Information about bipolar disorder, and treatment options for this particular mental disorder.

Writing a memoir, if you do it properly, is not a simple catalog of events. When I began Invisible Driving, my memoir of manic depression - http://www.invisibledriving.com - I knew it would be like following a piece of string that led inevitably into the darkest regions of my soul. Recreating mania through language was a technical challenge, but getting on a first-name basis with the demons that sparked my mad behavior was an emotional challenge. In my daily life I was reserved; in mania I was a runaway chain saw. I thought of myself as endlessly charming and funny, I was in fact boiling with furious rage. People in the full throes of mania are capable of tremendous, irrational violence. - A word to the wise. Don’t step on Superman’s cape, don’t spit into the wind, and don’t f*uck with a guy who’s manic. This chapter is called, “The Righteous Rage That Drives Men Into Battle.”

And now a little secret. A tale told out of school. Something I share with everyone else who has my illness. I loved it. It felt great. I mean really great. Why else would so many Manics refuse to get treatment? They get hooked on their highs. Can you remember the moment in your life when you felt the very best? Was it the day you got married? The day your first child was born? The day you scored the winning touchdown for your high school football team? Remember how you felt. Now double it. Keep going until the settings are turned up all the way to ten and your nervous system is buzzing like high voltage wires. Every pleasure center you have is glowing, you could burst into flames at any moment. Now add a few more elements. You’re incredibly strong, incredibly smart, and your energy is limitless. It gets better. You’re totally without fear. That tiresome little voice, the nagging conscience, is dead. You don’t care who you step on on the way up because you’re not coming down. There’s a separate set of rules for you, you’re a Greek god, lightning explodes from your fingertips.

Back at home with a brain that boiled like a cauldron of Louisiana gumbo. What to, what to, what to do? Zelda bubbled up to the surface. Used to work together at an agency, still spoke now and again. Liked to feed me freelance. Didn’t see her much, used the phone. Had always been a chemistry between us which I’d been very careful to discourage. Married chicks had always been off limits, police barricade, don’t cross. And if that were not sufficiently sufficient, and it were, she was moody, spoiled, and unpredictable. Cheese not squarely on the cracker. But to quote the redoubtable Lord Buckley, “If you get to it, and you cannot do it, there you jolly well are, aren’t you?” Which is another way of saying, I was looking at all career options, full-time freelance, free time full-lance, ad copywriting was a favorite. Half a dozen thoroughbred accounts in the barn and I could be completely independent. Fuck the corporate world and how they did me, wouldn’t treat a stepchild like that, but like they always say, he who laughs last, laughs flaff flaff flaff flaff flaff. With projects pouring in from Zelda, and all the other angels I would meet, prosperity was unavoidable.

These are glory days for Invisible Driving. I’ve discovered the core position, The Empty Car. While performing The Empty Car I’m in the driver’s seat with feet on pedals in the normal arrangement but all of me above waist level is bent over, resting on the passenger’s seat. I have the mirrors set so that I can still see perfectly well but to all observers the car is unoccupied. It’s incredibly funny. We’re talking radnopolis funny. Impossible for me to pull this maneuver without cracking up into a squizzling, snerchified hysterical laughter. I laugh with a nervous, giddy delight at the sheer absurdity of it. I laugh with a childish delight at the outrageousness of it. I laugh with an anxious excitement, agitated by the risk. But I laugh most uncontrollably as I imagine the reactions of the passengers in the cars who see this apparition. The ghost car.