In Memory of My Father Reviews from London!!!

We’ve started to receive reviews from UK based publications surrounding the release of In Memory of My Father!!  IMOMF opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London for a two-week run on June 6, 2008. Here is a new review from Film Review… a nice one!! And below that one from MAXIM…  Please tell all of your UK friends to come check it out!!

In Memory of My Father
4 stars

The title might suggest a straightforward drama of love and loss, but it’s clear from the opening scene – which sees wannabe film-maker Chris (Jaymes) pointing a camera straight in the face of his Hollywood producer father as he breathes his last – that it’s all a bit more complicated than that. For Dad’s (Austin) dying wish was for his youngest son to document not just his death, but also his wake and the impact his passing has on his nearest and dearest. And it’s not long before said wake descends into chaos – with Chris attempting to juggle his filming duties with his overwhelming feelings for his ex-lover Nicholle (Tom) and the demands of his new teenage girlfriend Christine (Lakin); his brother Matt (Keeslar) enjoying a passionate – if brief – affair with his father’s young widow Judy (Greer) and their messed up sibling Jeremy (Sisto) embarking on a drug-fuelled, faintly homoerotic journey of self discovery with new best friend Eric (Cole).

As an increasing number of characters join the raucous fray, relationships between them become confusing. It’s made even more muddled with the discovery that the boys’ uncle stole away their mother years previously, making cousins half-siblings and muddying the mix even further. But this just adds to the enjoyable mania of the piece and, as the action takes place over the course of one traumatic day, you can’t help but be swept along with it.

But for all the mayhem – of which there is a great deal – this is more than just a snapshot of dysfunctional modern family life. Writer/director/star Jaymes has brought a great deal of acerbic humour and edgy characterisation to his script, and the pace never lets up for a second. Yet underneath it all there’s some genuine heart; Jeremy’s burgeoning friendship with Eric is surprisingly touching, while Chris’s pain at both his father’s death and his mother’s betrayal occasionally crack his sarcastic mask. In fact, all of the boys carry their fathers legacy through their messed up relationships with women – having witnessed their mother leave for their uncle, and their dad subsequently hook up with a string of unsuitable women, it’s not surprising that they are all struggling to make valid commitments. 

As the movie boomerangs between laugh out loud humour, high drama and moments of genuine pathos, Jaymes keeps his hand expertly on the rudder – even more impressive considering he’s also taken a starring role – so keeping the tone balanced throughout. His cast are excellent and clearly loving every minute, Jaymes and Sisto in particular embrace their characters with gusto and it’s impossible not to be caught up in the moment with them. All in all, it’s a small film with a big reach, a great antidote to the summer’s blockbuster onslaught that effectively showcases some of Hollywood’s most promising young talent.

Film Review - U.K.
Nikki Baughan

As strange as it may seem… IMOMF is getting reviewed in England’s Maxim Magazine… They only place three films in the printed version per month and ours is one of them!! Here’s a blurb from the review.

In Memory Of My Father – 4 stars
If you like your comedy dark and your film families truly demented, Christopher Jaymes’ dysfunctional gem is for you. A Hollywood producer has died and his youngest son Chris has been asked to film the ensuing wake. The result? Familial carnage so funny and so ridiculous you’ll be weeping tears of joyous blood. Thanks so much Maxim!! Look forward to seeing you in London!!

Day 24 - Mis-Construed Reality

It has been the first time I have treated a weekend as a weekend since I can recall and I am obviously not capable of doing so.  It’s now Tuesday and I’m barely getting started with the productivity I ended the week with and have spiraled down into a place that now I have to beat myself out of to re-momentum-ize.  The pills are not necessarily making it easier… or maybe they are?  That’s the challenging thing to decipher.  What the hell are they doing?  That depends who you ask.  I have one friend that helped my confidence plummet as he explosively confirmed…

“Oh my God, they’re working.  Such a difference.  Last time we met, you left the meeting and we all looked at each other wondering if you were on amphetamines.  You were all sweaty and wouldn’t stop talking and yeah… they’re working.”

“Right… thanks.”

And for the next three days, that statement lived in my head.  Recurring thoughts ruminating over how insane I’ve appeared without having any awareness of my previous appearance for how long in my life?  How many people have been perceiving me in such a manner?  And what the hell are they seeing me as?  An imbecelic and somewhat deranged water hog crossbred with an aneroxic, amphetamine-driven wild boar with the mouth of Ritalin-induced goose?  Okay cool.  I guess maybe I should stay on these things then, huh?  

