Contrary to what many liberals imagined in November 2008, the debasement of American political culture continues apace. Instead of reversing the trend, the lawyer-President and his team have deliberately accelerated the process. There have been more deportations of immigrants than under Bush; fewer prisoners held without trial have been released from Gitmo, an institution that the lawyer-President had promised to close down; the Patriot Act with its defining premises of what constitutes friends and enemies has been renewed and a new war begun in Libya without the approval of Congress on the flimsy basis that the bombing of a sovereign state should not be construed as a hostile act; whistleblowers are being vigorously prosecuted and so on—the list growing longer by the day. Politics and power override all else. Liberals who still believe that the Bush administration transcended the law while the Democrats are exemplars of a normative approach are blinded by political tribalism. Apart from Obama’s windy rhetoric, little now divides this administration from its predecessor.

She said, you have to be able to be attentive to it, to listen to it.

He said, I can afford the diagnosis.

He felt what most poets feel. Lack of affect. An inability to get up and be out in the world. Everything dulled yet everything full of anxiety. An abject tilt to the head, a slumping of the shoulders, a placing of the right hand over the forehead and a rubbing of the area of the forehead and eyes with a strong squeezing motion. An inward focus of the brain-place. Anger. Rage. Self-contempt. A desire for cessation, for un-life.

He was otherwise generally agreeable, though. At least when he was among others, or at least when he was among others and drinking. He had agreed to be agreeable in that way that most of us agree to be agreeable, to keep our diagnoses inside, or to put one diagnosis out into the air among others, in order to mask the more shameful other diagnoses.

Nonetheless, after a fifteen minute visit in a sterile, overly lit office, he agreed that it might be best for some period of time to inhibit his voltage-sensitive sodium channels and through this to attempt to stabilize neuronal membranes and consequently modulate presynaptic transmitter releases of excitatory amino acids such as glutamate and aspartate. It seemed reasonable to do that, or at least as reasonable as anything else.
A signed slip of paper made possible this inhibition. He took this paper to the pharmacy along with $142.53 and was given in exchange a small plastic bottle of peach pills, each octagonal in shape, the number 200 imprinted on one side. He swallowed one half pill each morning with a mouthful of water. For the few seconds that the pill rested on his tongue, he tasted metallic, orange, sweet.

The literature warned him to expect nausea, insomnia, somnolence, back pain, fatigue, rash, rhinitis, abdominal pain, and xerostomia after taking the pills. And he experienced all of these at one moment or another. He also experienced loss of appetite and a severe increase in irritability that tended to peak between 4 and 6 pm each day. Whether any of these things were related to the pills or not, he did not know. He was also warned to watch for a skin rash that could be a symptom of Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis.

Shortly after he began the inhibition, he began to go to a small room that had been made available by a local arts organization.