ITEM!

After a year working as a gunslinger-for-hire at Electronic Arts, they decided to make an honest man out of me, and extended an offer to make me a gunslinger-in-residence (read: transition me from "contract employee" to "full time employee"). The offer letter arrived this morning via overnight delivery, and I have chosen to accept.

I will still be doing skunkworks projects, so I can't talk much about what I do. As mysterious as that sounds, it's really not that interesting: my inability to discuss is merely indicates weird laws about compliance and the like.

ITEM!

I forgot to mention this earlier, but two weekends ago my friend Chris and his crew came into town for the weekend. Chris and I went to high school together: back in 1990 or so, we would be driving around on Friday nights, listening to Skinny Puppy and Revco and the like, trying to find something to do in the two-star town where we lived.

Jenny and I ran into him over Christmas break, and we got to talking. He does television now, producing/directing a program about racing called Three Wide Life.

Anyways. He and the crew from the show were in San Francisco to do some interviews about some sort of racing or other (by "crew," I mean him, the other producer/director guy, and the show's hostess/talent). He asked if I could show them around, so I did.

First, I rescued them from hanging out in DouchebaglandNorth Beach. Then I took them for sushi at Jimisan, and then we went out drinking. It was a good time.

ITEM!

Last week I got nailed with a sinus cold. I felt it arrive like a hammer just as I was going to bed Tuesday night, and on Wednesday morning my skull was filled with delicious, gooey, yellow-colored snot.

By Wednesday afternoon, I felt the congestion move to my chest, and I started wheezing and having trouble breathing. Coughing up phlegm after a great deal of effort.

The breathing problems continued to get worse, and I just chalked it up to "yet another serious chest cold". Thursday evening I was having panic attacks about not being able to breathe (which just made it worse). I was experiencing the entire "fish out of water" mode, and even took some anti-anxiety meds to calm that down.

Friday it got . . .significantly worse.

On Saturday evening, I actually put two and two together and remembered, "Oh, yeah. I have asthma, and that's what this probably is." So I started dosing on my asthma control medication (Advair) which I'd stopped using a couple months back because I didn't feel I needed it.

I called the doctor yesterday, and he said to come in, so I this morning I had an appointment. He listened to my lungs and then we had a short conversation which boiled down to "keep using the goddamned Advair, even if you don't think you need it."

So that's that.

ITEM!

I've been taking a long, hard look at my life over the past couple weeks. I realize that I've been kind of stuck in a cycle of intentional failure in a lot of areas. Well, more like, "I have been avoiding situations where I would be able to succeed."

I've been pretty much drunk for a year and a half. It worked as a mechanism to fight the tedium while my brain re-assembled itself. However, that process finished a couple months ago, and I've essentially been over medicating.

Playtime's over. Time to get back to work.

Albuterol is a HELL of a drug.

Okay, I lied about taking a nap. Doesn't mean I didn't try to, but several mental, physical, and situational gremlins conspired to prevent this.

Watchmen.

This was one of the more surreal experiences I have had in a theater in a long, long time. Partly, this is due to the nature of the film's topic. Partly, this is due to the nature of my twenty year relationship with the original work. Partly, this is due to it being a midnight showing - and the film is long.

But mostly it had to do with the cocktail of chemicals that were vibrating through my spinal cord.

I've been fighting off a pretty heavy chest cold for the past couple of days. Respiratory infections are, for me, a terrifying thing. A history of spontaneous pneumothorax means that every cough is examined thrice: is there pain that shouldn't be? am i feeling a bubble along the lung wall? is that translocated pain along my shoulder?.

Deep coughing sessions can (and do) initiate asthma attacks. These then lead to panic attacks, which is a hellish cycle. Panic introduces the fight-or-flight response; this increases the heart rate, which increases blood oxygenation demand, which increases respiratory demand, which can't happen since we're having an asthma attack. So I end up feeling like a goldfish flopping around on the floor after a five year old knocked over its bowl.

