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I sat down in front of the laptop last night, went over to Amazon and asked The Wife, “What do you think? Get the whole Buffy: The Vampire Slayer series for $99 and a couple of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine seasons, or just pick up DS9?”

“Well,” she asked, “which do you like best?”

I sighed. “I hate when you do that, you know.”

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The medical drama continues. Sort of. Except now it looks like we’ve started to find out what’s going on with me. In short, it looks like my gallbladder isn’t working right. Not gallstones, mind you — that came out perfectly clean — but rather that the muscle isn’t squeezing like it should. (It might explain why I sometimes feel a horrible back “pain” (bloating?) in my middle back after eating, like if I’m having a really bad spasm. As it turns out, lazy gallbladder is also a precursor to gallstones, which run in my family.) Luckily, the doc pretty much discounted the possibility of gastroparesis, which is great. I’ve been reading horror stories left and right about that and scaring myself into the next life. (The people in the Yahoo Gastroparesis group are constantly in my prayers.) I’m still waiting on a few tests to verify that diagnosis, however. Anyway, that seems to be, in large part, the cause of all my recent heartburn troubles, all of which are getting better.

So what am I doing to fix my digestive system? A lot, actually, and I’ll be doing more.

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Kazimierz Dabrowski’s psychological theory of positive disintegration, in short, states that we are programmed from our early childhood by two things: our environment and our biology. We carry that programming through life and build upon it as best we can. However, there usually comes a point in a person’s life where the past programming is no longer able to take him where he wants to go. Often this is precipitated by overexcitabilities: overt intellectual curiosity, overt physical movement (the kid who just can’t stop moving), overt emotion and expression thereof, etc. The more these overexcitabilities are expressed, the more discontent with his primary programming a person is becoming. The first sign of this may be a panic attack. Once the person realizes that he can no longer continue down the path of his previous programming and go in life where he feels that he must or where he truly desires, it becomes incumbent upon him tear himself apart (to disintegrate as a person) and reconstruct himself (or reintegrate) according to how he wants to become.

(Regarding overexcitabilities: there are five categories of overexcitabilities: Psychomotor, Sensual, Intellectual, Imaginational, and Emotional. Most people will have at most one of these at a time. After psychological evaluation it was revealed I had all five. For a while some had nicknamed me “Mr. Excitement.” They don’t know how right they were.)

The process of positive disintegration is usually a pretty painful one, since it involves facing all the things which have created who you are — love, fear, hopes, dreams, hatreds, desires, taboos — and deconstructing them in order to create the person you wish to be. It is easy to become lost in the intellectual side of positive disintegration, meaning that the process can, without proper guidance, become mired in intellectualism. However, once the defensive barrier of intellectuality has been broken through, all that is left is the raw person, and from there does process of true disintegration begin. Tears are usually shed, depression may set in, and the question of meaning may become very pervasive. It has for me.

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At the beginning of the year, I made a list of items I resolved to accomplish. (I called them resolutions, but frequent commenter Junior corrected me.) However, life’s been pushing in its own direction, and things from my past, which I cannot control, have come back to determine the path of my future. While I’m fervent in the belief that history is not destiny, sometimes past actions—things you couldn’t necessarily control or simply bad choices that were made—require resolution before being able to fully move on.

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Been gone for a while, decided it was time to come back. Where was I? Well now, that’s a question with many answers, the short one being that instead of blogging, I’ve been writing in a notebook. Not diary entries, but short stories and ideas for these. Also, I’ve started working on my first graphic novel with a group of local artists. This is a tale for another time, however.

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