// μ = m // dayvan cowboy // music is math

I ended up working all night long to finish work due today. I’m still expected to get the comments on a previous version of this tomorrow morning and have a meeting about it all in the early afternoon. It also takes me a two-hour commute to get to work.

I accidentally skipped my meds after staying out all night friday. My drug schedule is all screwed up, not to mention the 15mg of Ritalin I took along the last 12 hours.

So I can either take the 8:40 bus and get there at about 10PM (and risk my colleague not being there with the comments) or take the 10:30 bus and get there about 12PM. I’m supposed to maximize for un-sleepiness and information digested and processed by the time of the meeting.

Should I just skip my antipsychotic again? All reason points to no — I need to counter all the craziness and be sane by tomorrow. On the other hand, if I take my antipsychotic and my benzodiazepines I might not be able to wake up at all, no matter how loud the alarms. And I skip the benzos I might be sleepy and get that kind of “hidden anxiety” that gets me deep into the DR/DP twilight zone.

Oh fuck, I’ll just take all my meds as prescribed this time. Work be damned.

(Edit: I just took twice the antipsychotic “to make up” for the one I missed, for an “extra unscrambling factor” and just for the heck of it, to knock me out reeeeal good. ‘Cause it’s a bittersweet symphony that’s life)

I’ve gotten to hate meta-considerations on a blog blog journal , but this is somewhat relevant in that it conveys information. I mostly dropped the ball on dayvan cowboy the blog journal 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 blog journal , 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 journal post.

Nah, I don’t mean the red pill stuff, or the associated political analogy. I have derealization and depersonalization symptoms. They’re mostly flashes, but sometimes a really hard crisis happens. It’s even often really pleasurable,  as an amorphous wave of pleasure. Once in a while, it’s some specific, disturbing fantasy that feels wonderfully perverse at the moment. Like the time I first heard “Luscious Apparatus”, being by my own in the dark waiting for the bus — I felt I could actually carve poems into my body since it wasn’t really my body and its skin was thick enough I could carve it out without bleeding.

  I have strong memories of that particular crisis whenever I listen to that song, and even really mild DR/DP flashbacks. And that was a pleasurable one, but DR/DP can be terrifying, and I had a really strong case of the bad ones this tuesday.

I was just leaving home for work. Having missed my bus, I had to walk for ten minutes to get to the bus that takes you to the subway. And then I lost most of my sense of context — I had a very very thin string tying me to my sense of self and didn’t know where the hell I was. All I knew was that I had to walk for ten minutes and get into the bus that takes you to the subway to get to work, so I did that in an automatic sort of way while I tried to get my sense of self back, trying to find music on my iPod that would remind me first of my childhood, then late teens and early 20s. And even when I had a clear picture of who I was, I didn’t feel like I was who I was. Thirty or fourty minutes had already passed, I was already on the bus and knew how to get to my workplace, and still I didn’t recognize anything or felt like I knew who I was.