And that drives my curiosity further…  I begin questioning the people that I feel safe enough to expose my narcissistic speculation and it all points at the same thing.  Over the past year, I seemed like a fucking lunatic.  Why?  Lost my grasp.  Why?  Relationship demands beyond my capacity… beyond my ground… beyond my logic, my fear, my confidence, my everything, but driven from a desire to make it work, similar to a diabetes patient’s desire for glucose or a bipolar person’s desire for lithium… it was massive, but beyond my scope.  So, I started to collapse and here we are.  That’s what love will do.  If you look at the distraught moments of your life, how many of them are caused by a relationship?  Hard to talk about antidepressants without bringing love and relationships into it… we’ll get into it, but for now…

Do I notice a difference?  When I have a good day, I think it’s helping.  When I have a bad day, I think it’s not.  Hard to say this early on… but I think I’m not scaring people away as intensely as I was a few months back, but that’s something people don’t tell you until much later.

 

Day 23 - The Hand-Feet of a Hamster

Talked to a friend today who was having a tough time with a cyclical issue that consistantly returns surrounding her career.  A huge amount of work spent with overwhelm accomplishment that she succeeds to pull off while those surrounding her tend to get the credit and the reward.  When something is so cyclical and recurring there is no denying that you are creating it, that you in some way have decided that this is how it will be and until you understand the crappy agreement you have allowed yourself to settle for, the contract you have made with yourself to say… ‘Yes, this is how it’ll be for me… I’ll take it.’  You will continue to succeed at fulfilling this unconsciously accepted goal.  You may not want it or like it in any manner and wish so desperately for it to be different, but that is irrelevant as you have scarred yourself with this subconscious tattoo that will continue to live on inside of you.The conversation started with that customary greeting of ‘how’s it going’ and was responded to with that response that we tend to hear so often.  

“Same shit.”

A few reaffirming sentences validate the commraderie of living in that state.  

“Same shit, just a different pile” as another friend said to me the previous day.  Somehow that quickly stimulated something along the lines of… “Like a hamster on a treadmill.”  And then it hit me.

The feet of a hamster seem more like hands, don’t they?  Kind of?  The hamsters I remember holding years ago seemed to have long, lanky toes that were more like stiff little fingers.  I started imaging those little hand-feet (we’ll call them) having to grab onto whatever it was that they were walking on, with every step.  Then I began to realize that those spinning wheels that they run on are not your average treadmill, as they are generally constructed with lots of cross bars instead of a flat surface.  A human running on a treadmill just clomps along, thoughtlessly pounding upon the spinning surface, but for a hamster it’s not so simple.  They don’t have big flat soles pushing the bars of their treadmill, but instead their little hand-feet have to grab onto each passing bar with meticuluous precision again and again and again without allowing their legs to fall between the cracks.  And it’s not like those bars are moving slowly, usually you can feel the winds a few feet from the cage.  Not only that, but the bars are passing within an inch of their eyes, distorting and blurring anything in front of them.  It’s an extremely demanding task on the hamster’s entire being…  imagine it… It’s like if you were forced to cross a mile long river hanging from monkey bars that were actually train tracks and the train was just behind you forcing you to travel at the speed of an amphetamine.

Grab… grab… grab… grab, grab, grab, grabgrabgrabGRABGRABGRABGRABGRABGRABGRABGRABGRAB…  and you can’t see shit, but you don’t feel safe closing your eyes.  Focus, focus, focus… the world is spinning in front of you, precision grabs, don’t slip, don’t let up or you’re fucked… and… whew… nice one.  Let’s go stick our nose on this metal ball over here so some water can spill on my face and I’ll try to swallow a bit of it before it gets dried up by the chemically-manufactured bits of crap they’ve covered my floor with making it so I can’t see where to avoid walking on all the shit I’ve made over the past four days since they last cleaned my cage.

I think these hamsters may not be getting the credit they really deserve.  Honestly, at the end of the day, how often do you hear people commending hamsters for what they go through?  But then again, at the end of the day… they are just hamsters.

Day 22 - Key Avoidance

 

Knowing that I had been given free reign to some degree to guide myself through the two weeks between the appointments with my psychiatrist, I did everything possible to avoid taking the next step.  Truth be told, I am waiting on some camera equipment to arrive so we can be shooting what happens with the proper format, instead of winding up with a bunch of various video to forcibly mush together at the end.  I guess the best way to put it is… the measuring is momentarily getting in the way of the measurement.  But only for a minute.  In the meantime, I will continue to avoid Lithium while cutting my dosage on the Depakote.  Something I am taking liberty on for the sole purpose of prolonging the shooting that will happen.  After that, I promise that I will not inhibit the momentum and I will not be taking liberty of any kind to alter the results and will stick to the absolute, unbending recommendations of the psychiatrist, or at least, stick to what I believe an average person would do.  An average person.  Such an insignificant statement that seems to be used far too much.  What the hell is an average person?  I can only postulate, however I find it hard to believe that a single person reading this thinks they fall into that category, yet all studies are based on that equivocal ‘they’ or ‘them’.

