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A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D 2 1 9

The Maryland
15
Every Chapter Is Extra

“Give every day the chance to become

the most beautiful of your life.”
– M A R K T WA I N

Club, located in
midtown Baltimore
Upon my return to Baltimore in 2003, my hypomanic obsession with creat-
ing a local digital business news company continued unabated. Hypomania
usually lasts only four days; my vision for cracking the code on local business
news has persisted for decades. Pivot. Pirouette. Crash and burn. Come back.
Think. Rethink.
My previous sortie, Local Business Network, had been part of late-1990s/
early-2000s dot-com mania. This time, prudence needed to prevail for what I
had in mind: citybizlist (now citybiz), a daily business news site that encom-
passed Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia. What if I bootstrapped the
company? What if my past advertising relationships could be resurrected?
What if the talent was globally sourced?
Reading Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book, The World Is Flat, taught me that
globalization was altering core economic concepts. The flattening to which
the title refers is the result of the personal-computer revolution and workflow
 2 2 0 A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D
software; Friedman calls it Globalization 3.0. In his book, he mentions
Brickwork, an India-based company that offers “virtual executive assistants.”
So when I was ready to launch citybiz, I reached out to Brickwork and hired a
part-time team of digital media associates, based in Bangalore, to build emails,
curate content, and handle customer support.
Over the next 15 years, the business has repeatedly evolved. The original
model depended on display or banner advertising. The next iteration embraced
a private Groupon-like ecommerce. Today, it is a mix of advertising, content
marketing, and CEO interviews.
Somehow, it has survived LinkedIn, Google, programmatic advertising,
over- and under- capitalization, pay-per-click, search-engine optimization, and
slick dashboards. And while it has not scaled to unicorn status, citybiz has pro-
vided me and Team India, as I call them, with a decent living.
“Some people are walking around with full use of their
bodies and they’re more paralyzed than I am.”
– C H R I S T O P H E R R E E V E , actor and activist
Its challenges, however, have not been strictly corporate in nature. They have
been compounded and complicated by corporal obstacles — i.e., my physical
and psychological well-being, or, if you will, body and soul.
Back in the mid-1980s, I took up indoor squash, playing almost daily at
the Maryland Club in midtown Baltimore. Squash’s racquet skills, workout
intensity, dopamine balancing, and innate sportsmanship appealed to me. I
found it addictive.
In the early evening of September 9, 2014, I played a not particularly stren-
uous or memorable round of doubles squash. Afterward, I headed back to the
club’s locker room, where I started to undress. The next minute, I was on the
floor with my right arm swinging around spasmodically. I could not get up.
Reflexively, I attempted to use my left arm to control my right. No good. I was
having a stroke.
Apparently, the Maryland Club has a long and glorious tradition of squash-
associated strokes, given the fact that, as I lay helplessly on its locker room
A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D 2 2 1
Wallis in a Manly Mood
F
ounded in 1857, the Maryland Club, a private establish-
ment located in Mount Vernon, close to where Wallis grew
up, originally catered to Baltimore’s aristocracy and captains
of industry. Notably, its first president was Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte,
Napoleon’s brother; later, my great-grandfather was a member. In 1861,
the Maryland Club made clear its support of the Confederacy in the
Civil War. Spitefully, occupying Union troops under the command of
General Lew Wallace closed the club and then outraged local residents
by turning it into a shelter for homeless former slaves. After the war, it resumed
normal operations.
In the early 20th century, the Maryland Club excluded women. That did
not stop wild child Wallis from surruptitiosly entering its paneled halls. Well, at
least according to one account. In an addendum to Andrew Morton’s Wallis in
Love, Mark Letzer, the president and CEO of the Maryland Center for History
and Culture, recounts to Morton the story of what Letzer terms a “youthful”
Wallis dressing as a man to gain entry to the club.
Fred Rasmussen, an obituary writer for The Baltimore Sun and something of
a Baltimore history buff, counts himself among the account’s doubters. (Fact-
checking is problematic with dead people, because you cannot contact the
subject.) When I emailed Rasmussen to see if the story about Wallis going to
the Maryland Club in drag could be confirmed, he responded:
Dear Edwin:
I found no basis for that yarn and it might be best to avoid it. It really
sounds highly improbable. I was told years ago by an elderly Maryland
Club member that she had laid most of its membership, however.
