Nootropics

Fixing the brain chemistry to eliminate counter-productive fears. This is something I'm working on, in a sense.

I've been fond of racetams for some time now. Piracetam in particular. Cheap. Effective. And totally harmless. Seriously, there's no euphoria and no sucked out dry feeling the day after stopping and there's no building a tolerance to it. It just works with increasing efficacy as You keep taking it. The only problem is to have it working at all, You seem to need to take it every day at regular intervals (and for about a week before it starts to kick it). Very inconvenient.

Adrafinil, and the whole ampakine family of smart drugs, excite me, but adrafinil definitely burns You out all by itself, with a little happy rush at the beginning, a feeling one could get used to, in not the best of ways. And developing a tolerance is an issue as well.

Huperzine A rocks my socks. It's an acetyl cholinesterase inhibitor which leads to more acetyl choline being around the brain, which lead to more acetyl choline doing the synaptic talky thing it does. Huperzine A is also a NMDA receptor antagonist, as are many of our fond dissociatives: N2O, ketamine, DXM, etc. From anecdotal something or others (let's just take that Fifth here, yeah), I've observed that NMDA receptor antagonists foster an introspective mind-set, but since Huperzine A increases instead of decreases brain activity (like most recreational NMDA receptor antagonists) the thoughts You have actually stay put long enough to be transcribed.

More on this later...Tired now. There is still no substitute for sleep unfortunately.

Breaching the Gap

I've generally been planning these before I type them. That doesn't seem to be a sustainable way to output. More free-association! Less inhibition! (I know You didn't think that was possible for me.)

When did I last update? A week ago perhaps? The week before? I'm not sure. Time stretches and shrinks. A voice in my head often jests "Time is the joke!" And now the laughter is with me not at me.

So many people. So many conversations. So rich! As Joe D said on the car-ride back from shore-house "Ah, this is what it is to live a full life!" Indeed.

For the first time in forever, I like talking again. Though I still falter: stutter and stumble, apologizing and addenduming. It seems words always fall short of what I mean to say.

Ted Smith said to me this weekend in our year long conversation on a hilltop which was someone else's couch a funny word I'd never heard before. I asked him what it meant and he said he wasn't sure but it sounded like what he meant to say. Ah! That's what language is. I see.

To say that humans are social creatures seems a half-truth, because if we truly were, wouldn't we have a better way of communicating than speech? To say You know what an honest someone's thinking based on his words is like saying You understand the vastness of the ocean by looking at a waterfall. Deeply moving, chilling, awe-inspiring, mood-altering. Yes, it can be all things, but it's still just the faintest echo of the infinity going on inside someone's head.

To art! To art! To filling in the gaps.

I long to fill the spaces between our experiences with music and body language. I want, I need (!) to learn an instrument. When will I make time for this?

Sleep less! Live more!

But I don't know, when do the diminishing returns start? (Maybe around this morning when I dropped a box full of ice and samples all over the laboratory floor?)

But we need to compare notes on the abyss of unknowing! Yes, mine IS as big as Yours.

Don't hold in. Hold each other close. (These words sing in my head stretched out over hours, trembling, weeping (which is not like crying but the overflow of limitless thoughts seeping out the orifices making the voice and body quiver) back and forth with the interruption of doubts threatening to sprout. The seeds of Melancholy: "Your imploring is insufficient!" she screams.)

You're safe; You're safe. You will have food tomorrow. You will have a roof over Your head tomorrow. You will be safe tomorrow. I don't know these things to be true any more than You do, but I know they need to operate as truths for us to move forward. Even though everything about us tells us otherwise. Our social structure. Our language. Our brain chemistry. We must over-come this.

Our biological evolution is not moving as fast as our technological evolution; so we must un-stigmatize the "unnatural." The natural is insufficient. We are animals with the potential for endless understanding trapped inside our heads.

Current Reading and Writing Goals

In my introduction(s), I was pretty vague, laying down justifications and lofty aims instead of, well, what I was meaning to say.

In terms of what I like to read and what I'd like to write, I'm interested in two different somewhat related ideas right now.