Understood.  Average is a basis of meshing a number of variables together to find the middle point and that the only way to deal with research aside from on an individual basis, however if your average is being taken from a pilgrimage of cerebral palsy engulfed pygmies how applicable is it to me and even if that same study was done on people just like me, how can you be assure that I don’t view them as cerebral palsy engulfed pygmies and demand not to be associated with such an entourage of equivocal ‘theys’.  

This is an important piece of perspective that we forget on a moment-to-moment basis.  We (a generalization based on my idea of the average ‘we’) seem to take for granted that information coming from external sources, be it the Internet, the television, the Gossip magazine or your friend’s mouth, is immediately factual.  The idea that the majority of information ‘we’ receive (in my generalized perspective) comes from an elongated line of interpretation doused with biased and impulsive opinion prior to arrival and yet, we thoughtlessly accept it as truth.

 

If it’s in writing, and especially if that writing is written by someone we don’t know… it must be true.  If someone on television speaks, then it’s unquestionable fact, even if it is reiterated as dialogue in a fictional movie, we believe… without looking further that it is relevant.  We have been trained not to ask questions, not to look further, not to remember that very little of what is being presented is being done prematurely or with an agenda for marketing something that in some way will be serving some other party.  And my point… Avoidance.  

I don’t really want to talk about feelings or emotions or what I’ve been going through, or look deeper into the alterations of energy or numbness that has been imposed upon me by the recent medication I’ve been ingesting… instead, I am harping on the idea that we will spend days and weeks researching our new computers, our iPods, our iPhones, customizing MySpace pages and circling the things we see in magazines…  We will spend hours in the mirror making sure our packaging is proper and days obsessing about how it’s not, but when it comes to putting pills into our body, we just shut the fuck up and swallow.

Everyone knows that there is a side effect to everything and everyone understands that someone is profiting off of our selective ignorance, but we quickly turn the cheek and head onward with the hopeful determination to find an out that may actually work…. an out that will lighten the load of responsibility that we have been granted without ever requesting… the responsibility to be a functional and happy and productive individual and somehow believe without question that we… on our own… as individuals… are enough.  

I am enough.  Do I believe that?  

It’s far too ambiguous for my acute thought process to comprehend.  It opens eternal hallways with doors that lead to eternal hallways, each with another image of what that means.  Of what I am and am not, of what I was or will be.  And within seconds, the spinning spirals and the halls become stairwells with bubbling-mirrored walls reflecting distorted images of yourself and your projected uncertainty, much like the mirrors in the Carnival Fun House that contort and twist while you stand on a metal circle that spins slowly with an occasional jerking twist.

When I get myself lost within this labyrinth of noisy, yet innocent deception I tend to be left with only a single option.  Avoidance.  The alternatives are stay lost within yourself and suffer… find the strength to pull out… or avoid it.  No one wants to continue to suffer and if we had the strength to pull out, we probably wouldn’t have got lost in the noise to begin with.  So there we are, inside ourselves and in that moment, and on comes a commercial for a medication that makes a case claiming that somehow it might actually give me some assistance in lightening my load and somehow it might even make things better.  And all I have to do is swallow it?  What moron would say no?  Because how do I know it can’t be better?  How do I know it won’t work?  How do I know what you’re feeling doesn’t feel better than what I’m feeling?  There are a lot of moments where it sure seems like it could feel better.  Is it supposed to be this way?  Is it me?  What’s wrong with me?  Maybe something is wrong.  And so on… 

Anyway, I’m avoiding the lithium and sticking to the Depakote until the new cameras arrive and that’s just the way it has to be for a moment.    

 

The Life of Lithium

Okay, so… since Lithium is pretty much the oldest drug used as a mood stabilizer I guess we should give it the respect it deserves and get to know it just a touch before ingesting it, right?  Now, I should make it clear that these history lessons should be thought of more as lesions than lessons, as I don’t have a research team working with me at the moment and I only have so much patience cross checking information… but here we go…

 At the end of the 1700s, the miners and the scientists came out of the ground with a mineral called petalite which contained Litium, however it wasn’t isolated to stand independently on it’s own until the early 1800s when electrolysis was imposed upon what is now known as lithium oxide.  And just to clarify, these Swedish scientists were not attempting to remove the hair from these minerals as these fall into the category of non-hair-growing minerals, and this form of electrolysis is when you stimulate decomposition by introducing the liquid or solid to an electric current.  Hello electricity… Hello what is now called Lithium Oxide, since we have not yet isolated Lithium… Let’s meet up and make Lithium cause maybe it’ll help people with their manic moods… and so here we are.

Before we get too far with this, I feel like I should mention that there is also a company called Lithia Springs Mineral Water who claim that in the mid-1800s the spring that they pull water from was used by a few doctors because of it’s high lithium content to treat alcoholism, opium addiction and other key issues that I’m hoping to face at some point in the near future, so I suppose I should hurry and get my order in when they start accepting them this summer.

