I discovered last Thursday night that these things do not alleviate the panic of a panic attack. The problem started with a couple of days of sleep deprivation. I agreed to accompany some student string players for their auditions in a week, really not thinking about how much a mother is needed by her breast-gorging baby and second grade daughter, and not taking into consideration how little time there is to practice (maybe 30 minutes in the morning if the baby takes his nap?) I used to wait until one or two days before a performance and binge practice eighteen hours, before having children, before having a more or less “real” job.

Soren screamed and cried under the piano while I tried to ignore him and get through a couple of concertos, (okay snobs, concerti then). He tried to pull my hands off the piano, he tried banging on the piano, he tried biting my feet. He laid his head on my bare feet and went to sleep. What the hell am I doing this for, I ask myself. A couple hundred bucks and the honor of playing for some kids who can’t count or play in tune? Is it worth my whole family suffering my absence, a week of dirty dishes, and giving my soul over to the nasty cross hag who takes my place in the morning?

Thursday just before midnight I realized that I could not play everything by the Saturday performances, I was too tired to practice, and I sketched out. I mean completely. Sitting at the piano with forty more pages I hadn’t even had a chance to look through, I felt a course of raw, burning dread and self-loathing come into my heart from my head. The head keeps pumping more of this adrenaline and panic into me–I shouldn’t say pumping, it’s really just a downpour, just buckets of panic–leaving not a chance of sneaking some sort of control or rational thought into the onslaught. This must be exactly how Marie Antoinette felt before having her head sliced off, is what I often think. Wouldn’t that be worse, I tell myself–what if I were going to be beheaded, wouldn’t that be worse? No, no, I wish I were going to be beheaded. I would stop feeling this way if I didn’t have my head. What about that idiot hiding in the boat? Did he feel this way? Really, really, do you really think it matters how you play the piano? Do you think anyone cares?

I started a bath and took the ipad with me to watch House of Cards. Maybe if this is as good as everyone says it will distract my mind from its misery. I inserted the earphone jack so that I wouldn’t bother Eddy but have you seen the first minute of the first episode of House of Cards with the dog being hit by the car and yelping? What happened is the sound was turned all the way up on the ipad, which isn’t loud on it’s own, but I forgot to adjust the sound so it blasted through the earphones directly into my brain, that screaming dog, and I tore the earphones out and let the ipad clatter to the bathroom floor.

I wrapped a moldy-smelling towel around me and went to the kitchen to scrounge around for some old Xanax or my last prescription of beta-blockers. Could find nada, drank a glass of wine instead. Went upstairs and put on some fleece pants and came back down to give my greyhound Fido a 1 am run. I ran up a hill, back down it, and then up and down again, as fast as I could to try to spend out some of the strange chemical that makes you feel this scared. I hoped that we might get hit by a car, thus providing me with a great excuse to miss the performance.

We came back in after about thirty minutes of this, and I poured myself two more glasses of wine thinking I could just impede the thinking somehow, just staunch the flow for a minute. Because I have been breastfeeding, I have had nothing to drink for two years now, so my body could not handle the combination of midnight running and alcohol, and I promptly threw up. I went back upstairs and collapsed on a pile of dirty laundry and moaned. Eddy, Eddy, I’m having an attack. Can you take me to the emergency room? He mumbled something about breathing exercises.

I think sometime around 4 am I finally calmed down enough to catch a wink of what can’t exactly be called sleep–it’s kind of like awake-dreaming–but I was in no state to be able to take Daisy to school in the morning, and instead justified letting her sleep in late by providing her with a full breakfast. I cut her boiled egg into flowers, gave her a grapefruit and crepes, and threw some mashed up avocados on Soren’s highchair which he then throws all on the ground just so that he can feed himself off the floor when he is released. Gems of the Floor is what I call this recipe, inspired by the evocative Frutti di Mare (Fruits of the Sea) I once has for reals in Amalfi.

Does it even need to be said that Saturday was fine, the students took everything at half tempo or even slower, and I could have played some of the notes with my nose and no one would have noticed? On the plus side, I have been gutted of seven or eight pounds and am back to the kind of skinnies most moms avoid by having the wherewithal to eat once in a while.

