I took this picture while waiting outside a pharmacy in Plainsboro, New Jersey, as the Rutgers-trained apothecary prepared my prescription for antidepressants. I don't know why it takes them so long to count out thirty pills and slide them into a little plastic bottle, but from years of experience I know when I go for a refill that I will have to put in a good hour. Sometimes I take my blood pressure; sometimes I pass the time in admiration of the collection of Russell-Stover chocolate gift boxes; sometimes I wander through the makeshift grocery section, and speculate as to the criteria that determine which grocery items belong in a CVS or Rite-Aid (Chef Boyardee, definitely; Lean Cuisine, probably; Manischewitz, no), and which by contrast are meant only for the shelves of a proper Wegman's or Shop-Rite.
This time I decided to go outside. It was the last day of a series of days of rough storms, which I, being from dry California, always think of as 'tropical'. These storms in the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast were the distant and final echo of the same weather system that had, two days prior, killed several hundred people in Alabama and neighboring states. The rainbow seemed to be saying, on behalf of the sky: Sorry for killing all those people. Sometimes I just, you know, lose it.
Over the years I've returned again and again to the metaphor of storm systems in explaining clinical depression to those who know nothing of it. If in my soul I remain Californian (which is to say that I respond to the vegetation and the topography and the sky and the light there as fitting and proper for a creature such as I), in my neurochemistry I am at this point entirely of the East Coast. My brain is like a May storm in the mid-Atlantic, with its menacing cumulonimbus and its hazy instability. The darkness and the thunder appear suddenly, and for no reason, and just as suddenly give way to half-ass rainbows of apology, which to me, at this point, look like nothing so much as portents of the storm's return.
The water cycle makes sense to me in a way that the process of natural selection that produced brains such as mine does not. A recent study showed that well-exercised mice are more likely to anxiously cower in the corner of their cages than lazier ones. A scientist jumped in to caution that we should not extrapolate too much from them to us, since they are prey animals, and it is advantageous to not be excessively at ease. But I am not a prey animal, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what natural utility such a neurometeorological profile could possibly serve.
But that's just how it is, and there's something undignified about dwelling on it overmuch. One doesn't want to let it become the kind of person one is, in the way that Foucault argued so many new kinds of people came into existence in the last few hundred years.
But still, the timing of the rainbow deepened my sense that in the end meteorology and psychology (or psychiatry; whatever) are but two branches of the same science.
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