Now, the real clincher of exciting knowledge… Lithium comes from the Greek word ‘lithos’ which means ’stone’ seeing as it was the only element in Group 1 of the periodic table that was from a mineral, where the other two common elements, sodium and potassium were discovered from plant sources.  The only thing more exciting than that is that Lithos is also a typeface made to resemble the geometric letterforms of Ancient Greek engravings and an article I found written in that typesetting went on to discuss the views that Ancients Greeks (or at least some of them) had towards mental illness, and a good majority of them viewed it as possession from evil spirits and used exorcism, which in some instances used physical beatings in attempts to drive the spirits away.  That said… would it be safe to say that one way to view Lithium nowadays might be that your psychiatrist has tossed you a stone to throw at your demons?

So then, from what I gather… our scientists got to work and throughout the late 1800s used lithium to treat a number of issues because they found it was effective at breaking down uric acid.   The most common disease being doused with miniscule bits of lithium at the time was gout, a disease where your body cannot properly metabolize uric acid, causing arthritis in the smaller bones in your feet (but not limited to those bones).  Uric acid was the Serotonin of it’s day in a way (popularity, I mean) and was blamed for many disorders, one of those being manic depression.  Apparently, a few doctors began using lithium to treat ‘mania’ throughout the 1870s, (mania being the manic state of bipolar disorder) as it seemed to sedate the patient from experiencing these hyper-enthusiastic states of sweaty-forehead coated euphoria.  So, on the one hand, lithium was being used to treat arthritis in the body and on the other, trying to induce arthritis in the mind.  Seeing that the pharmaceutical industry couldn’t patent that gentle little silvery-white metal known as atomic element #3, a significant budget was never spent on research and lithium began suffering from abandonment issues of it’s own until the mid 1900s.  

In 1949, John Cade so couragously began using extracts from pee that he took from schizophrenic patients and injecting it into rodents hoping to isolate the culprit agent that was causing that socially unacceptable behavior.  In experiments such as these, do you think that in order to see if one specific rodent seems to detach from reality to embrace a delusional, fantasy driven world, do you first need to spend time getting to know the rodent in order to properly observe the transformation?  If not, how do you truly gauge the schizophrenia they are acquiring from the pee injections?  And if they do seem upset, could it be justified that most anyone might get upset if someone was peeing IN them.  Unfortunately, Cade didn’t succeed at transforming the rodents’ ideological perception of themselves, but he did confirm that an isolated lithium ion tranquilized the rodents, and that was that.  He began treating hospitalized patients and published the first paper to be written on the use of lithium in the treatment of acute mania.  In 1970, the use of lithium was actually approved by the Food and Drug Administration, regardless of the fact that no one really knew why it worked.  That didn’t come until 1998.  

Researchers based out of the University of Wisconsin came to the conclusion that lithium promoted glutamate stabilization.  What is glutamate?  A key molecule in cellular metabolism.  Without getting too far gone with tons and tons of information, for now just think of it as this… glutamate needs to travel through the brain from neuron to receptor to keep things functioning nicely.  Too much glutamate between neurons gives you mania, too little gives you depression.  Lithium helps regulate and stabilize this, like a car wash for the roadways, only the suds seem to bind the car to the middle lane.  Or at least, that’s what everything seems to say.  Personally, I can’t confirm any of this as I haven’t started taking it yet, but it’s coming and the more I learn about it, the more my nerves seem to sputter and splinker and splunket.  Lots of unfeigned sp-ing.  Sort of like that nervousness you feel when the hooker jumps off from her straddle and rips the condom off of you, screaming out with earnest passion… ‘I just want to feel you’.  There’s an underlying fear-engulfed excitement, but the ambiguity of what’s to come slightly inhibits the enjoyment of your otherwise harmonious union.  Or at least, something close to that.

There are a lot of warnings and side effects and ’causes of death’ (more in the early life of the drug) that have occurred, but there are also a lot of success stories, so who would want to miss out on those odds?  You are supposed to have blood tests and thyroid tests and a few other tests before using it, and then again every few months being on it.  Did my psychiatrist demand that I do that prior to taking it?  Of course not.  Did yours?  How often do they?  Sadly, the inconvenience of taking the blood test would put off most people from taking the drug and is it really worth the risk of losing another taker who will most definitely be successfully sedated from that awful state of mania?  I have to stop now, I’m prematurely judging and my banter is just that until I have proven different by putting some time in on the drug.  Start soon.  Can’t Wait?

 

Day 21 - Insignificantly Functional Please..

 

Day 21

Every new drug sparks a newfound

alluring hope that maybe this next

gel cap is the one that holds the

mystical key to the life that

I’ve been waiting to begin.

