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

@TechCrunch: “How Many Silicon Valley Startup Executives Are Hopped Up On Provigil?” even though “PROVIGIL’s only approved use in the U.S. is to treat narcolepsy“. Duh, shouldn’t they be on Ritalin for the improved goal-directed activity? I mean, in principle, Ritalin should be the drug of choice to turn a nerd into an executive. Pick the right illegally used legal drug, for the sake of the widow’s son!

But really, get off my lawn, kids. When I look at the backlog of antidepressants banned because of their recreative abuse, I fear for the meds I actually need for a condition (ADHD) that might not be recognized as a valid illness by the relevant pharmaceutical control authorities.

I’m assuming a lot of implicit context here about the Jargon File and its place in internet lore. The relevant context is that the ESR curatorial intervention has been deemed reckless and sometimes plain delusional, most infamously with the invention of Aunt Tillie. A significant subset of geeks and hackers have come to resent ESR’s self-indulgent pretense of representing hacker culture adding significant content not backed by external input and even inventing a much-maligned “Hacker Emblem” vaguely similar to a table with dots. There’s an ongoing complaint about misuse of the Jargon File’s influence, thinly covered by the addition of early-hackerdom cartoons to random places of the glossary.

First of all, it’s worth mentioning each edition’s definition of “hacker”:

1996 New Hacker’s Dictionary:

[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in `a Unix hacker’. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example. 7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations. 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence `password hacker’, `network hacker’. The correct term for this sense is cracker. The term `hacker’ also tends to connote membership in the global community defined by the net (see network, the and Internet address). It also implies that the person described is seen to subscribe to some version of the hacker ethic (see hacker ethic). It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to describe oneself that way. Hackers consider themselves something of an elite (a meritocracy based on ability), though one to which new members are gladly welcome. There is thus a certain ego satisfaction to be had in identifying yourself as a hacker (but if you claim to be one and are not, you’ll quickly be labeled bogus). See also wannabee.

The ESR-curated Jargon File 4.4.7 changes the “membership in the global community to the following:

Ritalin has failed to inspire me to do my current job.

Ritalin failed dramatically at making me concentrate at the task at hand today — which is just expanding a summary text I had written into plain english portuguese. My mind’s all over the place and I keep doing useless stuff though I should finish this as fast as possible to earn brownie points with my boss — given that I’ve lost a couple of brownie points in the last two days; nothing dramatic.

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 did it again. Why did I do it again? This shit’s not safe in my hands.

There’s this scene in “Fear and loathing in Las Vegas”, the movie. Raoul Duke was paranoid that the cops might have found his secret stash of … pineal gland. Dr. Gonzo inquires further. That’s supposed to be the best ultraconcentrated dope, and you’re supposed to take just a little droplet to trip for days on end. Dr. Gonzo goes and takes everything, and starts having a huge bad trip. Duke just looks at him and says “Look at your face. You’re about to explode.” He’s kinda pissed that Gonzo finished up all of his stash at once, but he’s also concerned about his voyage buddy, so it averages out to being unconcerned. In the same cynical voice he starts to ramble.

“You took too much, man. You took too much, too much.

Don’t try and fight it you’ll get brain bubbles, aneurysms

You’ll just whither up and die”

all while Dr. Gonzo is apparently swimming on his bed or something.

I did it again. I took 10mg Ritalin straight — how long ago? Eleven hours ago. When the focus thing started to warble out, about say, four hours ago I took 5mg more. Yep, I one-upped myself. I’m just not safe around this stuff. And I didn’t really accomplish anything nearly proportional to the megadose I did — I should have just had 5mg and be satisfied with whatever I could accomplish with that, but somehow I wanted to do this faster, do this better, and now I’m fucked up, fucked up.

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.

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 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.