Against all rational choice of will, an old hunger in my heart returns

By David McElroy · July 8, 2021

I feel the beating of my heart in a terrible way tonight.

This hasn’t happened for awhile. I don’t remember when the madness last showed up. But the physical beating of my heart seems loud. It’s as though something powerful were contained within the walls of my heart — thrashing around, trying to break out, ready to explode.

For weeks now — maybe months — I’ve been so firm. So logical. So focused. And then this insane compulsion suddenly returned in a form that threatens to overwhelm me. Again.

It’s not a heart attack. At least not the physical kind. It’s something different. An inner attack which is emotional rather than physical. But in some ways it seems even more dangerous than a heart attack.

I can’t possibly still have love for her. That wouldn’t make any sense. She doesn’t love me. And it’s been years. It shouldn’t matter. And yet this obsession — this need, this hunger, this longing — returns against my will and leaves me feeling powerless to stop the overwhelming tides which rush over me.

Romantic love is a peculiar form of insanity, but it can be emotional salvation as well. When it forces its way into your heart, it’s impossible to say whether it’s a path that leads to heaven or to hell. Even when it saves us, though, it’s still irrational.

And even though I want — with all of my being — to hate this irrational feeling, I know very well how much I need it.

None of this is a new thought for me. I’ve gone through periods when I felt compelled to write about it frequently. Here’s a random example from a few years ago, when I said that love is part obsession, part reality and part madness. (I just read that again. It’s all still true tonight.)

Love and madness are remarkably similar — and it seems that it’s hard to find intense love without a corresponding bit of madness to go along with it. A touch of insanity might seem like a high price to pay for experiencing the intensity of love, but if they have to go hand in hand — and I think they do — I’d rather deal with some bit of madness and feel intense love than to live in complete sober sanity and fail to experience the loving connection with another person that makes me feel more alive than anything else.

I wrote something many years ago — which I can’t find right now — that touches on the experience of walking the line between sanity and madness. For a long time, I’ve seen myself as someone who lives on a razor-thin line that runs between the two.

If I’m too far on the side of sober sanity, I don’t feel alive. I don’t feel the intensity of love, creativity, beauty and truth which I crave. I know not to go too far toward the madness, though, because I know it would destroy me.

For months, I’ve been completely on the side of sober sanity. Too far, in fact. Tonight, something has pulled me back to the very edge of that powerful and scary line. I don’t know how. I don’t want to go too far, but I also don’t want to pull back to the safety of numbness.

I know this line represents where my best life is. I know that walking this thin line is where I’m happiest and most productive and most creative. I know all of that — in both my head and my heart.

But while this crazy beating in my chest seems to bang out a tempo that the whole world should be able to hear, I also know it’s a line I can’t walk alone. Not forever.

It’s sheer madness that’s brought me to this point again. I didn’t see it coming. But I’m back out here on this razor-thin edge one more time — and I’m waiting for the right soul to join me.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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