Alright, so another day has passed and behind it all I have managed to understand the cliche that you always tend to hear.  I am not excited about much, I am not depressed about anything, I’m just sort of here and could easily pass through the day with my feet up and a drink in hand.  Don’t feel much of anything good or bad.  In my opinion, that is not a result that anyone should be yearning for unless you are in a state of chronic depression that doesn’t allow you to rise from the drool your face is engulfed in.

Each day that passes with this feeling (probably five so far) leaves me more unsettled as I feel as if life is passing with no given meaning.  This feeling could or should lead to depression, not salvation or liberation, or an idea of success within yourself or in your life, however I feel absolutely capable of sitting in this purgatory from one side of my mind while the other side taps gently with a subtle… ‘hello… hey over there… what are you doing?’  

Doesn’t it seem that anti-depressants would mean absolutely that?  Anti?  Not subpar… or subtly-ligh

ter… or slightly-numbed… but anti!!  Anti means opposing, the opposite of,  reversing or undoing, acting as a rival… If I think of the opposite of depressed I think uplifted, euphoric, inflated and so far what I find more than anything is somewhere in medical school they skipped over the definition of the prefix anti-, as all of these people that have been successfully aided, don’t seem anti-depressed, at best, they seem zombied or flat or insignificantly functional.  How about that?  

‘Hi… I am here to get a prescription for some Insignificantly Functionals, cause my friend says they’re really working for him.  I don’t feel that bad, but there are definitely days where I’d love something that might help me feel a bit more Insignificantly Functional.’

 

At least that description might be a bit more honest then ANTI-depressant.  It seems they got results far too quickly with early tests of Lithium as a sedatitve and gravitated toward accomodating that side of the bipolar-ness in depressived people, but generally doesn’t it seem that the real issue is not so much the up side of the BI- but the down?  How many people come into their Shrink or Therapist session complaining…

‘Oh fuck… I just… I don’t know.  I’m just so energetic and motivated and I don’t want to sleep because I

‘m so manic.  The inspiration drives me to forget to eat and sleep because I have such a strong desire to get everything done.’

Not so much.  The issue is with the down.  The side of the BI- that resonates a feeling more resemblant to death.  The side that doesn’t want to start the day, that feels hopeless, that finds unproductivity to be surpassed by the successful completion of each exhalation, as another inhalation is about to begin and it might be somewhat exhausting.  Doesn’t it seem like that side should be the side we become determined to drive away?  Don’t get me wrong… I understand the idea of regulation, and that removing the function or misfunction… or the dysfunction that occurs to create the manic is a proven tactic which can help diminish the degree of the ‘down’ in those patients that are decrepit-ly down.

Possibly this rant comes after researching Lithium and knowing that it’s success is more as a sedative than something that will be lifting me closer to vibrating joyous euphoria, and I’m a bit resentful that I’m going through with it, but I have committed to the project so I will have to stop whining and push forward with my own secret euphoria that will live just under the surface of my newfound friend.  Actually, not true.  I am hopeful.  Every new drug sparks a newfound alluring hope that maybe this next gel cap is the one that holds the mystical key to the life that I’ve been waiting to begin.

Alright then so… If you read the posts from a few days ago, you would see that my psychiatrist was ready to switch tactics last Friday upon my acceptance, and now I’m ready.  Tonight, I will drop down to 750mg of Depakote and then tomorrow I will go down to 500mg while adding 300mg of Lithium.  So what the hell is that gonna do?  Lithium…

I will do a quick post about the history of Litium later today, as enough is really enough sometimes and it’s our job to know when.

 

Day 20 - The Myth of Serotonin

 

Day 20

Jesus Christ… I can’t even remember to take the f***ing pill.  Each day it seems to grow further and further away from my memory regardless of the fact that I’m consumed with a project surrounding taking the damn things.  It seems that once tasks pass over that initial ‘new’ phase, they quickly fall into the category of regulatory day-to-day tasks that I have very-little-to-no desire to do.  It’s not even that I have a simple lack of desire, it’s that my awareness blocks it out so intensely that it becomes a non-existent task within my day.  Anything regular seems to be disregarded and avoided as I am constantly in search of something new and whatever the new thing seems to be within a given day, is the thing that I am focused and impassioned about.  This would work to some degree in a time where my only responsibility was to bring in fish for the family or if I was satiated in an adundance of such wealth that thoughtlessness was supported, but now in this reality.  In this reality, it is unacceptable, unattractive, unimpressive, un-, un-, un-…ethical even?

Anyway, I jumped up and threw 1000mg into my mouth for the fourth or fifth time and started the day slowly.  Motorcycle ride down to the Coffee Bean.  An hour of reading and writing and I came upon some amazing stories about the insignificant research that was done in the 60s which spawned the whole idea that Serotonin was a key component to mood stability or even worse… happiness.  Not sure what your take on Serotonin is, but my uneducated idea of it was that it was the chemical the brain secretes that stimulates the feeling of happiness, the thing that Ecstasy stimulates and Prozac regulates.  