Be well.
Fred Rasmussen
2 2 2 A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D
floor, several “gentlemen” nonchalantly walked past me, completely unfazed.
WASP decorum. Civility redux. Business as usual. Carpe diem.
Finally, the club’s squash pro arrived and helped me get up, my right arm
still flailing, my speech mere gibberish. Twenty minutes later, I was whisked by
ambulance to downtown’s University of Maryland Medical Center, 10 minutes
away. Within 30 minutes of my admittance to the hospital, my son, Win, 23
at the time, was at my side in the ICU, where I was given a tissue plasminogen
activator, which dissolves clots.
The following day, my brother, John, flew in from Boulder, and a couple of
friends stopped by. After two days, I was discharged and returned home.
The first week out of the hospital was very, very scary. I was barely able to
shave. My typing skills were, at best, rudimentary; my word retrieval and abil-
ity to speak in sentences difficult. Since my healthcare package did not cover
rehab, I undertook the task myself.
Being 98 percent digital and two percent analog (the latter manifested in my
appreciation of hardcover books with dust covers), I downloaded Lumosity, a
brain-training app that measures and challenges your cognitive abilities. Over
the following weeks I exhibited gradual improvement, more easily summoning
words and forming full sentences. Oral paragraphs, never a forte, were in nascent
resurrection. Still, returning to work at citybiz remained out of the question.
My digital media company was a 24-hour operation, with my daily involve-
ment requiring 10 to 12 hours, seven days a week. Would it be able to survive
my absence? Would the team in India stay on board? Would I regain my ability
to communicate? To conduct a business meeting? Would my brain hit “reset”?
My heart? My gumption? If not, could I sell the company? How else would I
pay alimony to two ex’s? How would I support myself?
As it turned out, over the next two months, while I hibernated at home,
tentative about re-entering life personally and professionally, my son and the
incredible Team India kept citybiz alive.
Meanwhile, my brain made a miraculous recovery, and I felt sufficiently con-
fident to set up meetings to explore the sale of the company. In mid-November,
I received a modest buyout offer that would have provided income for a couple
of years, but, ultimately, the interested party was unable to obtain financing.
Shrugging, I kept in mind my mother’s edict of “Oh, bloody hell, press on,”
A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D 2 2 3
and one year later, in late 2015, I launched a related online venture: Warfield.
co, which presented in-the-flesh interviews with innovative CEOs — in essence,
a pay-to-meet business development tool for establishing C-suite relationships.
It works like this: Let’s say you wanted to meet Tesla founder Elon Musk. I
would reach out to Musk, and, if he consented, you, the sponsor, after agree-
ing to pay a set fee, would join me to interview him face to face. The resulting
Q&A would be published on citybiz and Warfield.co.
The first interview, with Manpreet Singh, CEO of the College Park, Maryland-
based TalkLocal, which connects consumers to nearby businesses (roofers, HVAC
companies, limo rental), appeared in December 2015. Accounting, law, and com-
mercial real estate firms became the primary clients of Warfield.co, with com-
mercial real estate company Newmark Knight Frank sponsoring more than 70
interviews. These featured innovators, disruptors, changemakers, entrepreneurs,
venture capitalists, angels, and visionaries who embraced the industries of the
future: edtech, martech, biotech, venture capital, cybersecurity, incubators, social
innovation, AI, black entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs, and foodpreneurs.
Over the past five-plus years, I conducted more than 300 such interviews in
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. A few examples:
• Tom Davidson of the D.C.-based online edtech company Everfi, who
raised $190 million (led by Bono’s Rise Fund) to teach students online;
• Doug Ward of Baltimore’s Personal Genome Diagnostic, a leader in
providing personalized cancer treatments using tissue-based and liquid
biopsy technologies;
• Ryan Simonetti of New York’s Convene, who has created a forum for
people to meet and work together, fueled by more than $200 million
in funding;
• Christy Wyskiel, who oversees Johns Hopkins University’s Technology
Ventures group, working on innovation, commercialization, and technology
transfer initiatives;
• Luke Cooper, founder and CEO of Fixt (cheekily described as the “Uber
of device replacement”), which offers users rapid repair or replacement of
malfunctioning mobile phones and computers.