The first is how the big life questions and answers of more recent generations differ from the Q&A of previous generations. To establish something of a baseline, I'm reading books on comparative religion, mythology, and folk-lore (which have always interested me anyway). For the more modern view, I've been reading books on cults, conspiracy theories, and (as always) science fiction.

I'd like to realize this idea by writing about the shore-house, channeling through different guests and their counterparts at different points in time. The present colors these parties, but the past resonants through them. I thank everyone who filled out the shore-survey, as Your answers will greatly help me with this task.

The second idea is sort of the daughter of this first one, though it occurred to me before it. It's a science fiction story in which people have decided to answer the big life questions by linking everybody up to everybody else for one big collective consciousness. This post-human/trans-human non-sense has been done before; so, I'm trying to read as much as I can of the established genre to help foment my vision and of course, give hat-tips where hat-tips are due.

The current model for the global mind-meld is basically mental music that everyone can hear and play. This allows people to synch up via a sort of melodious biofeedback system.

If anyone has suggested readings for these areas, that'd be cool. Especially books on cults from a sociological view-point. So far the only book I've read on the topic was by an Evangelical Christian, Ronald Enroth, who was for the most-part un-biased, but fell into the occasional ejaculations of scripture.

The Call Only the Straphanger Hears

This post is not for the squeamish. Contains violent imagery.

I have this fantasy now in which I go to Penn Station dressed in Velcro-ed business attire and a Barbie mask both of which I whip off while running down the stairs to my train, revealing Celtic warrior wear underneath complete with blood, mud, and woading...What do You think?

***

With so many people tracing the same steps every morning (a costly habit in time, money, and energy), the daily commute seems like too great a source of power for cosmic forces not to tap. Riders, drivers, by-standers, and passers-by lose lives every year clamoring to heed the call of the Big Apple, without settling directly in her, justifying the excess of the suburban sprawl. And so in reverence to this hungry power, I lift my thoughts to it/him/her and sometimes I find she tempts me with the thoughts of strange pleasures, releases from the grinding ritual we perform, but really, I think, she just wants the thing acknowledged. She wants her her fetters pulled at and struggled in. She craves a physical manifestation of the maddening.

***

An unbidden fantasy flashes in my mind as I leave work to head straight home (why, in the greatest city in the world, do I make no pit-stops? why rush a return to my unahppy abode?). The hot surface of the street vendor's flat grill entreats me and demands answers. I find myself wonder: How would it feel to throw my forearm onto it? And in rich psychosomia, I experience the result, in my mind like a deep dream, and in my waking body as a faint pulsing echo. First it would sting, and my muscles would tense with the reflex of retraction. Oh no, but I would press harder, (as the Suburban Spirit bids). Besides, my soft skin would stick to the griddle, leaning my weight down would only make it cook faster, making my skin numb and unelastic. Ripping it off, pealing apart the dead pieces, I wouldn't feel a thing beside the trickling heat in the surrounding tissue. Oh, hmmm, and how would it look? First red, then cooked white, oozing with the remains of my subcutaneous layer, speckles of burned fat mixed with the metal alloy of the heating appliance. My ears buzz from inside: How would it sound? And a voice my own and not answers in an cheery sing-song: At first, like nothing. Then sizzling, sizzling, sizzling. Oh and how would it smell?! (I answer before I finish asking, simultaneous thoughts building and interweaving in anticipation.) Would burning flesh stand out in a city of a thousand foul and fetid scents and more? Side-walk and street traffic wouldn't even know the difference. Cooking body parts are cooking body parts. A norm. Nothing more than pork roasting. It would smell as it does now, I think, my mental flash reverberating with the present. I shiver and tingle. And the Suburban God and I laugh. Yes! It would be a good tease on the evening news, how long would it would take for anyone to notice anything "out of place" (provided I was a good girl about it and didn't make a show or a peep of it) with a young woman resting her arm on a giant hot plate outside a hospital?

