I sit at a coffeeshop a few blocks south of my apartment often. Sometimes it feels as if I can't get work done anywhere else, including in my bedroom--so I pack my trusty iBook and head out. I'm here this morning, trying to disentangle my thoughts on DeLillo's White Noise, its representation of the 1980s as a threshold of media saturation and perceptive instability, and representation in general (don't laugh, I know it's fundamentally hopeless on our current discursive terms, that's why cultural studies will sustain themselves indefinitely--not that they don't merit sustaining, just that they have their own survival in view). Something about the unbalanced tables, aged mosaic floors, student art on the walls, and my budget lattes--Intelligensia coffee with spoonfuls of cream and honey--soothes me, makes me feel free to people watch in the interactive we're-not-looking-at-each-other-ha-ha way the carefully crunchy people around here do. I like to believe we all think of each other as part of the scenery and laugh at ourselves when we attempt to be more than that.

The point, though, of describing "my" coffeeshop is to set the scene. My good friend G, who's here more often than I am, plunked herself down at my table and told me that a mutual friend had a severe episode Saturday night. Evidently she decided to commit suicide, but due to medication--anti-psychotic medication--she was in such an acute and compulsively detailed frame of mind that she changed her mind in the midst of her quite extended preparations. (Thank you, unknown principle we call divine.) I'm hearing all this second-hand, but I can see her, with her cropped black hair, her naked eyes and bright bee-stung mouth, sitting in her tiny cluttered room at the top of rickety stairs, looking around at the possessions she'd covered with towels, the mirror turned to the wall, the posters rolled up in the corner, wondering at herself. Yes, she'd rather be dead than permanently crazy--but how could someone who had just prepared so well for death be insane?

So she took more anti-psychotics, washed 'em down with some vodka, and called a suicide hotline. When the ambulance came she was very much alive and very, very high. Now she's in the mental ward at a local hospital. I feel helpless and angry--my friend G is barely keeping it together, they're so close--and the worst of it is that we don't know when they'll let her go home. She's relinquished control, at least for the time being.

This reality disturbs me so much I almost forget to be pissed. I don't know this girl that well, but as someone who agrees with her that recklessness and an impulsive, improvisational approach are necessary to a lived reconciliation with existentialism and the vagaries of unmediated representation--as someone who also wants to think with my heart and feel with my head--I'm scared for not only her, but all of us, when some folks with med degrees can tell a very intelligent, stressed-out girl that she needs to stop thinking and start drugging herself. Her medication was way too heavy-handed, but will that be seen as the reasonable cause and culprit of her behavior? Or will she be straitjacketed with another pill? I don't know.

I guess I can't draw any conclusions or come to a restful temporary perspective until I visit her this evening. In the meantime, Davy (er, I mean David) called me just now to inform me that he ranted at some gay pride activists on the Quad. Don't think I say that disapprovingly--regardless of whether I agree with their action, or whether I agree with Davy disagreeing, I'm just proud of him for choosing to participate politically. It sounds like they had a productive discussion and everyone left happy. Makes me feel much better that I can end this post this way. (So thanks, sweetie.)

Is anyone still reading? I'd love comments if you have some, just so I know you're there. This ties into my ongoing quandary over whether I actually like blogging or not--but that's another post. Thanks for reading this far.