2 2 4 A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D
A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste
In the spirit of the only-the-names-have-been-changed-to-protect-the-inno-
cent disclaimer, I have devised pseudonyms for three people who played critical
roles before, during, and after the events that I am about to relate.
Bubastis is the Princeton-educated benevolent ruler of a Baltimore-based
sultanate — a larger-than-life man in full, intellectually and physically, despite
his expertise in “lean investing.” He has been a friend to me through two failed
marriages and multiple domiciles, plus various crusades, inventions, reinven-
tions, heart and brain issues, chapters, and episodes, not forgetting fluctuating
net worth. Our friendship, however, has entered a froideur stage, given the
episode I will shortly describe.
Niarchos is obviously Greek but less obviously has Asperger’s — in fact, my
best and only Asperger’s friend. He also was a Wall Street tech analyst similar to
the one described in The Big Short, Michael Lewis’ 2010 nonfiction book that
closely examined the leadup to the 2008 financial industry meltdown. Now
retired, he is learning to play classical guitar, and has committed to performing
at my funeral if I pre-decease him.
La Petite Princess, mentioned earlier by that nickname, is my fun, feisty,
frisky, fantastic, fashionable, fastidious, fantabulous, and friendly girlfriend of
six-plus years. Also, curious, smart (Columbia: BA, University of Pennsylvania:
two MA’s), an art lover, independent, wanderlust-y, and, not surprisingly,
petite. As for her nom de guerre: The first book that she gave me was Antoine
de Saint-Exupery’s classic 1943 Le Petit Prince.
On the night of July 16, 2016, I attended the grand, halcyon-like wedding
of the son of Bubastis, held at his uncle’s vast horse farm/manor home, located
in an area inhabited by the grandchildren of 19th-century robber barons.
The host is a legendary horseman and savant/investor in new enterprises. He
is also, not incidentally, one of my CEO interviews, as well as one of Maryland’s
most important angel investors.
The wedding and its reception served as the setting for one of the most
painful episodes of my life. For the occasion, I was properly dressed in a white
linen jacket, not dissimilar to the ones worn by my two favorite Men in White
— Mark Twain and Tom Wolfe.
It was a glorious evening for the son of Bubastis’ wedding party. On the
A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D 2 2 5
30-minute drive to the event, I engaged in a nonstop monologue directed at
La Petite Princess. As usual, I had not slept for nights, if not weeks. My spiel,
as best I can recall, was expansive and elevated, informed by a twilight zone of
delusion. Behind the wheel, I drove the posted speed limit, but my brain was
racing 120 mph.
When we arrived at the party, I hyper-engaged everyone, socializing both
frenetically and promiscuously. My behavior was not attributable to drugs —
I was taking only heart medications — and I consumed a mere two glasses
of wine all evening. While I won’t share details of my actions, I will note
that, towards the middle of the party, they prompted La Petite Princess and a
woman friend of Bubastis to tell me that they were confiscating the keys to my
car, causing me to hyper-spaz, freak out, and super-emote. In turn, I told them
that I was not leaving until the keys were returned.
“Love has, at its best, made the inherent
sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest.”
– K A Y R E D F I E L D J A M I S O N , An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
Around midnight, I pretended to go to the event’s outdoor spot a pot, and,
instead, hid in the nearby woods. Eventually, everyone left the party except for
the newlyweds, who frolicked in a stream that flowed through the estate. For
the next several hours, I attempted, unsuccessfully, to sleep. Finally, I gave up
and around 4 a.m., walked past the lone car in the field — mine — and started
the eight-mile trek to the closest town. After a three-hour bucolic walk through
a beautiful stretch of country, I arrived at my suburban destination and called
a cab for the 25-minute ride back to my apartment.
Around 10 a.m., I fell asleep. About an hour later, La Petite Princess was let
into my apartment by the doorman, confirming for herself that I was still alive,
but, significantly, leaving without a kiss. Several hours later, she called to plan din-
ner for that evening, informing me that Niarchos would join us for the occasion.