That’s what my take on it was, but without going into heavy detail, the Serotonin theory was placed on the map in the early 60s which came from a book called ‘Recognizing the Depressed Person’.  The research done was quite minimal, however in the 50s they found that a drug called Marsilid was not only helping the lungs of tuberculosis patients, but also helping their heads.  They were apparently dancing in the halls with a euphoric joy and no one understood why.  They spent some time trying to understand what the Marsilid was doing and came to the conclusion that it was preventing the brain from secreting the enzyme responsible for breaking down Serotonin.  What was Marsilid… a derivitive of hydrozine…  What was hydrozine… a volatile alkaline liquid used in WWII to fuel German V-2 rockets, as well as, to make Marsilid for the patients at Sea View Hospital in New York.  

This stimulated the drug companies to go after the idea that mental illness of this sort might actually be a chemical imbalance instead of a psychological issue and Merck bought 50,000 copies of the book to distribute throughout the prescribing doctors.  In the meantime, they got to work on the Serotonin theory, which a very simplified version could be as follows… Serotonin was thought to act as a connector between the neural transmitters in the brain and the receivers around the brain and body.  The potential issue was that, in some people, a part of the brain cell known as the ‘reuptake pump’ was overactive with it’s capacity to clean up the available serotonin, leaving the receptors understimulated, leaving the person… depressed.  Possible solution… find a way to leave the serotonin there.  How did they go about it?  You don’t want to know… it’s vile and prehistortic and well…  basically, they injected rats with potential agents that might inhibit the serotonin absorption.  At which point, they would grind up and blenderize the rat’s brain hoping to find an agent that caused the left the serotonin alone and they did.  What was it?  Prozac.  And that was that… our nation was well on it’s way to becoming a society hopeful for an answer that would relieve them from taking responsibility for themselves.  But my God… if you can’t even remember to take the pill, is there actually any hope?  I guess that’s where the ADD comes in?  Technically, shouldn’t I be taking that pill first so that I can remember to take care of myself in all the other ways?

Over the past 50 years since the initial findings, research has increased but I’m not finding anything so significant based on much but projection.  The interesting thing is that all of natural medicine seems to follow in the footsteps of these findings and approaching them with their own techniques… but are they going for the proper core… which opens up the question that is far greater than we really want to open at this point… how much is about chemistry and physiology and how much is about mental strength and discipline?  Which leads to improper training of our minds and so on and so on… for now, let’s just pretend that maybe there is actually something to this medicine idea, just as the people dancing in the halls were experiencing from the rocket fuel they were ingesting.  There must be something to it… somehow… in some way.

Alright, I know that was a lot of information and not necessarily fun, so… I’m gonna leave you with just that for today, but on a personal note.  Can’t say there is any progress over here…  I’m still sort of a flatline… there is a bit of blockage on experiencing that bright, glowing drive that I sometimes have for life… everything is sort of acceptable… which in my opinion is unacceptable.  The spark in me is something I want and makes me feel alive and I will tough out this experiment, though there is a sensation of guilt in me that feels like I am sort of failing myself in certain ways by spending time inside of these illusory boundaries that I seem to be swimming within.

 

Day 19 - Logic Vs. Emotion pt.1

 

Day 19

Alright, so again… here we are, another day passing and I’m still lacking any significantly enjoyable vibrating life essense. I am fine, not lacking any thoughts or feelings, but they all seem to be a bit muted. I get subtle bursts of enthusiasm for the work I’m doing on this project, but the overall feel of the day seems to lack the drive that I tend to feel when things are good.

My biggest question of the day is surrounded by questions of parenting, as my friend came by with her kids, ages four and seven, I think and I watched them switch from excitement to tears to anger to smiling. Each thought, each emotion lasting for no more than it was entertained. If a tear came and it was embraced by the parent, it would sustain. However, if it was not credited it would quickly pass and move onto the next moment. This seems to be very much what we do to ourselves. A feeling arises and if we can’t seem to avoid embracing it, if we feed it with an iota of attention, it will sustain and potentially even expand. The more we feed it, the larger it becomes, the longer it sustains. I guess the simple trick is to realize that nothing we feel actually means that much and that we need to not reward our inner kid for having these feelings. Again, it places us back into the position of becoming and increasing our capacity to be more of a logic-based being, functional by knowledgable awareness that can overpower the reactivity that we habitually experience throughout any given day. Seems so simple, but for some reason, our brains generally become the follower to our emotional body. No matter how much our brains kick and scream, we seem to be enchained to that stubborn f-ing brat that lives inside, that has so much to prove. On the other side of the spectrum, we have that other grouping of people that tend to immediately disconnect from their emotional being and seem to have no recognition of it whatsoever. Either extreme seems to be less-than ideal. The first version torments us and the people around us, assuming they are aware of it and the second version torments the surrounding parties, while the disconnected person seems annoyed that they have to deal with any of it in any manner.

