Apparently, however, this wasn't enough for me. For some reason I needed drugs to make my life complete, or to feel better about myself. So I went and ate a bunch of mushrooms. Psychedelic mushrooms, the South American variety. Two kinds: very potent, nearly deadly.

I didn't sleep for 17 days. As you can imagine, I became a walking time-bomb: paranoid, delusional, hallucinating, fearful. I had to see doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists. I had to go into the ER a couple times. I began drinking heavily. I had to move back home with my folks. I lost my friends and fiancée. I went to see a naturopath, a priest, back into a hospital for alcoholics.

In short, all the joy evaporated from my life. I put on 55 pounds and let my hair and beard grow long. My own friends didn't know me. I didn't know me. All I wanted was for each day to end so that I could crawl back beneath my miserable covers and die. I tried suicide twice--and was a miserable failure at that, too.

No person or thing, it seemed, could help. Finally the priest helped me to feel the light and love of Christ once again. It took a year, but finally I began to pull myself out of the worst hell imaginable, and see that I was not put on the earth to suffer.

By the spring of 1981 I was attending AA meetings, regaining my old physique and love for life and being lifted out of depression. By July I was climbing mountains and heading off to the East Coast for a vacation with my old college pals. I had never felt better in my life--which, as you know, is exactly how a "manic episode" can begin.

I slept little. I began churning out poetry like nobody's business, grooving to music all the time and seeing "signs and symbols" everywhere. I became a little paranoid, but I seemed to be filled with and carried along by some strange and wonderful forces. There were some mysterious occurrences as well.

I came home feeling as though I were cradled in the very hand of God--so much so that it delivered me right into jail. But not before I had some of the most beautiful and mystifying experiences of my life--ones that no one will ever be able to take away from me.

Anyway, after being bloodied in the bowels of the King County Jail and told by some anonymous doctor at the hospital that I had something called "manic depression," I spent the next four months "coming down" from the baffling experience, concluding it was all just one of life's little quirks, or something.

Time moved on. I drank a lot. What the hell: I was back in school. In February 1984 I had my second manic episode. Four years later, ditto. By then, though, I was on Lithium regularly and wary of the illness. Ten years went by with no manic activity, except for a little blip in the summer of '87 and the winter of '91, when the Gulf War threatened to sweep us all into mania.

But the blip turned out to be some holdover ACOA issues, so I started going to meetings to deal with some of the issues arising out of growing up in an alcoholic household. After the Gulf War I went to Europe for two months, an angel in my pocket and God looking over my shoulder at every step, and I took millions.

Us manics can walk, can't we?

Anyway, as I've said, ten years went by with no mania. I learned a new career, one I still have and am quite successful at. Plus I like it. What more could you want? Then last summer the heat, or something, got to me down in Phoenix and I got pretty high for about five weeks. Funny, though, I was still able to do my job and all, no one the wiser (including me) that I had slipped into mania. Probably because the TV biz is sheer gonzo as it is.

Now I'm on some new (to me) drugs such as Depakote, Seroquel and Trazodone. They really slow me down but that is good, I suppose, because I am sleeping like a log. And you don't see many manic logs.

Be that as it may, I recently (February) underwent another manic moodswing. I can't really talk about it, other than to say that it required a great deal of effort to hold on and get through it. But I did, although the aftermath has left me in my worse state of depression since my post-mushroom, dark days of 1979-'80.

But I suspect there is a lesson here: the purpose of life isn't to soar through the manic highs; any moron can do that. The real challenge is to live in the world as it is, to overcome the "gray" days and the mediocrity, to put up with the dull and the routine. Or, better yet, to fill them with sunshine.

Our hearts have known both the darkness and the light. Maybe making the world a better place is as easy as flicking the right switch.

--Charlie

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