However, instead of dining together, La Petite Princess and Niarchos initiated
what amounted to an intervention, aided by Bubastis, and the trio escorted me
to the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital.
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My first day in the clinic, a nurse or doctor would ask, every 30 minutes or A B I P O L A R G A L L E RY
so, “Do you have any suicidal thoughts?” Over the next few days, they contin- CLOCKWISE
FROM TOP LEFT:
ued to ask, but less frequently. In truth, I had never considered suicide, even
when the most vitriolic divorce attorneys were bludgeoning my soul. Estée Lauder:
Her obsessive-compulsive
The Hopkins mind mechanics started me on a cocktail of drugs, includ-
fixation on faces created
ing lithium, which, they noted, would not produce any discernible effects for an empire.
several months. I spent almost three weeks at Phipps. On my final day, I was
Kay Redfield Jamison:
visited by Ray DePaulo, the clinic’s director, who informed me that Edwin The queen of bipolar
Warfield 4.0 was Bipolar 2.0. (By the way, I knew of Ray through my CEO Mark Twain:
interview with his nephew Alec Ross, author of Industries of the Future.) Late in life, he suffered
During my clinic stay, my second wife’s second (or third, I forget) attorney from “volcanic rages and
nasty bouts of paranoia,
tried, and failed, I later learned from Niarchos, to serve me papers related to and he experienced many
our divorce. My good fortune ran out almost a year later, however, when yet periods of depressed
another attorney representing my second wife had me served with papers in indolence, which he tried
to assuage by smoking
the men’s room of Baltimore’s Center Club. Yes, the men’s room. I was hosting cigars, reading in bed, and
an event at the club called City Genius that highlights Baltimore’s innovators, playing endless hours of
change agents, and disruptors. Luckily, the process server was gracious enough billiards and cards.”
–from the website
not to disrupt the purpose of my restroom visit — its due process, so to speak. biography.com
My initial reaction to my Phipps diagnosis was that it was a collective mis-
Theodore Roosevelt:
diagnosis. Of course, like many aspects of WASP culture, the subject of mental “Hypomanic on a
health invites — no, demands — a certain denial, a topic best swept under mild day.”
the oriental carpets or saved for the obituary. My clinic stay, I reasoned then, –Kay Redfield Jamison

paralleled Jack Nicholson’s experience in the film version of Ken Kesey’s 1962 Ernest Hemingway:
“Bipolar disorder, alcohol
novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — someone who was not mentally ill,
dependence, traumatic
but, rather, someone seeking an alternative to prison. brain injury, and probably
Eventually, though, nudged by the gentle persuasion of La Petite Princess, I borderline and narcissistic
personality traits.”
gradually began the process of coming to grips with my bipolarism, a period of
–Dr. Christopher Martin,
self-reflection regarding the many chaotic and manic vignettes and chapters of Baylor College of Medicine
my life — in short, my longtime pas de deux with the disease.
My symptoms probably first manifested 50 years ago via bouts of adoles-
cent hyperactivity. My mother’s solution to these was to ask me to creosote
a mile-long fence; my father’s was to ask me to mow our 50-acre front yard.
This may explain my subsequent aversion to all things related to the country,
including my mother’s cherished fox hunting. Next came a five-year stretch of
2 2 8 A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D
teenage drug dalliances that can, perhaps, be attributed to self-medicating my
condition. During the following decades of adulthood, I probably hoped that
the squash and excessive exercise regimen that I engaged in would reset the
dopamines and stifle the mania. Simultaneously, another telltale indication of
the disorder persisted: insomnia. Bipolar brains never sleep.
Not forgetting the spells during which I felt an intense need for isolation —
antisocial timeouts. These may have reflected the Maserati-like machinations
of my unquiet mind. The non-manic me loves people, while the hypermanic
me prefers solitude — the yin-yang of my bipolar brain.
A Maniac Scattering Dust
Three bipolar episodes — two major, one minor in nature — bear mentioning.
Revisiting them has been part mea culpa, part self-help exercise. Given the foggy
memory of time elapsed, a WASP inclination towards opacity, and a familial
stigma of mental-health issues, my recollections are sketchy. Apparently, I have
consigned their most sensationalist details to the cerebral dustbin in order to
ease my pain.
