Monkey Mind

Or

Is My Mind Monkeying With me?

Tempus Fugit. During a life, a long, and in many ways, unexpected life, we who have endured now have the distinct oddity of reflection. Or as we age further, the inability to reflect as we would like; to remember the facts and figures and events that have shaped us, molded us, into our specific spot within humanities’ realm.  Lines blur, memories meld, everything becomes fungible, fuzzy, fantasized upon occasion. How are we to sort it? What are we to make of the inconsistencies that seem to spring up daily in our foggy memories of yesterday?  I know.

Let’s Write a Book!

Where to begin?  This has been my dilemma and one of the reasons I took myself out of my life for two months recently to sort out how I was going to write this book.  In researching formats, it is straightforward. Autobiography, biography, memoir.

Simply put, a biography is the life history of an individual, written by someone else. An autobiography is the story of a person’s life, written by that person. And a memoir is a collection of memories written by the person themselves. 

“Collection” will become important

After setting up my atelier in a tiny city in the Tuscan hills, I set out on this self-imposed literary mission.  I was cranking out the story of my life and, because we all come from sources external to our own selves, parents, families, and cultural surroundings, they seemed particularly salient and necessary to my story. Twenty Thousand words later, I found myself up to age three years. Faced with the ignominy of my own existence, I sadly had to admit that I was neither famous nor infamous enough for anybody to ever read what was looking to be a NextGen War and Peace. 

I put aside this growing monster and looked a little deeper into my reasons for feeling compelled to write this at all.  People: friends, acquaintances, have been telling me for years “You need to write a book”.  I had to realizes that they, too, have the same compulsion to tell their own stories so, as a writer, they were egging me on to make themselves feel justified in their own desires. But was it Ego or a Conceit.  I did manage to get a piece penned about exactly that question, but it left an ever greater, growing, void about what I was really after.

I dove it at this point and went in search of how, why, when, and who writes any of these tomes. The most salient bit of sage advice any of my research turned up was this. 

Start In the Middle

This seemed fragile to me as an outline but, at least as far as writing a memoir is concerned, the best approach. Find a point, a marker, a theme from which most of your life, before and after that event, has had its genesis and from which it plays out its third act.  The book then becomes a series of stories, most fact-based, some memory-clouded a bit, but all, before and after the central impetus, relate to that one thing, that happening, that reflected everything before and altered everything after.

Last night, even after I had taken all my evening potions and pills, settled into bed, dragged open my book and, waiting for the quieting fog of sleep to take me to my dreams, I wasn’t even on the off-ramp to sleep.  I honestly could not keep my eyes open and was not really absorbing the last page of the book I was reading, a sure sign it was time for lights out. But, once I closed the book, took off my glasses, and physically rolled over to sleep position, my Monkey Mind took control. 

In the dark behind my eyes, my thoughts felt exactly like a stainless-steel pinball; heavy, lumbering, inexorably trending downwards to the exit slot but, at the same time, being constantly whacked and buffeted upwards again by flippers controlled by unseen hands. Every whack back up awakened my mind to more and more intrusive thoughts.

Should I start to pack now?

Was I rude to so-and-so?

What is first on my work schedule when I return?

What has my life amounted to?

Should I change all my money to Lire now?

I wonder if I could find my teenaged car on-line?

Am I losing my mind?

There was the Middle

Maybe not the exact middle, but far enough along that there was certainly a before and hopefully enough after to make it a good starting point.

As I lay awake tossing through my laundry list of mindless chores I should be doing, I found myself scratching my head, more in manner of self-soothing touch than a real questioning of priorities.  As I raked my fingertips through my hair I discovered, again, a daily occurrence, the set of four significant indentations in my skull. 

And Just Like That

I had an entirely new and horrifying thought with which to occupy an entirely new timetable of worry.  I am starting, finally, to lose my hair.  If I continue on the hereditarily dictated pathway to baldness, my time is coming.  

My middle point story involves The Fall, an event I have written about before, but one which now raises more questions than the initial surgery itself posed.  The prospect of utter baldness, a look that so many men in my community are so comfortable with, both as a necessary evil and as a fashion statement, now shoves itself to the top of my Monkey Mind list of things I have to confront, probably sooner rather than later.

I had brain surgery three years ago. It required the neurosurgeon to drill four, dime sized holes through my skull in order to drain the blood clots that were threatening to permanently disrupt my inner-head.  They left me with a skull that resembles a polo field after a chukker, but before the audience takes to the field to replace the divots plowed up by the horses and the players. 

Instead, the surgeons placed titanium plugs to cover over my exposed brain.  Now in all fairness, before I went into surgery, they told me “We don’t know whether we are going to have to do a complete craniotomy” (removing the top of the skull, excising the blood clots, and then, later on, replacing the skull and stapling it back together) “or just drill some emergency evacuation holes.”

The drill won out and I am left with what I refer to as my manhole covers.  A much simpler, less risky, less time-consuming operation.  Easy access in, easier healing time after.  But the dents in my skull now have taken on a sinister new place in my fever-dreams.

I will not resort to the comb-over, ever. And with my still red hair, a crew cut, or a buzz, really reminds me too much of the look I sported most of my childhood, whether as a convenience for my mother, comfort in the humid summers of my youth, or the remedy for lice infestations that all of us country-raised kids seemed to have with regularity. Peach Fuzz I was called.

