Post-election blues Ketosis hits when I see red BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

Since the election, I’ve woken up in the mornings to a sliding feeling like my bed is tipped toward the sea between the Eastern Prom and Mackworth Island. My heart is beating; I feel sweaty at the back of my head. I’m not unused to this feeling this time of year. In fall it seems that everything fucked up is possible as my life careens toward the holidays begging for January 1, when I can be done with the specific and total angst brought on by Suicide Sunday (aka daylight savings — "fall back") and making the holidays matter when we all know that we’ll never be the family we once were. Once when my ex-boyfriend and I were seeing a shrink, on the Upper East side of Manhattan for $200 a pop, who looked like a transvestite version of Cher and wore rubber skirts and black, silk fish nets and had real Philip Gustons on her walls, I explained that in the fall I went through a period of ketosis, literally eating myself from within and shutting down every pore inside my heart until I was totally withdrawn.

She asked my boyfriend if he knew what ketosis was and then went on to talk about her relationship with her husband and how my issue was similar to hers but that, like her, I need to relax, which she, by the way, had successfully mastered. So I went into existential ketosis right then and there.

Right around the time we all saw red on our TV screens, it was as if a balloon popped over my head. I had a fight with a dear friend which got worse as days went by; a producer in NYC with whom I was working on a show had an episode on the phone with me and went maniacally insane; I didn’t receive funding for a program I run teaching acting to incarcerated kids at Long Creek in South Portland; my aunt went into the hospital for a heart ailment; and I stopped sleeping. Depression, it seems safe to say, settled into my every waking moment and I stopped eating, wanted to start smoking Camels again and lie in bed with the covers over my head and take narcotics to slow my heart down. Not that I’ve ever taken narcotics, but, hey, if my friends the ’pams weren’t going to work, I was ready to go find some. But I didn’t. Instead, I called my mom at three in the morning because Mitch is in China and I can’t call him in LA and everyone else I know is depressed, too.

Loneliness, it seems, is something many of us feel post this red election. Friends have called and said, "I don’t know where I belong." Or, "I want to move to Paris but my wife won’t go." Maybe that is why good people seem to have lost their courage to be brave and open. At least in my life. I don’t know; I just know something touched me last week and it threw everything into torpor.

In periods when I’ve slipped I’ve sometimes gone home — pale and face puffy from too little sleep. This time, I went to New York City. I took the bus because it snowed and my car needs to be inspected and I was tired from not sleeping. In Boston I ate a greasy sausage McMuffin without the muffin and drank an OJ. Back on the bus, which was packed due to the storm, two middle-aged security moms sat next to me and talked about the election, compared testicle-size information and then confessed to each other that they throw their kids’ art projects out when the kids go to bed.

I became convinced that the guy in front of me was a terrorist and this was why he kept jerking up and sitting back nervously in his seat like his own balls hurt, looking around like a groundhog, his seat thudding against my knees each time he sat back down. Some woman’s baby was changed and the whole 400-degree bus smelled like slimy baby shit. I tried to read the New Yorker but the girl next to me was reading People, which seemed eminently more interesting, so I read over her shoulder. She read more quickly than I did, which was a drag.

By the time we got to the city I knew most of the story about why Johnny Depp has such a great marriage and some of the reason Mary-Kate Olsen is an anorexic coke head. The terrorist in front of me made a call on his cell phone . . . in Spanish.

That night I went out to dinner with two friends, one an incredibly successful banker at the age of 28 and the other a chef and food writer. We pulled on some black boots and tight sweaters and made our way down to Irving to eat at Mario Batali’s new tapas place for a 10 p.m. seating. At the bar, discussing everything from why China will be the next financial superpower to the pumpkin goat cheese croquettes that melted in our mouths to how many people we had slept with and whether one-night stands even counted, we drank two bottles of a tempranillo. In the warm lights of the city beyond the plate-glass windows, the wine prickly on my tongue, my girlfriends and I laughed at our lives and shared our dismay at the world we once thought we might change.

Caitlin Shetterly can be reached at bramhallsquare@yahoo.com