I dismissed these manic episodes at the time each occurred as extensive and
unwieldy dreams-cum-mental-obsessions wrapped around seemingly unend-
ing bouts of insomnia. Dreams last at most 20 minutes; my bipolar incidents
lasted for days. Insomnia was my mania’s petri dish, cultivating and nurturing
the mental machinations. There were no timeouts in my warp-speed brain.
All three incidents were driven by varying degrees of mania; depression never
entered the equation. And, again to varying degrees, they bear a common
thread: creation arose from chaos, albeit chaotic creation, including a 200-page
book and an amateurish stab at installation art.
In each case, I self-isolated, locked myself down. I ate sparingly and saw
no friends or family. In my bipolar cortex, life’s functional rituals disappeared.
No sex.
Devastated by the crashing and burning of my digital media company,
Local Business Network (LBN), and crushed by the pending scorched-earth
divorce from my first wife, in March 2002, while living alone in a loft in West
Palm Beach, I embarked on the first of these manic sessions. It lasted 10 hyper-
active days and sleepless nights, during which time I cranked out a 200-page
A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D 2 2 9
manuscript for a book to be entitled The Perfect Merger: The Warfields and the
Wassersteins. The book you now hold was written with the aid of lithium, pro-
duced at a pace of approximately one page per day; by contrast, The Perfect
Merger, written without the benefit of lithium, was generated at a rate of 20
pages per day, resulting in an astounding 120,000 muddled words.
The 2005 book Bipolar Disorder for Dummies states that a manic session
should have at least three of the following symptoms:
• Markedly inflated self-esteem or grandiosity
• Decreased need for sleep (for example, feeling well rested after three
hours or less of sleep)
• Excessive talking or the need to talk continuously (pressured speech)
• Flight of ideas: when thoughts flow rapidly and shift topics rapidly and
indiscriminately — and/or the feeling that one’s thoughts are racing
• Inability to concentrate and being easily distracted by insignificant
external stimuli
• Significant increase in goal-directed activity (socially, at work or school, or
sexually) or significant physical movement or agitation (aimless activity)
• Excessive involvement in risky, potentially self-destructive activities,
including sexual indiscretions, unrestrained shopping sprees, and
optimistic investments in pyramid schemes
Chalk up an almost perfect score for me.
As chronicled earlier, Bruce Wasserstein’s private equity firm was the lead
investor in LBN. With The Perfect Merger, I attempted to interweave the his-
tory of Wasserstein’s family with the history of mine.
Some of the chapters about my family included in this book were created
in their nascent form in The Perfect Merger. Regarding Bruce himself, I chroni-
cled his role in some of the go-go 1980s major mergers and his co-founding of
a successful boutique investment bank in the 1990s, while also examining his
approach to the art of his deal. At the time, I was a prolific reader of business
books, including Wasserstein’s 2001 Big Deal: Mergers and Acquisitions in the
Digital Age. Additionally, I explored the career of playwright Wendy Wasserstein,
Bruce’s sister, whose 1989 The Heidi Chronicles won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Part self-therapy, part guilt-assuaging for the failure of LBN, the book proj-
ect ultimately served merely as creative catharsis; in truth, it never crossed my
2 3 0 A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D
mind that it had even self-publishing aspirations. Its writing also probably
kept me from indulging in dangerous behavior and hamster-wheel activities.
Without this word journey, my daily dosage of malbec and unisom would
probably have increased; dangerous sexual liaisons may have occurred.
For a week and a half, words served as my safe harbor, my salvation, my
solace; words comforted me.
Once this bipolar trip finally concluded and my brain recalibrated, I started
to reread the manuscript, a truly painful experience. I had produced only a
string of manic-driven semi-non-sequiturs. Without hesitation, I assigned its
fate to the dustbin of history via the shredder.
After eight months of relative mental tranquility, I again decamped to one
of bipolar hell’s innermost rings, sparked by the completion of my beleaguer-
ing divorce. My memories of this second episode remain fuzzy, its details tak-
ing on an aura of abstraction.
