20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0% packet loss
Oh, cool, that means I have internet access. You wouldn’t believe how much downtime I get, specially on, wow, weekend nights, when I really need it.

My meds. Many people think medications are like drugs you take to help you cope instead of addressing the actual problem. The actual problem, of course, is the actual problem they have, because everyone seems to think every existential search is the same. Heck, dr. Freud thought every existential search was the same, and that’s why I was always distrustful of psychologists, even though my parents tried to force me into one (and managed to, for one consult) — they’d tell me what my existential search was. I was in my tweens, I had no friends, and that was the obvious guesstimate about what my existential search was, and they’d try to help me cope with something that was never really the problem. I’m just beginning to see what the problem is, and that’s because all the fucked up nonlinearity in my head is being sorted through — not the old nonlinearity that forms my memories, my personality and the fears I’m trying to address, but the new nonlinearities so I myself can keep up with my thinking and both search through my past and the problem, but also try and build a life from now on.

I’m currently taking an antipsychotic, an anticonvulsant, a benzodiazepine (which is actually a mild anticonvulsant whose side-effects everyone seeks) and a stimulant. First there’s Seroquel, which is quetiapine fumarate, but mentioning the generic name is pointless because it’s still patented. Then there’s lamotrigine, best known abroad for its original brand name before it went generic, Lamictal but I’ve really taking made-in-india Lamitor and made-in-Brazil Neural. Neural is such a stupid name for a med.

Stream of consciousness today — I apologize for the bad style. I fucked up big time when I  tried 10mg ritalin knowing I had skipped one dose of anticonvulsant. I had just run out and thought Seroquel was strong enough everything else was just an add-on. I think it’s a full hypomanic flip-out. I do know Ritalin competes with Seroquel for receptors. I’ve already taken six miligrams of clonazepam — which sure did chill me out — and two susie-Qs, and I’m still insomniac. Usually one 100mg seroquel will knock me out for 10-12 hours. 

I do hope the extra antipsychotic stops this on its tracks. If it doesn’t  I’m upping the anticonvulsant. But I don’t have the time for that, I’m supposed to function as a normal human being or get fired. 

On a second thought, I should up the anticonvulsant right now.  Maybe a Depakote, but if I’m depressed tomorrow I won’t be able to function. Lamictal has that antidepressant effect which could get in the way of stopping mania in its tracks. Maybe Risperdal?

Jesus, self-medicating is hard. I should have gotten an algorithm in case of a manic flip-out, but I wanted the Ritalin enough that I downplayed the pro-manic effects of it at my last season. 

What’s worse, as soon as I feel stabilized — no chaos attracting my brain even if ultrafocused on ritalin — I’ll still take ritalin, though in much more moderated amounts.

If the pre-psychotic “chaos attracting my brain” is the problem, I think I might do half a 2mg Risperdal. Seroquel is way too expensive to keep one-upping it in hopes of getting okay. OTOH a full 2mg Risperdal steals my entire soul. But hey, 1mg Risperdal plus 200mg Seroquel might be way too much antipsychotic and might numb my soul far worse than 2mg Risperdal did — even though Seroquel is much smarter.

I’m at the diametrically opposed state of mind as of the last post. After two hours of sleep, a moderate (5mg) dose of Ritalin about seven hours ago and a small (1mg) dose of clonazepam right now, I’m focused, sitting straight, eyes focused at the screen — I feel like a robot.

I’ve just been given strict deadlines to complete a strictly defined workload. There’s next to none creativity involved, so I should be able to complete it no matter how sharp my cognitive skills are at the moment.

Instead, even when at the ritalin zen ideal of being calm, emotionless, focused, I keep looking for complexity — I keep expanding the scope of the report I’m supposed to be writing.

Even at zen state, my brain seeks chaos.

I am not actually emotionless. I’m dazed and confused, somewhat depressed over my apparent incapacity to perform normal tasks, afraid of utter general failure in life. I also need to talk to someone over coffee. Coffee, not alcoholic drinks. But emotions don’t seem to surface. I’m calm and focused, as in that Radiohead song spoken by a voice synthetizer. Insulating outside noise with Einstürzende Neubauten’s “Silence is sexy” — the album. I’m fucked up big time as far a seric levels of medications go, and I need a plan to go back to pax seroquel and yet be able to use moderate amounts of ritalin to get this project done — or I’ll get fired.

The plan right now is to clonazepam myself out of hypomania — the fire within that seems to seek complexity and return tonight to the normal schedule. I’m hoping the anticonvulsant dose I missed caused the big disruption and I’ll be able to reach pax seroquel by tomorrow, and microregulate my mood/productivity on ritazepam.

What if Van Gogh was a mapmaker?

I bet he could put real art into those maps, but it wouldn’t really matter.

I’ve gotten to hate meta-considerations on a blog, but this is somewhat relevant in that it conveys information. I mostly dropped the ball on dayvan cowboy the blog because the whole idea of dayvan cowboy the book was conceived while manic and not noticing just how overcrowded the entire genre is. I did have the deleuzian angle going for me, but behind the bullshit, surfing the “plane of immanence” applied to my own particular story basically meant “trying to feel really — but really, deeply alive”. Most people don’t realize that to be alive they have to go for the plane of immanence — in a nutshell, constantly redefining themselves in order not to let the identity you contructed get in the way of actually experiencing the real. Whether going for deleuzian lingo and risking getting shot both from the Badiou and the De Landa camps further encumbered the pipedream project of a book I couldn’t manage to consistently write remains an open question.

But I still have a blog, you know. And letting it rot for such a long while owes in part to not wanting to admit the book project was a bad idea in first place and in part to pax seroquel. Sometimes you’re just too blissed out to care about projects — too alive in a way that skateboarding down the plane of immanence wouldn’t describe, but still too alive. But then I started to take some ritalin, which makes me more anxious and ends up with long, shapeless intellectualization of your issues, sometimes taking the form of long, weird dreams or some mild dr/dp while you try to analyze the background of what the hell is going on.

Sometimes a chat partner will illuminate a slice of it. And that’s how I got to sit down and write a damn blog post.