This evening was a perfect storm for many of these things. I had been having panic attacks all day long. Just before we left the house, I took a heavy dose of Dextromethorphan, a cough suppressant that has side effects that include dissociative hallucinations.

Charity gave me a Xanax to combat the panic attacks. I had never taken one before.

Turns out, not a fan of the Xanax. It performed as advertised: the panic attacks subsided. Instead, I was filled with a cohesive, dripping, existential anxiety. All of the mental filters which are in place to protect me from my hyper-active perception vanished, leaving every tiny moment more brilliantly important than the last, all things fightingformyattentionatONCE HEYLOOKAT THAT NO THAT NO THAT NO THAT NO THAT NO THAT NO THAT...

Then someone has grabbed my hand and created something for me to focus on and I'm able to think.

It was in this mental state that I was audience to the film made from one of Time Magazine's top 100 novels of all time.

Hollywood in general has a really bad habit of fucking up Alan Moore's work. So I was apprehensive that this, the magnus opus, once called "unfilmable" by Terry Gilliam, would be castrated, butchered, and sanitized.

I am happy to say that my fears were unwarranted. Zack managed to pull it off. It was shot with a great deal of love and respect for the source material. In fact, most scenes were obviously storyboarded using the panels from the comic.

Some material from the comic - beloved material, for me - did not make the cut. We have a generous two and a half hours to look in on this alternate version of 1985. This requires some surgery in the story. Hollis Mason's death is given a lumpectomy. The Tales of the Black Freighter is amputated. The story of Rorshach's psychiatrist: an excised tumor.

Sadly, there is a depth to the comic that simply cannot be placed on screen. How exactly would one express excerpts from Under the Hood, or Dan's essay about owls, in the medium of film? We cannot. There are little things that I miss (Laurie's smoking out of the strange pipe, or the fact that cars are electric), but I forgive them.

There is a change to the story - one that has some fans of the comic freaking out. I am speaking of the removal of "The Squid." Take a deep breathe: It's okay. It works, and it works better than the Squid. The Squid is, honestly, a hokey product of the year 1985; today's audiences are a bit more sophisticated. The change doesn't alter the core plot in the slightest. In fact, it brings the story whole.

You may notice that this review is heavy on "experience of" and thin on "discussion of" the film. There is a reason for this: Watchmen is an experience - in any media. Each successive reading of the graphic novel has revealed to me new facets of its experience.

Likewise, I expect that successive viewings of the movie will show new things to me as well. I will definitely be seeing this movie again.

Probably this weekend.

Mom had her first round of chemotherapy late Monday. This was the first of five or six (I think). I spoke with her then and again this evening.

She is doing as well as can be expected. Groggy and a bit depressed. She's on an anti-nausea medication and has thus far managed to avoid vomiting - though apparently there was a close call when she almost missed a pill. However, the big bear in all of this for her is apparently not the nausea.

Yesterday they gave her a shot that is intended to kick-start her body's production of white blood cells (since they killed all of them on Monday). The side effect of this is that her shoulders, arms, and sternum ache like hell,

So she has been in pain over that today - but that is to be expected. Producing an immune system is hard work, I'd imagine.

I will never bother you.
I will never promise to -
I will never follow you.
I will never bother you.
Never say a word again,
I will crawl away for good...

(What follows is some pretty personal stuff. Do NOT read the following as a "cry for help." It isn't. Seriously.

It is posted publicly because I realize two things: that I have been extremely opaque in recent months, holding everything close to the vest and thus preventing anyone from getting close, and that I feel I was always happiest when I was being transparent because then I had control of things.)

I have been pretty damned happy the past couple weeks, even given all the other things going on (Mom's cancer, economy woes, you name it). Stressed out, sure, but in a good mood.

It is probably obvious to those who know me that I have been engaging in what could be classified as "self-destructive behavior." I could probably stand to drink a couple fewere bottles of whiskey, for instance. I only ever get involved with emotionally unavailable women, thus sabotaging any chances I have at having a positive emotional cadence in that regard. I'm eating like crap; I don't work out anymore.

