jD is back and he's got a new mood stabilizer!
Poem: Nervous Ashers
Transcript:
[0:22] Hey, it's JD here back for another week of introspection and reflection on grief, depression, and the pathway to mental wellness, all the while nourishing my soul with the music andart of the late, great indie rock singer -songwriter, David Cloud Berman.
How are you doing motherfuckers?
It's been a week, man. It's been quite the fucking week.
Just when things seemed at their lowest, I managed to get levels lower.
As I mentioned to you before, that idea of hitting rock bottom and then finding a fucking pile driver or a...
What are they called? Jackhammer. You know?
Not good. Not good. It was a bad week for JD. Very bad.
Canceling plans willy -nilly.
Not leaving the house. Not showering. It's ugly. The truth is ugly. I'm sorry.
[1:46] And everything sort of culminated, well, I haven't talked to my therapist in three weeks and I don't talk to her until the 13th.
So you're hearing this before the 13th, I believe, or you'll be hearing this after the 13th.
So I will have talked to her when you've heard this. By the next episode, if not the next episode, the one after that. So I should have talked to her by then.
But that's just business. That's just logistics.
You don't need to hear. You don't need to look in the trunk.
Hey, hey, hey, get away from the fucking trunk.
You don't need to look in there.
It's better for us if you don't understand.
So, there's that.
I saw my psychiatrist, though. I saw him this week.
And basically, since I saw him last, you know, there's been a couple of things that have happened.
I stopped working on that one podcast.
[3:04] And the event that went with it. The event happened on the 31st of August, the last episode aired on the 4th of September, and that was that.
At around the same time, I got taken off of lithium.
So, JD's mood goes in the tank for a couple months.
Who's to blame? I don't know. I don't fucking know. Who's to blame?
Is it A? Is it B? Is it some sort of cocktail of the two? Is it the weather?
The weather's starting to turn.
Mornings, of which I enjoy immensely, are dark until 8 o 'clock in the morning.
It's horseshit. It's just horseshit.
[3:55] I gotta stop forgetting to drink coffee too. That reminds me.
I didn't have a coffee today. Fuck.
Now, I'm lucky. I could have a coffee at like 4 in the afternoon and it doesn't impact my sleep.
You know? I usually have a coca -cola during, you know, on the weekends I'll have a coca -cola around 4 o 'clock. It does nothing, it does nothing.
It's just that taste of Americana that I crave.
So there's that. So I go in and I see my psychiatrist and that's his question as well. He's like, should we put you back on lithium?
And it's like, do I want to go back on lithium? Man, I was getting up to pee three times a night.
I was drinking six liters of water a day, seven liters of water a day.
Taking good care of those kidneys. And, um...
[4:57] My dreams. My dreams were spectacular. If you've ever been on lithium, was that your experience?
Send me an email jd at mediumalchemists .com. Yeah, I was baffled by that.
My dreams were like the movie Inception. It was like there were dreams within dreams within than dreams, they were art.
They were fucking high art.
If there was an academy of motion picture arts and sciences for dreams, I hate to tell you, but I'd have some fucking statues on my mantelpiece, okay?
So just deal with that.
[5:43] He spent about a half hour with me and he's only supposed to spend about 15 with me.
Like he's really just there to monitor meds and I don't quite know.
I don't quite know what a hospital's outpatient program should be like in an ideal world. That's something I should talk to my therapists about.
What would that look like? Like just, you know, sometimes we talk about random shit and sometimes we get dark and dirty, and that's hard, man.
Fuck, it's hard work. So something that's not hard work is pharmaceuticals, I suppose, I'll say.
There's varying schools of thought on pharmaceuticals and big pharma and the way we treat mental illness.
[6:51] Some of it, I mean, dude, I had fucking electroconvulsive therapy.
That just seems barbaric. I would do it again though.
If it made me better, I would fucking do it again, but like they literally put you under so they can give you a seizure and they give you a seizure by shocking your brain.
Jesus Christ.
So I'm on a new drug. I got put on a new mood stabilizer.
It's... I don't know what it's called. I'll look it up for you next time.
I've got to do some research on it.
I'm happy because I think the lithium adjunct was good for me.
I think it did perk me up even though it was a low dose.
I feel like I got something from it.
So when it was taken away from me, that was stuff. And it was coming at the same time that I stopped doing some work that I felt was sort of meaningful.
The work that I was doing was meaningful. We have a charity program named after the lead singer of the tragically hip, Gord Downie, and an indigenous child who tried to leaveresidential, you gotta look it up, but it's called the Downie Wenjack Fund.
And they do good work. And we supported them, so that was nice that we were able to do that.
So I don't know, in the next few weeks, We'll document how things are coming along.
It's good that I do this so that I can, like I'm not on it right now.
I haven't started taking it. I'll start taking it on Monday.
And that's cool. And we'll see what gives.
There's very low side effects on this drug.
That just means it probably makes you come green or something like that.
I don't know. These things do fucking weird shit to your body.
They do weird shit to your body.
So there's that. Let's listen to some music.
[13:55] Everybody say it with me don't step on that shit JD do not step on that shit, what a fucking tune right American Water is just a fabulous.
[14:11] Record and Blue Arrangements is just another absolute monster on this record if you love jammy malchemist you're gonna fucking you know just die over this song.
Malch did it solo a few times on you know solo tours.