Ah, but I'm fast-paced, hard-faced walking down the street in actuality. All pauses from the marionette motion pulling me forward make me queasy. What's to say stopping for a snack or drink or word are so out of the question? I don't know. It all seems to go in the same category as pushing my arm down on that vendor's grill. If I can't call attention to the absurdity of the situation, what's the worth in doing it at all?

It begins to rain, a New York rain, which is a sorry excuse for a rain. It's more like an aerosolized dead man's spit, against which umbrellas are less than useless, caught up in the wind and other people's faces. As I descend into the sacred subway station, hot air rushes me, blowing up my skirt, like the cloying rotting breath of a hundred horny old men. My head swims. I swear as I climb downwards, downwards, downwards, I can feel haphazard oily prickles on wrinkled rough skin brushing my exposed thighs. As the bile rises in my throat, (wishing to match disgusting with disgusting) I find that I have been beaten to it. Fresh vomit stands scentless at my feet, its acidic odor masked by the general decay and humidity of the station. It expresses my sentiments exactly. And somehow I feel as though my tiny prayer has been answered. Oh what a generous commute, to meet my every whim!

***

I hope to continue on with this ungelded narration. It's definitely part of a bigger weirdness.

Bodies In-Between

For those of You who don't know (which would probably be anyone reading this besides Kyle Pearce) my day-dreams basically consist of permutations on the lives of four people, tangled up in one over-arching story-line. The following scene involves a character I first met roaming the cereal-aisle for a break-fast food which would cut the roof of her mouth. Since then, I've been calling her MaC-E (pronounced like Macy), short for Masochistic Cereal Eater, and nothing more fitting has ever occurred to me.

She's very near and dear to my heart, as she's a toned-up/toned-down version of me in high school (the real high school me would be strangely both too boring and too unbelievable to worth writing about).

***

She didn't necessarily feel terrible about her body. No, quite to the contrary. She frequently brazened outfits which elicited various "helpful" tips from the school faculty. "Dear, You'd let Your natural beauty shine if You didn't wear such dark make-up," "If You want success, You have to dress for it." And even, her favorite, "Honey, You're leaving all the wrong things to the imagination." Why they thought she would take this advice seriously, why they thought her impression on her peers was of any consequence to her was, well, a rather steady source of amusement, and yet...

The television roared innocuous light and color in the living room. The modern family's hearth, she mentally sniped. A place of gathering. It was her mother's (second? third?) child. Absently blathering. Enunciation clear and void of regional origins. Each voice was like a baby without a navel. Unnatural yet universally appealing. However, this sterility was was necessary to travel clearly into the living rooms of boob tubes everywhere. Not everyone could afford the kind of speakers Mac-E's mother bought. Yet, despite their hefty price-tag, artificiality broke through. A reverberation on each sound, note, and syllable which reminded MaC-E to the point of distraction that this performance was not for her, but at her. To persuade her to keep watching, keep listening. To persuade passivity.

But she couldn't. She had too many questions. She questioned the motives of even the most innocuous programming: save-the-earth PSAs, commercial-less news programs, public broadcasting, etc.

She longed for interaction. She wanted a Q&A session for these gods of the glow-box. Like right now, she wondered about this woman dancing before her in quick cuts. Yes, You look wonderful from that angle, doing that, but how do You look when You sit down? Do You look like I do? Do You find that Your stomach ripples up unevenly, unpleasantly... unphotogenically? Do Your thighs spread out and flatten?...Is anyone really attractive from every angle?

***

This rough draft may be edited and re-added at later points...and certainly expanded upon, (suggestions welcome!) but first some reflections, and credit. This entry was inspired by a late-night (early morning?) conversation with Michelle Hutt while watching Shakira music videos...

***

At the heart of the body-image problem are two simple truths:

1) The longer You examine a human body, the more flaws become apparent.

2) The only human body an average person gets to observe with any scrutiny is his/her own.

Thus, the saturation of the media with increasingly undressed persons is a double-edged sword. Sure we get more human bodies to scrutinize, but only after they've been sanitized for Your-viewing-pleasure.

