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

Don’t.

Seriously. It’s my own “agenda” to defend, my own mountain Everest to climb, my own life pursuit. It’s also a nondescript umbrella term whose meaning I’ve been and probably will be shaping implicitly in my writing.

Sure, you could hypothetically try to infer a cloudy idea from what I’ve been saying and try to follow it. But hey, trying to shape oneself into a dayvan cowboy is not something a dayvan cowboy would do. It’s not just the chutzpah, the deleuze-ish ultraphenomenology of crashing down the plane of imannence, or even the zen idea implied by the very idea of “don’t try, just do” implied in this paragraph.

It’s not like there’s a crowd to worship the idea either. But I worry about myself, about being blinded by the idea that I have some big secret to share. Something like Being alive: a primer needs to be fueled by a sense of self-assurance that is both positive in that a dayvan cowboy should just dive into things as if they’re liquid — they always are — and negative in that begins to convey a sense of closure. As if I had it solved, or at least knew I was heading into the solution.

I registered this domain like, what, 2 months ago? and my PageRank with Google implies an exposure I don’t see reflected in my viewer stats. So I started comparing it along blog blog journal s. As a measure of comparison, Wikipedia and the New York Times are a 9. The scale maxes out at 10. Jason Kottke and Nick Carr are a 7, Waiter Rant is a 6 and The Last Psychiatrist is a 5; I’m a 4 and annoyingly, Violent Acres is below me at 3. PageRank is bunk, dude. V. from Violent Acres has been at it for years, consistently kicks ass and is guaranteed to have controversy in her comments. She’s in a way someone I admire, as she’s been living out her life pursuit in her very own way — she’s far, far from being a dayvan cowgirl — and what’s more, consistently avoided letting herself indulge in her own identity. This is the girl who went (voluntarily and with a plan) homeless to pay off debt.

Here’s to the fucked up. The crazy ones. The misfits. The chronic wallflowers The suicidal. The manic. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. And while some may see you as the ones with weird issues, I see life. Because sometimes, just sometimes, the people who are fucked up enough to think they don’t fit in this world, Are the ones who change it.

1. Trinity said it best. The Matrix cannot tell you who you are.

Just as I stole the general structure of the opening verse from an old Macintosh ad, I stole this soundbite and others from Alone from The Last Psychiatrist. Credit where it’s due: it’s another blog blog journal ger hipster quoting the Wachowskis about the same context I do. I’m also gonna steal some soundbites from Jerod Poore, the mastermind behind Crazy Meds! All of these might be used way out of context. Do read these guys. They kick ass, know more about the psychostuff than I do and make for general pleasant reading. But let me cut to the chase and repeat it.

The Matrix cannot tell you who you are. The Matrix cannot tell you who you are.

The first step out is acceptance. Self-acceptance.

Some of the most fucked up people I know are people who invest all their energy and all their soul into passing. Passing as what they’ve grown to believe normality is. Passing as what their parents expected them to be like, passing as what their peers have always been like, passing as someone in their condition is supposed to be like. These are the people who can’t give a shred of an answer when you ask them who they are. They are, um, what people are. Normal people.

These mayonnaise posts might be annoying from the point of view of the reader and sure hurt my googleability and reader attention, but there’s so much context involved in most post and it’s kinda tiresome introducing it as-needed, not to mention forcing anyone who really wants to understand this story to decipher through the breadcrumb trails scattered over short-ish, this-is-now posts.

My psychiatrist. My psychiatrist is a psychopharmacology geek who has studied under who he consider his Master, a psychopharmacology geek from Spain. I mean, he went all the way through med school, but he still holds a special place to this Master.

What being a psychopharmacology geek means is that we’ve gone through a lot of meds trying to optimize my experience. Most psychiatrists will give you lithium or Depakote and expect you to cope — actually bullying you into coping and keep taking your meds — and while that does work wonders, statistically — as in preventing relapse for N weeks, where N is a function of the size of your research grant, I for one know that I would have lost a lot in life if I had been in Depakote monotherapy, even if that meant avoiding a few hypomanic flip-outs.

He’s actually cool with me doing some psychopharmacological experimentation — not taking other people’s drugs, I guess, though I never had the chance, but fiddling with my doses in general and being discretionary about my clonazepam and ritalin in particular. I did earn his trust by being responsible, extremely well-informed and being fantastically aware of my moods so psychopharmacological experimentation can lead to optimal experience. I think he’s glad I don’t have major psychological issues that interfere with him being a psychopharmacology geek working with psychopharmacological optimization.

No, really, this was way unexpected. And I’ve had no stinkin’ antidepressants either, just old’ school anticonvulsants; this week I took my first non-anticonvulsant med and it was an antipsychotic. I’ve been depressed all my life, mostly the dysthimic, “soft” kind of depressed comparable to the chinese torture where they tie you down and let a tiny droplet of water fall on your head every ten seconds.

But with some random lashes of the real stuff too. And then, when the last straw broke, maybe a year ago, a psychiatrist (whom I shall refer as my shrink) diagnosed a case of “soft” bipolar II and gave me anticonvulsants with a soft, very soft antidepressant edge. Then I fliped out. Not like now, anyway. They never expected the spanish inquisition that even though I’d get better from the depression and have longer and longer periods of stability and an improving overall functioning (a better social life, an actual job), I’d be getting these progressively higher crises of [hypomania.

Thinking back, I've had a couple of [hypo]manias before treatment. Guess I am bipolar after all. I shall refer to them all as manias; apparently you only get to call them manias if you spontaneously self-combust from the sheer self-destructive behaviour, and as long as you have a shred of consciousness you don’t get to be manic.

I have a shred of consciousness. I’m here at work, where everyone’s wearing a suit and I’m supposed to be preparing for an important meeting in two hours, and I’m in my “KILL YOUR POP STARS” t-shirt setting up the blog journal for the book I’ve been writing for a few weeks now. But I noticed that. I’ve not gone psychotic, I’m just having fun.  Because contrary to what jaggerian though proposes, I can always get what I want.