As it's mainly his voice you know it's easy to sort of see how he could do that but just fantastic.
Some great turns of phrase, as you know we've come to expect at this point.
You're a shimmering socialite jewel.
[15:10] When something breaks it makes a beautiful sound. Jesus.
There's just this whole stanza. Sometimes I feel like I'm watching the world and the world isn't watching me back.
But when I see you I'm in it too.
The waves come in and the waves go back.
Oh man that reminds me of that Hunter S. Thompson bit talking about with the right set of eyes.
And then oh I fucking love it I wish I should memorize that that's something I should memorize that would be a cool thing to memorize so I could just throw that out every once in a whileI don't know if I'm even capable of memorizing things anymore speaking of ECT so yeah I don't know, anyway that's blue arrangements and that's fucking spectacular stuff if this is newto you, congratulations!
You're getting some great, some fucking great music in this second season of The Berman Project.
[16:17] Yeah, we've got some good stuff still to come, from this record and from others. great stuff in fact.
So stay tuned. Let's go to the poem.
This one as always comes from actual air by David Berman, his work of poetry, and this one is called Nervous Asher's.
Nervous Asher's. And it's a monster. It's paragraphs.
So please bear with me as I recite Nervous Asher's.
[16:59] There were mountain huts full of smallpox strung out along the hillsides between, Escadawapaw and Morgan City, birds boiling up and out of freestanding chimneys under theroutine advent of rainbows and chainsaws, the old sound of cheap labor rising and falling in the weather that was like frosted bank glass and advancing.
There were heaps of tangled sawhorses and tripwire, fire, vacant jaspers and wolfermites, mines, mounds of dead ataris and scarred desk -drawer bibles scattered across those abandonedcounties that lay inert as a rope.
[17:40] Hazel and Bobby lived together in an old slave shack I rented out of the Upper Fields.
They cut Canadian thistle and picked slowberries off the blackthorn for a living, slashing their hands and bickering all day in the frayed heat, visiting me in the cool main house mostevenings.
We'd sit in rooms without ceilings, drinking White Hill Whiskey under the recumbent stars, and Bobby, who loved to go on about things, would reminisce about his dead wife who'dcontracted the disease from sleeping too close to the box -fan.
On Sundays they wouldn't move a muscle. They'd just sit there like two piles of coins, quietly warming through the afternoon, then slowly cooling off over the evening.
[18:30] Bobby puts on his sound jacket. Shards of hospital bed are locked in the bass drum.
Through the worn, dulcioid rafters, I can see birds flying over the practice room.
The snare is stuffed with traffic tickets, and out the window there's my horse walking on the stream, the stream always behind schedule.
[18:55] There's a dust moat hawk landing in slow -mo on my guitar.
Hazel sang something about earnest worlds in Tullahoma who'd had a dream about a cougar sleepwalking on Polk's grave and how that was bad luck for the region.
Look! That look out the window are darkened and those faces pass down the centuries that kick -start the rivers and grow like nerve endings in a coal cart until they're key cold and shovedthrough the death gate.
A cattle folk set free, released into the dirt waves.
And John and his father John trap Mink under the chain lightning in the libraries they've landed in, where all the talk about shadow -dappled paths is typeset, published, and poured into abreak in the earth.
Hazel murmured to no one in the room, you might think it was words and dark tickets as we began to play RMT in the swarming weather chart sundown. And it was.
[20:02] Outside, you'd still hear the music, hear someone singing, actors dreaming, got nowhere to say, see my sheet go walking, run and fly, and it would sound better from far away, like afaded sketch of a long -forgotten pacer at the downs, all the while platinum ticks are dropping off trees like little Romans onto an auburn shower curtain half -buried in the forest floor.
Already gone were the golden days of easy credit, the days of approaching squat south -central skylines from underneath the ice -blue tides of the windshield and five -cent war comets,howling saran yaps and careening school cords, all that was left looking like two lost eyeballs on the field of Spotsylvania where a couple of black plastic knobs in the dirt, one for toneand one for rinse.
[21:02] The place is like a haunted turnpike closed down for years where things still happen in the little turn -offs to the renowned teenagers that never came back.
If you came in the day and you're lucky, you might catch yourself a nice photograph of two sweat bees fucking on a Coke mirror.
You might see my horse breaking across a white wine -coloured clearing, or maybe hearing the old court coming for no real reason out of sockets in the walls, because there's ananswering machine clogged with ice deep in the courthouse mountains where he lived and died in the breach.".
[21:48] How about the Nervous Ashert? And like I told you, it's a monster.
I'm going to take a little drink of water right now because my mouth is dry.
[22:05] Yeah, I don't know what to say about that. Uh, I gotta sit with this one.
I think I have to read it about 900 more times.
And just sit with it. It's dense. It's really dense.
It's a story. It's a short story, basically. But, you know, it's got the poetic convention so that it can come in and out of almost Consciousness? Like sort of?
As paragraphs change, scenes change, situations change.
Yeah, it's uh... sort of fucked.
Great words. Some cool words. Escatawapaw. That's fucking great. Man.
[23:01] So that's what I got for you this week.
I'll be back next week and the week after that and we're gonna keep listening to music and we're gonna keep having a good time.
So thanks for sticking it out with me and in uh subscribing to season two talk to you next week be cool be well stay hungry stay foolish, and wash your goddamn hands.
Support this podcast at —
https://redcircle.com/thebermanproject/donations