In conclusion, let's make awkward porn...

A Defensive Spasm and a Messy Table of Contents

Even as I write this, I feel a pull from within trying to retract each statement as I put them down.

I hesitate. I feel embarrassed, foolishly nostalgic even, for a time, when I didn't care what other people thought of me (but then I didn't care about anything at all).

Why am I fighting the gravity of my inner workings, which demand their privacy?

The egotist in me, would rather I ruminate in solitude, free from any influences which might alter some mystical "natural" course, which he holds on the highest pedestal, because of course my thoughts are so unique (!) and brilliant (!) they should find enlightenment all on their own when and where others have failed for centuries...Well, it's obvious why this voice should be silenced.

Then, what of the shy new girl in my head? Who fears judgement and rejection?

Well, to her I say, in all Your efforts to escape insult, You will have simply escaped notice.

When I was in VA, working for the government, trying to take a safe route, trying to find security in career and conscience, I found a new mantra breeding malaise in my mind: "If You let this life be everything, it will be the end of You." And I knew that it was true.

So I hope this can be my something else. Or part of it. Or the beginning of it. Or What Have You.

***

Entries will include not just my thoughts, but thoughts of characters who've been stirring around in there. Please don't hold me to their opinions or conflate my actions with theirs (or anyone else's in my present material life). Some are more similar to me than others. Many are fragments of people who shaped my environment without shaping my mind, and I've found I'm as compelled to explore their psychology as I am my own.

In addition to probing inward, I will set my brain-tentacles to tackle more practical matters as well. In particular, I intend to spend some time explaining scientific phenomena, as I hope to sharpen this skill to bridge the gap between science and the general public.

I want to give an honest glimpse of my mental geography, as squeamish as the effect may be, for both You and me. Therefore, because I strive to leave my thoughts unfiltered, I will label my entries with warnings according to any graphic content they may contain.

Up-dates will be daily (except on weekends, possibly leading to double entries on Sundays?) but brief.

Introduction

So I was just wondering what You were thinking...and maybe how You were thinking it...

Is it linear? Each thought after the other culminating in self-discovery. Or is it a sort of snowballing? A circular process which builds some ideas while coming back to others. Or does it seem to roll out on a loop? A main motif guiding the progression while others simple push it forward. Or is it more like a play? In which personal philosophies interact like characters in a play, each with their own strengths and weakness: the fates favoring some and thwarting others...

I suppose it's like all of these things, in-between them, and more.

What stimulates certain mental patterns to dominate some times and not others.

Some external impetus is usually to blame, but sometimes not. The mind is a disconcerting creature like that. Ungoverned by natural laws. (A chaotic neutral, really.)

Alone inside our heads, it's hard to get a good gage on the productivity of others' thoughts.

How far along is everyone else with answering the big questions in life:

Why am I here? What should I be doing? When will it be enough? And does anybody really like me?

The only way to get a glimpse is to absorb what others share. Yet, despite the urgent quest for this essential knowledge, we tangle ourselves up in the complexities of what would be the most mundane of life's questions. (“You like me; right?”) And in an attempt to win each other's favor, we dress ourselves up in what we think we'd like to see...A maddening cycle of well-meaning obfuscation increasing the already unsurmountable gap between human minds.

The ever-widening chasm and rising walls each side: it's enough make me want to rip my clothes off and demand “Everybody touch me!”

And so here I do my part and share. (But also that as well.)

The Abstract to this Experiment

Every hallmark birthday, I've made a resolution. And by channeling through the importance of the one "holiday" which is personally my own, I've made them stick.

When I turned turned 14, I stood up to my parents and peers and forsook meat. At 21, I completed the process and gave up animal products altogether.

In the past, I shrunk away from leaving my imprint on the planet, (by trying to live sustainably), and today, (finally satisfied that I am worth the resources I consume) I hope to make some ripples in the minds of those who oddly show interest in my opinion. (I don't feign popularity.)

So this year (and from now on) I hope to explain to You (Your patience is necessary yet voluntary) what I was meaning to say when I rambled at You.