Around this time, I vaguely remember an uncharacteristically voluntary
doctor’s visit, perhaps engendered by my continuing regimen of sleep depri-
vation and a 25-pound weight loss. My doctor’s guesstimate diagnosis: “situ-
ational depression.” Wrong. Most bipolar individuals are diagnosed with the
disorder within 10 years of its onset; mine took close to 50 years. Perhaps
another example of WASP declinism.
No one ever suggested to me that I was bipolar, and if anyone suspected that
was the case, he or she never mentioned it. Meanwhile, no blood or DNA test
exists for the disease. Its exact cause remains unknown, although a combina-
tion of genetics, environment, and altered brain chemistry may play roles.
My go-to creative platform for my second manic episode was art. My unquiet
mind always quiets when I enter a museum or gallery. Over the decades —
especially during my 1977-1978 study of the art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art
in London, when I traipsed through the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate
Museum, the British Museum, and the Wallace Collection — I have loaded
my mental mainframe with images of thousands of artworks: paintings, sculp-
ture, furniture, installations, antiquities, and more.
Many of these elements came into play when I embarked on a frenetic,
weeklong art project — not that I have ever pretended to be an artist — that
took over my entire apartment: over the floors, on the walls, up the stairs. It
A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D 2 3 1
was part collage, part assemblage — 3x3-foot photo montages composed of
dozens of small, detailed, close-up 4x6-inch photographs. (Think: rudimentary
versions of David Hockney’s photographic collages.) I used hundreds, if not
thousands, of images that I had previously shot of West Palm Beach, as well as
new ones I made from my collection of art books.
Robert Rauschenberg’s combines, which incorporate everyday objects into
paintings, and the collage and assemblage work of West Palm Beach artist
Bruce Helander, served as inspirations. (I became familiar with the latter’s art
when LBN moved into the loft that he had vacated.)
The mid-1950s/1960s Washington D. C. Color School — abstract paint-
ers such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, whose art explored the optical
effects and transcendent properties of color — also figured into my crazy-quilt
creation. Not forgetting the American modernist painter Oscar Bluemner.
In truth, all of the “isms” were represented in some manner: Romanticism,
Classicism, Impressionism, Symbolism, Pointillism, Fauvism, Cubism,
Constructivism, Futurism, Vorticism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Abstract
Expressionism, as well a dollop of Pop Art.
Finally feeling finished — or maybe just physically and psychologically
spent after a week’s worth of frenzied artmaking — I collapsed, eventually
returning to my quotidian life. Soon thereafter, a tennis pro introduced me
to the woman who would become my second wife. It took a day and a half to
clean up my apartment to make it date-appropriate. In keeping with my WASP
nature, I did not share my recent manic episode with her or anyone. My sane
mask took over. Bipolar client privilege.
Since my 2016 bipolar diagnosis, I have taken lithium religiously every morn-
ing: before coffee, shaving, and checking in with La Petite Princess. Lithium
deserves credit for bringing to my life both mental and relationship stability. My
insomnia persists, but not to the same degree; my mind has quieted. Ad meliora.
The third incident — which occurred in January 2018 — while serious, bore
only a passing resemblance to the aforementioned twin tornadoes. Instead,
it can be best characterized as an extended dream-like state. Clinically, it is
known as hypomania, an elevated mood that lasts for a few days. Mania lite.
It doesn’t create functional impairment, but nonetheless proves challenging for
relationships. This time around, music was my metier.
2 3 2 A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D
My son calls me a “faux musician,” an apt description given that I play music
(guitar and piano) only that I compose — no cover versions — excepting a six-
month period in my 30s when I took up the cello with the limited goal of learning
how to play the Bach cello suites. And I studied music theory for two years as a
teenage student at Milton Academy. As an adult, I have composed/played music
primarily during excruciatingly stressful times, particularly when a marriage has
degenerated into a pernicious state — music as solace (well, music and malbec).
Now, some pre-third episode background: As my second marriage disinte-
grated from 2013 to 2015, I wrote more than a dozen songs, and in early 2015
I headed to a small West Baltimore recording studio to make an album, Day
Blue — acoustic singer/songwriter material whose lyrics generally address love,
longing, and self-reflection, while also examining my feelings on subjects as
specific as Baltimore, my daughter, and my stroke.