None of this is a comfort

What it does signify is the impending need to continually be explaining to total strangers and friends alike why my skull looks a lot like a rutted, washed out, flood damaged roadway.  But that aside, what it triggered in the dark nights of my discontent was a mental exercise of reviewing all the other crap my sleepless mind was considering.

This, in turn, began to morph into a cautious thought tunnel of wondering whether the hit to my head and the subsequent surgery had actually impaired my mental functions.  Were my sleepless mental meanderings just exercises in frustration? Was my growing tendency towards a mild OCD, something I had never, ever, had in my younger life, a result of the trauma? It has seemingly sprung from nowhere lately and while not unwelcome in that I am much more organized than I had been when young, why now? But then, the real issue in the dark of night and the dark recesses of my mind became crystal clear.

Was This Dementia?

I did ask my surgeon afterwards what was in my future.  He was quite reassuring but……I keep going back to my own research, from Medscape.com:

Favorable five-year outcome rates after acute TBI range from 14% to 40%. Several series have shown an increase in favorable outcome in younger patients. Ages younger than 40 years were associated with a mortality of 20%, whereas ages of 40-80 years were associated with a mortality of 65%. May 28, 2024

I was seventy years old at the time of The Fall. In fairness, after the surgery my brain felt like it was on fire!  My thinking was rapid, crosswords were once again my go to stress reliever, reading and comprehension came roaring back.  I really felt like there was no stopping me. In our house we spend almost no time on looking back.  If I felt this good, then mission accomplished and all of this medical mishigas was behind me.

My friends let me believe this for some time.  They were quite encouraging about my progress. Almost immediately, I started a new career, a wholly unexpected development at this point in life, but one that put my brain and my body to good use, and I felt there was no stopping me, I was on top of it all.  Bring it on!  Give me more! Yet, when the subject of The Fall would come up, little snippets of reality started popping up from friends and family.

“Oh, you were really not yourself”

When pressed for more information from their perspective, it became painfully clear I had been quite cognitively impaired for weeks leading up to the surgery and apparently, unbeknownst to me, continued through what I had been perceiving as a brilliant and totally complete recovery.  As always in life, the axiom of 

Not so fast

Is really a good rule of thumb.  Noone wants to tell you, to your face, that you’ve been a bubble off level for quite a while. But an honest search of my mental inventory and my own actions post-surgery revealed to me that I really had been (still am?) significantly affected by the surgical intervention that saved my life.

In conjunction, I will point out that this was mid-Covid and the life-adjacent issues that that blip on life’s radar created were also personality affecting and weighed heavily on some of the decisions I made in this time frame.

We all culled our address books, winnowed out the old, dead, no longer in contact “friends” we have carried for decades. We simplified our lives because that is what we should be doing at this age.  Simplification. Narrowing the focus moving forward.  Keep what works, jettison what, and who, doesn’t. 

I became ruthless in my redline editing. I eliminated two multi-decade friendships that I discovered were no longer serving me well.  They both, individually, exhibited behaviors that I was simply no longer willing to accept.  When approached on their actions I was met with denial, rage, anger, and demands for apologies (on both sides).  The sheer escalation of vitriol was shocking to me.  The finger pointing of fault, at me, was hard not to internalize.

To one of these folks, I wrote a long letter apologizing “if I had offended them” because honestly, I could not see where I had.  A perfect political apology.  I was told “You didn’t apologise enough”.  Really?  That is what they had to counter with?  After some stalkerish behavior ensued, I was really over the drama. Click, delete.  Lesson learned.  I will never issue a politically correct apology again.  

The second friend, who had spent most of lockdown at our house, was really “family” for many decades.  They were intertwined with many of our other friends both locally and elsewhere.  But the behavior towards us, in our own home, became rude, thoughtless, and more than annoying.  They were told, directly, that their actions needed to be explained and apologized for.  There was literally nothing in return.  A silence so deafening that my choice was made, almost for me. Many well-meaning friends urged me to “be the bigger person and apologize”. Based on recent experiences, this was not an option.

These were very painful decisions

They cost me a couple of years of soul-searching, hours of conversation with mutual friends, a lot of self-doubt but in the end, I was in a place where I had to stand in my own truth, acknowledge the years we had all spent together, the times we had had, and fully accept what was fully in the past and what I must do to gather my forces for the future.  My future. And sadly, those specific friends would not be a part of whatever future I had to craft moving forward.

My night terrors, controlled in the dark by my Monkey Mind, would still be there.  What they meant then, what they mean now, is really a moot point. It is a marvel that after the dark nights of my soul, the light of day is a cleansing wash so complete that even last night’s terrors dissipate in the bright light of each new day I am given.

Monkey Mind in the dark. Fears of dementia. Questioning my choices and decisions. It is just life, at this age.  I fall back to Doris Day. “Que sera, sera” What will be, will be. Or maybe even better, make sure that you consume every morsel of the life you are currently living.  It is our collective responsibility not to fret and dwell, but to eat like the banquet is never ending.

“Life’s a banquet and most poor bastards are starving to death.”

Auntie Mame