I wonder how many parents have a compulsion to read about babies getting shot while their fathers change their diapers, or nannies exploding into devils incarnate and stabbing their charges, or dead first graders huddled around their teachers. It’s too bad to love your children out of fear of losing them. You try to arrange happiness for them, keep them away from roads and poisonous berries, protect them from the witches and wolves. But the foetid fruit of knowledge, bursting through its skin with global warming, sex, marketing, and the news that all is not well at all, makes for a world-weary seven-year-old.

We like to know about things, but not really. Just enough to feel grateful. What is that called? Schadenfreude, or Schadenlove?

I don’t hate the idea of religion as much as I used to; maybe I’m getting old. If you are passionately anti-religion, and suspicious of the zeal and dogma of followers, then it seems to me you are falling into the trap of fearing those with a different belief system, and that’s the same fear that the religious have of non-believers. I don’t foresee our society going back to a time of subservient women and leeches for medicine and parsley, sage, rosemary and jumping off ladders for inducing abortions even though a surprisingly large number of Americans are fighting with their guns and bibles to have it so.

We are too comfortable with our technology, and we have it because of science. Those who want to be told what to do, and would rather be led into a rewarding after-life than have to duke it out alone against one senseless misery after another, need their comfort, need their air-conditioning and grain-fed beef, need their wi-fi and beta-blockers. Not all of us are chosen to be non-believers. Those who believe in science will have the education to pull the plug on churches and popes if they so choose.

As much as the mere mention of JC has filled me with revulsion and the heebeejeebies, I also have to concede that there are some goddamned beautiful cathedrals, and some effing beautiful paintings of the Virgin Mary, and some gloriously composed Magnificats and Alleluias hung on that cross. Every day that I teach music to my students, I spend hours trying to explain that not everything is explainable. You’ve got to put soul into it. You have to believe in it. I can’t tell you how to make it beautiful, but if you try to make it beautiful, it approaches beauty.

Could we have created the Western canon without JC? What is the point of asking such a question–it is what it is. God is most definitely absent from what I see hanging or installed in the Guggenheim today, and so is, coincidentally or not, beauty.

In a kind of encapsulated submersible, some pieces of music and some pieces of writing will take you to airless depths too dangerous and high-pressured for daily life. Coming back up can make you very unhappy. You want to stay in that rare environment, where a crescendo matters and real schools of flashing passions are tethered and driven by a phrase, but you can’t. Brings these things with you to your sink of dirty dishes and pile of laundry, and they flatten out, become gelatinous nothings, or worse, they turn into childish and cheesy clichés. You want them in the trash immediately before you are reminded of your vulnerabilities.

I’m not sure where I’ve been either because I haven’t been anywhere.

From Denver to the corner of Kansas, the country roads that run perpendicular to the highway are given the names of the letters of the alphabet, from A all the way to Z, and then starting at AA all the way to ZZ again. You may see two cars on your way past CC and hitting QQ, but certainly not more than three. I would probably put a gun to my mouth if I had to live on one of these double-lettered barren roads, but for an hour or so, being swallowed by the treeless hills you can believe that us little humans have little effect on the landscape. That makes me feel less guilty of my footprint.We’d be impossible to spot.

And when it gets dark, why, it gets real dark.

You wouldn’t do for anyone what you would do for your own son, letting him scratch through the skin of your nose with his tiny razor-sharp fingernails, and even enjoying this attention from him, and finding his lunge towards your nipples adorable, and then not being bothered at all when he pees right into your face while getting changed.

I don’t know whether it’s because of his innate biology or because of what I project that from the start, I’ve felt that baby boys are very different from baby girls. There was no love between Freddy and I at the time of his birth, and our relationship was so strained that I considered keeping him out of the birth process entirely. He didn’t come to a single appointment with the obstetrician or witness any ultrasounds. He seemed disappointed when I found out I was having a boy. Though it feels like blasphemy to say it now, this was what could be called an unwanted pregnancy, with a big question over which day of the week he was conceived. If it was on Tuesday, then Soren would be more aptly named something Gaelic. It has taken these six months for Freddy to concede that this baby was made on the following Friday, and is therefore his biological son.