Weirdly, the album’s third cut, “Starry Night,” serves as a pre-diagnosis pre-
monition that my brain was on bipolar bypass; the song is inspired by the off-
the-charts bipolar painter Vincent van Gogh. A snatch of its lyrics:
It’s a starry night
Hold on tight
Meteors a-flight
Van’s gone mad
Brushstrokes flying
Colors crying
Go, go, Van
Go, van Gogh
Throughout the album, I sing while accompanying myself on acoustic gui-
tar or piano, with support on some tracks from several local musicians. Tracy
Beer handled the trickier guitar parts. Tracy, it turns out, figures curiously into
my family history. In July 2014, I placed an ad on Craigslist looking for a part-
time writer to cover commercial real estate for citybiz. Tracy responded, and
we met for a lunchtime interview at a popular local restaurant (we had never
A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D 2 3 3
met previously). As we chatted, Tracy asked me if I knew that his father had an
affair in the late 50s and early 60s with my mother. I replied yes. Ultimately,
we became good friends. No doubt, my mother Carol and his father Bob are
amused by this turn of events.
Ryan McBridge, who I discovered playing at the Indian restaurant where I had
my last dinner with my second wife, contributed sitar, while also serving as pro-
ducer. The rest of Day Blue’s musicians were sourced from Google and Craigslist:
Charlie Rutan on acoustic highland pipes, irish tin whistle, uilleann pipes, and
electric pipe; and soulful back-up singers Shaleese Slater and Tim Slater.
Here’s where the bipolar-lite episode finally kicks in. Two years later,
home alone after La Petite Princess decamped to Costa Rica with a girlfriend,
I was seized by an urgent and unshakeable fantasy: I would book midtown
Baltimore’s Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, home of the Baltimore Symphony
Orchestra (BSO), to perform the Day Blue album in its entirety.
One of the defining symptoms of mania — and in this case, hypomania —
is a “markedly inflated self-esteem or grandiosity.” That certainly describes my
Meyerhoff delusion. Over the course of nearly 24 hours, I feverishly fussed over
my imagined stage debut: its setlist, stage design, and participating musicians,
among other things. For example, I plotted to use different props for different
songs: a yoga mat would help illustrate “Gandhi Man”; a coffin for “Stroke”; a
prayer rug for “Africa.” I would reassemble the recording session “band,” but I
also pondered hiring members of the BSO for added accompaniment: perhaps
a cellist, a harpist. And with only about an hour’s worth of music, I agonized
over whether or not there should be an intermission.
Quite likely, my proposed gig was incited by a real-life precedent, buoying
the possibilities that mine could happen, too. Wall Street businessman Gilbert
Kaplan — he founded and published Institutional Investor magazine — amassed
a fortune that allowed him to fulfill his fantasy of becoming a conductor, and in
1982, at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, which he rented, he defied skeptics from
the musical community by leading the American Symphony and Westminster
Symphonic Choir in a performance of Mahler’s idiosyncratic Second Symphony.
Obsessed with the piece, Kaplan went on to conduct it more than 100 times, and
twice recorded it: first with the London Symphony Orchestra, second with the
Vienna Philharmonic.
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However, unlike Kaplan’s feat, this less-prominent publisher’s Walter Mitty-
esque idyll evaporated after a mind-bending day, mercifully curtailed, I sus-
pect, by lithium.
Vincit qui se vincit.
After carefully considering my life-long signposts of bipolarism, possessed
of a clearer understanding of the disorder through my reading of Kay Redfield
Jamison’s books, and with the staunch support of La Petite Princess, I finally
have cast aside my WASP decline-ism and now publicly come clean concerning
my condition.
My Heart Has Its Reasons
The weekend of July 11-12, 2020, was meant to be a non-eventful continua-
tion of the COVID-19 lockdown imposed in Baltimore. La Petite Princess and
I were happily ensconced: her bingeing on Masterpiece Theater series such as
Poldark, Sanditon, and Beecham House; me finalizing changes to this book while
coordinating an upcoming Warfield CEO Interview with Wendy Perrow, who
heads AsclepiX Therapeutics, a biotech company incubated at Johns Hopkins
University’s School of Medicine.
