Author Archives: Joel Derfner

Yesterday, E.S. insisted that we have a day with no agenda. That meant no checking e-mails, turning cell phones off, and not doing any planning beyond the present moment.

It was horrible.

I mean, it was wonderful, of course, to be so carefree. (When I say “so carefree,” you must understand this in context; my carefree is another person’s locked up in unbreakable chains so tight as to induce temporary if not lasting paralysis.) But to be sitting in Ben and Jerry’s eating peanut butter cup ice cream (why, oh, why have they done away with chocolate peanut butter truffle?) trying with all my might to be relaxed and yet feeling the twin dread of Things I Ought to Be Doing and Bad Choices I Have Made hanging over me like modern-day Swords of Damocles–well, in the end it got a little tiring.

We ended up going to see Taking Lives, and I must say it was a welcome antidote. I mean, no matter how bad I feel, it’s unlikely I’m going to end up as a serial killer or his victim.

Though if I were a serial killer I’d probably be a lot more relaxed than I am.

I’ve been feeling for some time that I’m holding myself together with bits of string and tape, that my life is just waiting for a mild breeze with particularly inopportune timing and aim to blow it gently to bits.

If I needed confirmation of this, each of the last two blog posts I’ve made has contained a typo. For someone whose AP English teacher called him a grammar Nazi, this is particularly distressing.

I’ve rectified the situation and am thankful to the person who brought the one I hadn’t noticed to my attention, but, still, it leaves me quite concerned. I mean, if I mistype a letter today and my hypervigilant linguistic superego doesn’t notice, can I be that far from running around naked on an island with a conch shell, shrieking “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!”?

When I was a senior in high school, someone with distinctly more school spirit than I decided to organize a three-on-three basketball tournament.

Even in high school, I was good at many, many things. Basketball was, however, about as far down on the list as you probably imagine it was.

Nevertheless, Kevin H., Allen H., and I–the three least athletic kids in school with the exception of Max B., who smoked a pipe and did a great Corazon Aquino impersonation–decided to form a three-on-three basketball team for the tournament. The fact that I’d had any number of sexual fantasies involving Kevin H.–in fact I’m feeling somewhat warm under the collar remembering some of them–had nothing, I repeat nothing to do with my decision to join.

We realized that the most vital thing to do, far more important than, say, learning any of the rules of basketball or, oh, practicing, was to come up with a name for our team. And so we did: Stegosaurus. The next most important thing was to get T-shirts. And so we did. They were a hideous salmon, with stegosaurus decals on the front and our individual team nicknames on the back. Kevin was “Earthquake,” Allen was “Killer,” and I was “The Blade.” (Our coach, Mr. Moore, our AP English teacher, was “X-Terminator.”)

During the weeks leading up to the tournament, we spent long minutes strategizing. When the day of the tournament arrived, we were brilliant. We showed up in our Stegosaurus T-shirts and struck fear into the hearts of all. Play started, and, though the heat was on, we kept our heads cool. As planned, I pretended to lose a contact lens, thereby putting myself in position to body-check a member of the opposing team, a move I accomplished with great aplomb. At another crucial moment, Mr. Moore–wearing, if memory serves, a seersucker suit over his Stegosaurus shirt–blew a boat horn and distracted the other team, thereby causing them to miss a point.

Nevertheless, by the final moments of the game, we were still behind. I don’t remember the actual score, and I can’t even make anything up because I don’t know how basketball is scored, but suffice it to say, things weren’t looking good–

–when all of a sudden I got control of the ball. Under pressure I instantly became a basketball genius, dribbling and whirling and making my way to the basket, where I shot and, astonishingly, scored.

I was still jumping (literally) for joy when someone informed me that, because of a rule about playing on a half court or something, I’d actually scored the winning basket for the other team.

If I’d had any dreams of joining the NBA, they would have been quashed right then and there. Luckily, all I wanted to do was sing baroque opera in all the great capitals of Europe, so I was a-okay.

Note to self: in the future, when suffering from early morning insomnia, do not travel west. If you do, time zone changes will lead you to find yourself sitting awake at the local time of 3:00 a.m., unable by hook or by crook to fall back asleep. You will not be able to call your boyfriend for at least another two hours; in the meantime you will work yourself slowly but surely into a passion of self-recrimination and fear. You will try to ward this off by watching the DVD of Bring It On Again, the straight-to-video sequel to Bring It On, but, inexplicably, the attempt will fail. You will end up reading but not taking in Steve Martin’s very funny piece about Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ in The New Yorker, a magazine you don’t usually read because it makes you feel ignorant, while you eat muffin after sugar-filled muffin and wait for the rest of the house to wake up so you can eat more muffins with them and then spend all day avoiding the scale because you really don’t want to know how much weight you have put on and not calling your boyfriend because you don’t want him to know how much weight you have put on either, though of course he’ll find out soon enough when he sees you.

