post about the horrors that surround us, I suddenly hit the Too Much Reality Wall, and believed that The Reaper had arrived.

I was tapping out "No matter that they/we are financing war crimes on an hourly basis, and that the people who survive --" when it struck. Sharp pain in my chest. Heart beating incredibly fast. Pulse rate through my skull. Hands numb. Lack of breath. Dizzy. Soreness at the base of my neck. I stopped typing and fell to the floor on one knee. Was this a heart attack? My family hasn't had a lot of heart problems, and both sides live to ripe old ages. But here I was, mid-40s, about to fucking die.

I stood up shakily, completely consumed with pain and panic. Should I call 911? I was within a minute or two of doing this, when I heard my kids talking in the front room. I stumbled to them, told them what was happening, and they each grabbed my hands.

"Your palm's all sweaty," said my daughter.

"Dad," added my son, "you look afraid. Don't be afraid. Think of peaceful things."

Looking at their concerned, loving faces helped. The pain subsided, but my heart and pulse were still racing as I gulped for air. This wasn't a heart attack -- it was a massive panic attack, the culmination of two solid weeks of facing the reality of the Middle East, reading two books at a time ("One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate" by Tom Segev, and "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War, and the Roots Of Terror" by Mahmood Mamdani), as well as endless articles from the Lebanese, Israeli and British press, absorbing hundreds of graphic pix of destruction, despair, grief, and violent death, dismemberment and incineration. These images and accounts seeped into my dreams, when I could sleep, that is (I've been averaging at best four solid hours a night), and my unconscious mind screened horrific scenes, some of which were so unsettling that I'd jerk awake in a sweat, and spend the next couple of early AM hours walking around in the dark, trying to shake off the nightmare effects.

Finally, my body and mind could take no more and decided to shut me down.

I sat and tried to regulate my breathing -- in thru the nose, and long slow exhaling thru the mouth. My son put his arm around me, rubbed my back and stroked my head. "It's all right, Dad," he kept saying. "It'll be okay. I promise." My daughter put on Joni Mitchell's "Court and Spark," my favorite Mitchell album; and as "Help Me" and "Free Man In Paris" played, I slowly pulled it together. After about an hour or so, my heart and pulse rates were back to normal, but I was exhausted. I phoned the wife to fill her in, and she immediately said, "No blogging, Internet, or computer for at least 24 hours." Fine by me. I went to our bedroom and collapsed on the bed, falling quickly into a dreamless sleep, out cold.

So you see, Woody Allen's right -- too much reality can kill you (I notice that the usually stoic Billmon had his version of freak out as well), which is probably why so many Americans stay away from it as much as they possibly can. Me, I'm a masochist. I mean, here I am, less than a day later, typing out more of this shit. And I'll be here tomorrow. And next week. And on and on and yippity-dee. The trick, I'm guessing, is to spread out the atrocities and establish a reasonable pace when researching and writing about them. It would help if I could maintain a mantis-like coldness when assessing all this brutality and ignorance, but I take it personally and allow it to sink into my mind and heart. Stupid? Self-destructive? Over the top? Who knows. This is how I've always approached this insanity, and I doubt that I can shift gears at this late date.

There are so many other topics I'd rather write about and have placed in limbo. Maybe I'll get to those in the next few days, depending on reality's relentless aggression. We'll see. But for now, I must tend to the tree that was felled by a massive storm last night, and is covering a large chunk of our front yard and sidewalk. Consider it chainsaw therapy.