a Chris Jaymes place

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.