Even I had trouble in the beginning recognizing that this was my biological progeny. He was shockingly big and fat right out of the chute. There’s no resemblance with me–hazel eyes, reddish hair, broad chest. Sweet, mellow disposition. Our daughter looks a lot like the British model Alexa Chung, who is a quarter Chinese (a mom in Daisy’s Tae Kwon Do class made the comparison and pulled up a photo of her Ms. Chung on her mobile, and I had to agree, the resemblance was weird), and her mind and body are on a spin cycle 24/7 which until recently, I thought was just normal for all children. (Intense, energetic, emotional, distractable, okay then, probably ADD. No question that it is inherited). Soren looks like he was sired by Eric the Red. You can pour gallons of water over his head or make him sit through two-hour long piano recitals, and he’s totally chill. He doesn’t wake up and cry for hours and hours like Daisy did. Maybe she’s more normal, and he’s not? He is costing us a lot more, however, because he goes through 50 bucks of formula per week and several dollars worth of jarred liquid peas and carrots per day on top of my breastfeeding, not to mention all the clothes he quickly outgrows. I feel like a fisherman exaggerating his catch. I have to give away all the winter clothing I’d planned to bundle him in this coming season because he is wearing things sized for an 18 month toddler. Geezus, what a beautiful boy! A Boy!

I should keep on having babies I think, maybe I can fit in 3 more. A better chance that one of them will not hate me for writing this when they fly the coup. The other day, Daisy said she didn’t understand how I got pregnant with Soren because you have to be in love to have a baby. My heart broke a little.

How do you know that a sensation exists when you have yet to experience it? The first time you got high, was it a total let down, or did you want to get high again and immediately? Was it an experiment, or was it a quest for a specific feeling?

What do you find if you have no idea what you are looking for? I think you find nothing. (Everything is like nothing. 6 million is like nothing. 11 million is like more of nothing. One however, one that writes, and is blotted out at Auschwitz, and then has her writing read by 30 million, is transcendent. Is a singularity on the cusp of blackness.)

Once while riding on the wing of a hot feather, I wanted to read something that was not in my bookcase, craving a specific sensation that I hoped I could suck off of an arrangement of words, so I wrote it out myself. Am I supposed to apologize for the arrogance of trying at all, being at least skilled enough to recognize that I’m not as smart as the people I admire? Yes, I think I am supposed to apologize, but to whom?

The places where you’ve lived have their maps in your head, and when you dream, you travel the roads and the houses and the fields and flora of your childhood dwellings. You can’t really move away as these places have moved into you. Some one has pointed out that I very rarely give the reader a sense of my place. I think I am afraid of belonging to a place or time.

I told my second-grade classmates that I had a secret room in my house, which was entered through an apparently seamless concrete wall that would open with pushing a sequence of hidden pressure points. Not one of these jaded friends would believe me, so I worked very hard at convincing them with drawings of the interior of this room. It looked like a My Little Pony landscape with cheap wedding decorations and a flowered trellis, and the predominant colors, strapped under the horizontal blue lines of the notebook paper, would have been pink, yellow, and green. I felt that if I could imagine the place fiercely enough, it would be proof of its existence. After all, these kids still believed in the Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy, and I knew, for a fact, that they and Santa were fakes. For my open scepticism, I was attacked by everyone, including the teacher.

The pressing question of this, the third hour after midnight, is why did I want my classmates to believe in a place I had imagined? That answer is also the reason for pursuing fiction writing.

I still am looking for “meta-fiction” that will successfully let you in on the secret untruths without sacrificing the emotional conduits. So much of it is affected gibberish, poking around in the cold ashes of the dead Novel for a bone on which to scratch out its amusing little scrimshaws. If there isn’t a plot I can chew on, then the words themselves need to be savoury. Please.

Daisy gets dragged out with me on dates since Freddy is such an old homebody. I don’t like staying put. We go to the movies, eat Thai food or sushi, listen to some live jazz. What a weird and delightful child. Her favorite shows are “Art 21″ and “Nova”, and her favorite Nova episodes are ones that mention dark matter or worm holes. I get her to practice violin by promising her an hour of Nova afterwards. I am going to miss staying up with her when she starts school next week and needs a regular schedule.

She wants to sleep in my bed, especially now that the baby is commandeering my attention. I lay between her and Soren, nuzzled on both sides, and I remember that I am going to write this down because this is what I want to remember when the time comes for me to forget most things.