Logic vs. Emotion seems to be the largest battle that I face. My awareness always knows when the emotion begins to flail, but unless I am forced to be alone to deal with it, it’s gonna come out. And, even then, there are certain things that tend to build inside of me that even upon logically diminishing, tend to go into a storage facility in my brain waiting to be said… and they will be said, and generally and the most inopportune times against my better judgment.

Conversing with a friend of mine who is a month into a new relationship with an actress that is seven years younger than he. Two major flags from the beginning. First, an actress (or actor for that matter) tends to need a bit more validation than your average woman and live in a constant state of need. They are their product and their success is based on the buying and selling of that product. Powerful men (or even not-so-powerful men) hold the key to their success, validation and stability. They are hyper-aware of their aesthetic and their vulnerability level is somewhat accuentated by constantly being in situations where they are being judged moments after sitting in a waiting room with ten other girls that are of equal or similar beauty. After years of being a heterosexual man in this town, you become acutely aware of this demeanor in women and you approach every one of them with a bit more distrust.

His current situation is heightened by the fact that she is experiencing success at her green age of 21 and her experience levels within relationships is next to non-existence. Hours of conversation over these past few weeks has resulted in his successful strategy of going against his skeptical fear-driven thought process about each episode that arises. He slowly proceeds through each reactive moment and then makes the appropriate alterations to not inhibit the progress of the relationship. Acknowledging her inexperience, forces him to overcompensate his maturity levels and communication skills in order not to sabotage what could be a decent relationship… and so far, he is succeeding.

Yesterday, the latest issue was… the friend. She apparently has a male ‘best friend’ who is 46 years old and is complaining about the lack of time they’re spending together since meeting my friend. He is also discrediting and insulting my friend based on stories she’s telling him, regardless of never actually meeting him. Her mistake is not only in the action of conveying these conversations to my friend, but by not having the capacity to honestly assess her situation by realizing and honestly accepting that there is no such thing as a male best friend. Generally, that means one of a few things, assuming they don’t have a business or children together…

1. The guy is hopefully waiting for his moment

2. He is an ex, and the two people have somehow maintained a friendship, but even in this scenario, there is a solid chance that they will have sex again at some point… again, making it a lie, as a best friend is not a sexual friend in my opinion.

3. The guy has cerebral palsey and you are nursing him, again, a situation where the guy would probably want sex, but be inhibited to actually have it.

To further complicate the situation, her lacking communication skills approached it by saying… “Oh God, it’s gonna be so wierd when you guys meet. I’m so nervous about it.”

Sorry, but do I need to comment on this? Women… if you think it’s going to be awkward then there is a reason that it should be, which means, you are aware that there is something about the situation which is in some way off.

Why am I bantering on about this? Well, because… my friend is now in a situation where he spends a night drinking him self to sleep in order to repress everything that he’s feeling and everything he wants to say to her. The next day, we speak for an hour as he walks through the logic of the situation and how the only approach is to remove the fear that is engulfing him and support her relationship. He must be the good guy and drown this fucking 46 year-old man in kindness, so that at the end of the day, there is nothing to say that is not good. Basically, setting up the situation in a manner that allows the friend to self-implode with one utterance of anything less than positive.

Alright, now does that seem honest? The logic is correct. He should approach with kindness. He shouldn’t have an issue or an insecure thought, however that is an idealist perspective, not a reality. He either is honest and expresses himself and risks conflict or he strategically counteracts his emotional existence and embraces logic. It should be easier than this and the only way for it to be is if one or both parties are so completely grounded and stable within who they are (highly unlikely) or both parties are aware and can openly communicate and nurture one another with the compassion that we are all somewhat scarred and that the fears have nothing to do with you. Team work is key and generally lacking in relationships, as fear stimulates defenses in the other and the other doesn’t ever want to be sited as doing something wrong. Again, a reactive, emotionally driven response that overpowers the honest logic of the situation.

If we could find a pill that enhances logic, we might have a chance. Otherwise, we have to strip ourselves of awareness completely as that middle point is like living with your ‘best friend’ who is a girl and sleeping in the same bed every night with an erection that will never be nurtured. A fun situation for any man… or at least one that will stimulate absolute self-medication from pharmaceuticals and porn.

Day 17-18 - FlatHead FlatBrain, but Alive

Day 17-18

Two days pass and as challeging as it is to keep up with the blog, is as challenging as it is for me to remember to take my medication.  Both nights, I happily started dozing off before remembering that I hadn’t taken it.  Getting out of bed is something that I just don’t do.  It is like coming out of a flatline without a defibulator.  My blood pressure has always been extremely low and every nurse always asks if I’m a triathalete or an avid athele of sorts, but for the majority of the past decade the biggest exercise I can consistantly account for is lifting food to my face, cigarettes to my mouth and the occasional stints of elongated sex that have at times given me the momentary illusion of abs.  

