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

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.

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 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.

All the drugs I’ve taken for most of my psychiatric life — except for that brief contact with bupropion — have been anticonvulsants. And I’ve actually been okay, oscillating between mild hypomania and no hypomania at all. Remember, I started psychiatric drugs because of depression, which hasn’t happened for more than a night or two since I started treatment.

Then somehow I got into the (hypo)mania that wouldn’t stop. I’d take 6 or 8mg of clonazepam and still be awake all night. Spending massive amounts of money in luxury stuff like $250 headphones or a 160gb iPod. So we finally entered the strange world of atypical antipsychotics. I had learned a lot about anticonvulsants, but this is brave new world to me.

For a while I though they were horrible drugs that silence the chatter inside your head. 1.5mg o risperidone made me smart — as in shutting out all other stimuli that made it difficult to concentrate on the smarter stuff. 2mg made me a bot.

We’re phasing risperidone now and introducing Seroquel. Like with risperidone I’m quite liking the effect — which is very different — but I’m not at the final dose yet. OTOH, I’m still on risperidone, so I might be on the right track regarding antipsychotics.

I’m getting pleasure waves around 6PM everyday, and my first theory was that that could just be the Seroquel (which has a half-life of 7 hours only) wearing off and leaving the 4mg clonazepam that’s still on my daily cocktail. But, hey, I’m on minimal doses of Seroque, and that’s supposed to hit your H1 receptors first, which could mean I’m only getting a sedative — or maybe it’s enough for the antipsychotic effect to kick in — and no one in the world can tell. And I’m on risperidone as well.

A snippet of the book-in-progress:

 Triangular wheels have always been much more entertaining, and when some of their scent managed to find its way down to the lowly lands of earthlings, they have even been some of a chick magnet. I’ve always been desperately interested in things that are way too complex for me to handle superficially. I basically lost the only real intimate relationship I had with a woman to functional programming, and I shall not bore you today with the fascinating intrincacies of Bird-Merteens calculus, Martin-Löf types and Girard logics because I wish to drone on to an anecdote that’s much more relevant to the case at hand because it involves directly atypical bipolar mania in all of its atypical manifestations, with atypical grandeur, atypical delirium and borderline atypical psychosis. [...]

I NEVER SHOULD HAVE WRITTEN THIS POST. I was manic, trying to drug myself out of it, and I used broken, terse english that recquires extra reader attention to get the point. Antpsychotics are not nootropics. Risperidone won’t make you smarter. I addressed these points on a comment, but this has become the primary driver of traffic to this website, so it should be STRESSED OUT.

Risperidone makes me smarter.

This is not the first time a drug is introduced in my cocktail for circumstantial reasons and has deep, nontrivial effects. Apparently antipsychotics make me smarter, and since I’ve been taking more of them than I should — even though they make me depressed and I’m only supposed to take them for two weeks ending thursday — I’m switching to Geodon, which is supposed to work the same, not mess with your hormones (making me smelly and even more girly) and be a mild antidepressant too.

So, wait, is this just for bipolar people who were really really smart to begin with, but had their wits fogged down by the illness (something which I have felt), or is there smart sauce in antipsychotics which is being kept from the general population as part of a giant conspiracy?

I think it’s pretty much obvious from the phrasing which version I subscribe to, but what if more people are just fogged down and can be cleared up with antipsychotics?

Is this another “Psychiatry is underutilized” rant? Yes. Is there even such a category? It seems so .. obvious, so generative. Anyway, more young people who feel their (even mild) emotional problems have fogged their brilliance over the years should consult psychiatry.

And that symbol in the title is a bad attempt at a turnstile.