By Myles Ludwig
I worry that I’m losing my mind.
I worry that the indefinable, ungraspable spirit that somehow, magically, animates my character, clicks on my personality, is slipping away, cell by cell, molecule by molecule, quark by quark, that my synapses are plaquing up and starting to slow down the everyday neural transmissions.
For a writer, it’s one of the worst things to fear. For a painter or sculptor, I suppose blindness is the great horror.
I used to pride myself on my memory, but I have a little less confidence in it now that I’m passing the speed bump of three-score and 10.
I know that memory is a mysterious and complex, a mineshaft without apparent end. The drill has not yet been invented that can bore through it to a vein of gold.
But where did I put my car keys, my cellphone, my favorite faded denim shirt, or those two cool quilted Barbour jackets with corduroy collars I scooped up from eBay for a low price a couple of years ago when I was sure they’d not only keep me warm, but also increase in value as fashion collectibles?
Where are they?
It’s not the occasional name or word or expression that seems to disappear in mid-mind like a breath of air, like the way Eli Wallach described the loss of money and power in Money Never Sleeps with a bird-like chirping whistle, which Matthew McConaughey emulates in the current Wolf of Wall Street and calls “fairy dust.”
I take those instances of momentary mindlessness as “senior moments” as they are so commonly known here in Florida, a descriptive term that seems to be spreading rapidly across my generation’s geography wherever they live. These, I put them down to gentle nudges of age or lapses in attention.
I’m not talking about the irrational fears I had like when I was much younger, when I used to worry I might be the hapless innocent victim murdered by a stray bullet in a fit of somebody’s road rage, that I might be crushed and driven into the sidewalk by a chunk of concrete falling from a skyscraper as I hurried up Madison Avenue in Manhattan on my way to a meeting.
When I was a teenager, I had a disease that might have confined me to an “iron lung,” a torturous, but life-prolonging device that really doesn’t exist anymore. I was lucky. My greatest fear was ending up like Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a man’s mind trapped in a paralyzed body. But even he was able to craft a memoir by blinking his eyes.
Now I worry that I am going slowly crazy, headed into a territory where dragons are as real as they are on The Game of Thrones. I worry about a lot of things like that. I worry that the drugs I take to control my blood pressure, my cholesterol, my mood … that these drugs will eventually be proven to be radioactive.
I see now that life becomes more fragile — the more perilous — the longer you live. I guess it’s inevitable.
Unless I end up as a victim of some kind of vehicular catastrophe in a car crash, a plane crash, or a medical catastrophe like a heart attack, it’s likely I will slowly slip into a state that has become increasingly familiar: the disunited states of dementia.
In my parent’s generation, dementia was another word for surpassing your 19th nervous breakdown (a term that has been reduced to “mood disorder”) and ending up in some ocean of non-being. If you were demented then, you were nuts. Now it’s a diagnosis with recognizable stages, from the gently early onset to the give-it-all-up terminal.
Frankly, I don’t think I’d mind temporarily settling into some kind of comfy sanitarium to take the cure, so to speak, to whack out the weeds that have taken root in my various consciousness — sub and un- — some time to retie my boots and clamp on my pitons before I have to restart the climb.
I suppose that’s a kind of progress.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.
Editor’s note: The posting of this column was delayed by technical difficulties.