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.

Ritalin is supposed to partially counteract the effect of antipsychotics, which is maybe why I’m not fully enjoying the bliss of pax seroquel. But this is how the story goes: confronted with hard deadlines and a lot of work to do, I got a prescription for Ritalin to use as cocaine-with-a-PG-rating. I was to watch closely for signs of mania, which never happened: I just got the ultrafocus effect, which in turn led to suspecting ADD (by Jove, how much more fucked up can I be?) — which would explain a lot of my workflow troubles and a suggestion of using ritalin daily, taking 5mg as  I woke up.

Maybe I’m supposed to wait for some kind of stable seric level to come up, but that seems hard to imagine in a drug with such a short half-life. The first time I took the pill just after waking up I had some of the focus effect, some of it counteracted by just how damn sleepy Seroquel makes me.

Anyway, it comes down to this: I have a controlled-substance upper and a controlled-substance downer and some space to play. Instead, I took some ritalin yesterday and managed to write some of the report that is due tuesday, though I didn’t feel the hyperfocus effect and wonder whether I’d been able to write all that without it anyway, and I didn’t take it today hoping I’d stop at some point and get to work.

Which I didn’t, so I’m taking 10mg ritalin tomorrow hoping for the hyperfocus effect and toning down my clonazepam tonight to attempt ritazepam for intellectual purposes (as opposed to being paralyzed in a dancefloor) tomorrow.

This is all a mess. This drug cocktail is a mess, and I’d rather store the remaining ritalin for special circumstances and trying to reach pax seroquel again. But I already promised a first draft of that report due tuesday…

And I never skateboarded again after my first taste of pax seroquel. And I wonder what I’m aiming for, which would be a lot easier to figure out without that pesky day job constantly interfering with my existential search for the plane of immanence and, you know, the bipolar/dr-dp-NOS/ADD/whateverelse this psychotropic cocktail is trying to counteract. I’m engaging in self-destructive behaviour in order to stay alive and try to bootstrap me out of it. Which is my link to the next topic at hand.

I’m assuming everyone has read Notes from the Borderlines by now. In a nutshell, there’s a specific kind of narcissistic, often bipolar male that always ends up involved with borderline women. I know it from experience, as I’ve never been involved with someone who didn’t end up diagnosed with borderline personality disorder eventually (or had a diagnosis before we even met). 

Now, I’m a narcissist at heart, and while I have a sometimes fragile emotional shell (most of that vanished as soon as I started psych drugs, probably from the clonazepam) I’ve got a strong personality core, enough that I expect the world to revolve around it. Borderliners are satellites at core, and they need to gravitate around a strong personality core. Now while they hit on men with strong personalities (most of whom are bipolar anyway — it’s a small world), it’s the bipolars who will respond because they need the support when they’re down.

Borderliners express this need in a confusing contradictory manner, but after a while, you learn how to decode them — to the point you start decoding people who aren’t hitting on you because part of the borderliner/fascinating-bipolar-personality dynamic seems to be happening. This happened with this specific woman (whom I’ve pseudodiagnosed as a borderliner given her entire relationship history). 

Anyway, nothing productive could come out of a hypothetical situation where I became involved with this particular hypothetically borderliner chick, given that she’s into her 30s and has some adult needs I can’t fulfill. But she tells me she’s seeing a 35-year old divorcé who makes her laugh. This should be a normal romantic involvement if it wasn’t for the entire fragile-personality-docking-into-protective-arms dynamic that I seem to see into it. But who can blame a angsty  30-year old woman with a fucked up relationship history, a similarly unstable job situation — scrobbling the earth for multiple sources of income, as a tattoo artist or an internet café attendant — for engaging in self-destructive behaviour in order to stay alive and (hopefully) bootstrap herself out of it?

So I’m into psych drugs and she’s into relationships. Somewhere lies a sane, productive drug cocktail/relationship situation that’s actually fit for us, but the world keeps getting in the way of control.

But at least for me, I don’t think I’m on a downward spiral, even though my meds are getting to be harder and in higher doses. I am sorting out through a sea of issues and accumulated pain through the treatment for my actual bipolar disorder. I just keep wishing this friend of mine would snap out of borderliner behaviour, maybe because it’d be a proxy for me snapping out of being in a fucked up med situation because I have to deal with the world. Well, that’s just how narcissistic I am, wishing for a friend’s wellness because it means some sort of escape from my own world of pain.

Unfortunately, she has to deal with the real world and her own world of pain as well. I just have to force my heart, nerve and sinew to serve the Will that says “carry on”.