The solution to all this would naturally be to travel east by a couple of time zones. Unfortunately, implementing this plan would land me smack dab in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where insomnia would be the least of my problems.

One of the results of the many imbalances in my brain chemicals is that I have an anxiety-spectrum disorder that seems to land somewhere between generalized anxiety disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. My history with medication is long and complicated, so there’s no need to offer me advice unless you are comfortable using terms like tachyphylaxis in conversation.

The thing is, there seems to be credible anecdotal support for the idea that shrooms have significantly helped people with OCD–credible enough, in fact, that the FDA has approved a study testing the effectiveness of sub-hallucinogenic doses of psilocybin as a treatment for OCD. The more I read about this, the more interested I became in trying it, although I have never ingested a substance stronger than alcohol, and the last time I did that was about six years ago (with one recent exception, which I’ll blog about before too long). I approached several friends who seemed like they might know where to get shrooms, but in the end none of them came through.

So I’m growing them myself.

Back in October, I went online and ordered a mushroom grow bag and some psilocybin spores. They arrived along with a slide suitable for examination under a microscope; naturally, the company was selling the spores for research purposes only, as they would never support an illegal activity like growing shrooms from spores. I injected the spores into the grow bag, as instructed, and placed them in a cool, dark place (my closet). I checked on them every few days and the bag looked like what the web site said it ought to (if one were involved in an illegal activity like growing shrooms from spores, which of course no one who bought spores from this web site would be), so I looked forward to a day sooner or later when I might both have my first experience with hallucinogenic drugs and feel like a normal person for the first time in years.

The problem, of course, is that this was all happening during the time my apartment was infested by mice. I could give you an extended buildup.

But the long and the short of it is that the mice gnawed through the bag and ate my shrooms.

And, really, what else is there to say? I imagine the mice had a great time tripping, and perhaps it was this experience that led them finally to abandon my apartment for greener or more fungal pastures. I recently decided to try again; there’s another batch of shrooms growing in my closet, but I’m wondering if I shouldn’t take what happened the first time as a sign that I should just leave well enough alone and continue to live in fear and dread.

Okay, so here’s the deal: you know when a friend calls you and you don’t call her back for a few days and then you go to call her back and you feel so guilty about not calling her back that you decide you’ll just wait another day and then all of a sudden it’s been forever and you haven’t blogged whoops I mean called, and even thinking about sitting down to type whoops I mean picking up the phone paralyzes you, and also your anxiety disorder is raging out of control and doing its level best to ruin your relationship with your boyfriend, oh and your upstairs neighbor is, I swear to God, a professional whistler, and the floor/ceiling between your two apartments is about a quarter as thick as it ought to be, so you can never concentrate because he’s always fucking practicing, including right now, and you haven’t slept more than six hours a night for the last two months?

That’s my explanation for the sparse posting of late. I promise I’m not giving up. It’s just slightly rough going at the moment, especially for the last three minutes, as the whistler has been practicing “Un bel d

Well, aside from the fact that all I could pay attention to were the glaring flaws in the writing, the opening went fabulously.

Now I want to go to sleep for a year.

Unfortunately, I have too much rewriting to do.

Opening night is tomorrow. Wish me luck.

Just think–after that, I might even be able to write posts of a decent length again.

E.S.’s mother’s birthday was delightful. It was just her, her husband, E.S., me, and my dog A.; after we took A. on a long and undoubtedly baffling walk through the woods behind the house, we all piled in the car and went to a steakhouse for lunch, where I had something called a chocolate bomb for dessert. It was delicious.

In other news, I’ve lost count of the number of times over the past week that I’ve almost told E.S. I loved him but luckily managed to stop myself in time.

Erratum: The show on Saturday the 27th is at 2:00, not 3:00.

Now I have to go to Brooklyn, where I’m staying the night with E.S. so that I can go to New Jersey tomorrow for his mother’s birthday party.

For a search for love in Manhattan, I seem to be going pretty far afield.