Last year, I did an experiment with my blood pressure.  Standing, sitting and then lying down all within a few minutes and the moment my body went vertical the count abnormally sky-rocketed downward, to the point where another doctor was called in to see the results.  No one knew what it meant or what to do, but it seemed like a big deal to them, so I tried to ‘wow’ a bit with them and walked away with the feeling that I was again, somehow different.  Is different just different or is different special?  It’s such a hypocritcal term based on circumstance.  When you’re a kid the last thing you want to be is different and parents are forced to tip toe around the issue, and then upon reaching adolescence different becomes a tool for acquiring sex.  The more oohs and ahs you can attain from your ’special-ness’ the higher up the chain of desirable commodities you become, unless of course your diffence is your capacity to gain weight or stutter or drool, then you fall into the helmet-wearing category of categorically-acceptable or non-acceptable society, based mostly on aesthetic.  Always sad for those people, though it doesn’t stimulate our human affinity all that significantly, at least not publicly and when it does it’s as if we’re doing them a favor and should somehow be rewarded for the gift of our compassion and acceptance.

The weekend passed with a slightly disconnected, timelessness.  Saturday might have well been three days that I watched on a movie screen  I spent five hours riding, two hours watching the Lakers, two hours driving on the freeway, all of which were fine.  Kind of a flatline.  Nothing too excitable in me, nothing to depressing, just awake.  The heat was intense and that seemed to be an excuse for limited productivity.  I guess it’s time to start bringing things to the next level with the project here.  Soon I will assemble my initial state, my issues and isms, my so-called flaws and fallicies so there is a gauge to watch.  This week I will set some goals and see if we can concur that I am A.D.D. or just lazy.

Breathing is occurring and the body is moving.  It’s my excitability that seems to be somewhat absent at the moment, though not in a down way.  Depakote?  Maybe.  We’ll see over the next days.

At the moment, I’ll just look in the mirror blankly and see that I’m nothing more than a flat-face with a flat-brain living in a flat-substance that reflects the image back at me with the illusion that it’s less than flat. 

Day 16 - Lithium & Risperdal Introduced

Day 16

A little lighter today and I head to meet my psychiatrist. After explaining that I had three days of depression and constant headaches and eye pain, he asks if I’ve had a pressure test done on my eyes lately and that this medication can accentuate glaucoma if you are prone to it. Oh good, nice. So, a pill that I am taking to ‘fix’ myself can potentially cause glaucoma… or at least, make it worse if you might get it? Two weeks prior, I had actually had a pressure test on my eyes and it seemed fine the optomitrist said, however he wanted to check again in a few months.

He began writing and writing and then ripped off a piece of paper summarizing plan A, B and C, and then began collecting drugs from all places, acquiring samples for me.

 

Plan A. Stay on Depakote. If things improved, stick with it.

Plan B. If no improvement, cut down to 500mg and add 300mg of Lithium and eventually wean off Depakote unless everything improves.

Plan C. If no good on Lithium, quit Depakote and Lithium and switch to Risperdal.

He hands me a pile of samples and says, ‘See you in two weeks.’

I quickly try to get information about the specifics of how long before switching, weaning off one to another, but I get only tidbits of information before the appointment ends and I’m off.

Wow… okay. Here we go. The doors are opening for a mixture of chemicals that will inevitably become a part of my physical makeup. There is a sensation of an elongated deep breath that moves through me as I question this reality. Am I actually going to go through with this? I’ve made it this long and what the hell am I doing? What might this do to me? How am I going to feel? What if I can’t find the strength to come off the drugs and live a life of dependency? What if it works and I feel great? And so on and so on.

The day passes with very little to report aside from the fact that it’s very hard for me to accomplish anything. My focus is intermittant and my drive has been misplaced. I explain to my friend what the plan of attack is and what the new pills consist of.  She emphatically pushes against me going through with what I’m doing, but moves on quickly before pestering me to come over.  Regardless of the fact that I have to be forty minutes away at 6 a.m. I head over at midnight and irresponsibly stay up until one-thirty playing music.

Is there a difference between A.D.D. and taking responsibility? I sure like the idea that medication could make me begin taking responsibility and I love the idea that there is a possible chance that organizing my thoughts could be a treatable ailment. This appeal can universally fuel a marketplace and though I am skeptical, I am growing more and more curious of what kind of affects I will have while taking the A.D.D. medication once we get there. Making choices seems to be a challenge in so many ways. I never have a challenge making choices regarding integrity or loyalty within a relationship, but making responsible choices for my better good and for a more stable and productive tomorrow seems to be a concept as fleeting to me as the concept that a pill can effectively stabilize my energetic torment without losing the feeling of me. Anything is possible, right?