Around noon that Sunday, for no apparent reason, I began to feel chest pain
— not overly acute, closer to heartburn than a heart attack. With Warfieldian
tolerance, I thought, this, too, shall pass. It did not.
Me being me, I Googled “heart attack” and up popped:
• Sudden severe chest or upper back pain — often described as a tearing,
ripping, or shearing sensation — that radiates to the neck or down the back
• Sudden severe abdominal pain
• Loss of consciousness
• Shortness of breath
Bingo.
I called my friend and cardiologist Jim Porterfield, who advised me to drive
to nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital’s emergency room immediately. I complied.
After being admitted, I was whisked to the hospital parking lot, where, for the
next hour, I was tested for COVID-19. Result: negative.
By 3 p.m., I was in surgery. Seven hours later, still unconscious, I was
wheeled out of the OR with 14 inches of sutures running down my chest, held
A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D 2 3 5
together with Kryptonite super glue (its actual name). Diagnosis: an aortic dis-
section, which, according to the Mayo Clinic’s website “is a serious condition
in which the inner layer of the aorta — the large blood vessel branching off
the heart — tears. Blood surges through the tear, causing the inner and middle
layers of the aorta to separate (dissect). If the blood-filled channel ruptures
through the outside aortic wall, aortic dissection is often fatal.”
Well, not fatal in my case, at least.
I spent four days in the Hopkins ICU. The prevailing coronavirus lockdown
meant no visitors were allowed, which was fine with me given my worse-for-
wear condition. Most unfortunate post-op effect: excruciating pain whenever
I coughed or sneezed. It felt like being punched repeatedly by Muhammad
Ali. To partially alleviate the extreme discomfort, a nurse gave me a “heart”
pillow to clutch against my chest, thereby diminishing any jarring movement.
Meanwhile, I used a walker to make my way around.
Mercifully, my brain appeared to have emerged unaffected by the coup de
coeur. By contrast, in the wake of my 2014 stroke, it took two-plus insomnia-
filled months for my mind to reset.
I returned home less than a week after this most recent health “episode,”
and as my pain dissipated, I reached the point where I could dispose of the
heart pillow; soon thereafter, I set aside the walker. Week three at home was
heralded by a Zoom-arranged micro intervention by my daughter, son, and
brother, who urged me to banish malbec from my life, noting that wine did
not exactly serve as an appropriate chaser for the lithium I have taken since
2016. Considering that I did not consume alcohol at all for the first 36 years
of my life, I had zero trouble replacing malbec with pineapple juice — no need
for 12 steps or a stay at my father’s alma mater, Ashley Addiction Treatment.
Gradually, I resumed work, conducting or producing Warfield CEO inter-
views, addressing daily citybiz responsibilities, and, not incidentally, continu-
ing writing this book. More cerebrally, I spent time reflecting on the trifecta of
heart and brain emergencies that I had endured in less than a six-year span: the
stroke at the Maryland Club, the bipolar meltdown at the wedding reception,
and the aortic dissection.
These most recent Warfield Adventures — file under “personal” rather than
“professional” — merely strengthened my determination to live up to my
2 3 6 A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D A D V E N T U R E S O F W A R F I E L D 2 3 7

mother’s eternal mantra: “Oh, bloody hell, press on.” Time for the resurrection
of Edwin Warfield 4.0 — or maybe it’s 8.0. I’ve lost count.
As I finished this book, I found a link to an article that described the power
behind storytelling. It asserted that most people will experience some sort
of adversity during their lives, and that, despite these trials, humans have a
remarkable ability to recover, become more resilient, and share their experi-
ence. Telling our particular story, the piece pointed out, allows us to truly own
it, and sharing it enables us to use our journey to help others who are struggling
with theirs. A strong, emotional autobiographical story, the article’s author
discovered, can be a powerful palliative.
None of this surprises me. What started as therapy 18 years ago has ended
as a wonderful adventure filled with childhood memories, exciting people, and
new discoveries. My adventure is the adventure of everyone — our heritage,
our struggles, our visions, and our stories. While this book may have started as
a gift for my son, it has concluded as an unexpected journey of healing for me.