Working hard or hardly working, mate?

I am working hard, but I am hardly painting, because I'm in the throes of finishing my book, Head Study: A Life In Two Extremes.

For the first time in a while though, I'm also doing a lot of reading, which isn't always possible when you're in a medically-induced brain-fog. In a brain-fog, medically-induced or not, you get stupid. Very stupid. 

I'm reading a lot of bipolar memoirs. You'd think that this would be gun-to-the-head depressing, but it's only claw-your-eyes-out annoying. Juuuuuust kidding. There are a lot of meh memoirs out there, and there are a lot of overtly titillating ones, too (I say "overtly" because it's so obvious some editor went to the author and was like, you gotta sex this shit up.). 

One memoir that is on all the "Best" lists is Andy Behrman's Electroboy: A Memoir of Mania, and it is freaking fantastic. Reading it reminds me of the time in high school when I was skiing in Aspen and coming down a hill too fast and couldn't stop and freaked out and closed my eyes and then slammed into a tree-- with my head. I had to be strapped down on a gurney, and skied down the mountain. I suffered a concussion worthy of a Texas football player and got about 14 stitches on the left side of my head behind my ear, which was hanging on by a thread (of skin). Things had been going so fast and careening out of control, and life could only stop once the earth had tasted blood.

That's what Andy Behrman's mania feels like.