But I know all this, and it isn't really "self-destructive" so much as it is "self-flagellation." It is transparently obvious to myself (and others, such as Maynard, who knows me best) that I am actively keeping myself from getting "burned" again. It's a known quantity and one that has been the topic of several conversations with my family and friends in recent weeks.

I met a woman last week. She's young, but smart, charismatic, and incredibly attractive. I am pretty sure I've gotten all the signals. Maynard says I should ask her out, but I feel that I'd just sweep her up into the aforementioned intention for failure.

The thought makes me happy nonetheless. Even if I never speak to her again, I'm pleased that I didn't immediately seek to destroy. Over the weekend, I even failed spectacularly at being self-destructive.

Which is why yesterday was such a shock.

I will move away from here.
You won't be afraid of fear.
No thought was put into this.
I always knew it would come to this -
Things have never been so swell;
I have never failed to fail
Pain

Pretty much immediately after I wrote about my switch from Lunesta to Ambien yesterday I found myself flailing inside the blackest depression cloud I've encountered in many, many moons.

As a rule, I do not perceive myself as being a "depressed" person - at least, no more so than any other human being I know. I have ups and downs, to be sure, and I've had a spectacularly shitty year, but for the most part I consider myself to be "up beat".

I am not the only person who thinks this; most people who I interact with feel the same way.

So it came as quite a shock to me yesterday when I found myself seriously considering giving up and ending everything.

Everyone ponders suicide from time to time. For me, every time that thought crosses my mind, there is a switch that gets clicked somewhere in the cob-webby recesses of my skull that activates some sort of animatronic ass kicking machine that delivers a solid whallop to my posterior. I drop the thought, and I move on.

But not yesterday.

I'm so warm and calm inside.
I no longer have to hide.
Lets talk about someone else -
Steaming soup against her mouth.
Nothing really bothers her;
She just wants to love herself.

That fact - that the animatronics didn't fire - was enough to tell me that something was seriously fucking wrong. At this point, the Batman process kicked in and told me "this is probably chemical in nature and not indicative of reality."

Minor research into the possible side effects of Ambien indicates that "altered thought patterns" was one of the known effects.

So I made an appointment with the doctor and saw him yesterday afternoon. He, too, expressed surprise at my mood, since, in his words, I have "always struck him as up beat." We agreed that Ambien obviously disagreed with me and he pulled me off it, substituting Restoril for my chronic insomnia instead.

There was also a short conversation that I assume he was required to have with me regarding whether or not I was seeking hospitalization. I wasn't; I just wanted to fix what was broken.

By the time I got home in the afternoon I was feeling about four thousand times better. For one, I had taken steps to change things. Taken control, been proactive rather than reactive (the fact that any residual Ambien [which has a half-life of like, three hours] had been flushed out of my system by then probably helped, too).

I will move away from here.
You won't be afraid of fear.
No thought was put into this;
I always knew it'd come to this.
Things have never been so swell;
I have never failed to fail
Pain.

Last night, Maynard and I jammed for about two hours. We both picked up our instruments only intending to play for five minutes or so and the next thing we knew it was late.

We've been doing that a lot lately. It has been cathartic for both of us (he is going through his own shit).

I remember when I first started playing, everyone I knew said, "oh, you'll love it, playing guitar is a great way to get rid of angst and anxiety." I didn't believe them at the time because I couldn't play. Far from decreasing stress, it amplified it because I was so frustrated by my inability to play.

Now, though, I know what they mean. We set down and just play. Sometimes he follows my lead; sometimes I follow his. We are in sync musically.

We open the porch doors and turn the amps outward so the music doesn't rattle the other apartments. I stand in the doorway and smoke cigars while playing. We drink beers.

The other day we had a rather nice thing going for about ten minutes and then one of us fucked it up (probably me). At that point, from the street below, we heard someone shout up: "HEY! Don't stop! That was great!". We had a little audience of three people going on.

It felt good. It felt like progress.

I write music that sounds like the desert. Sometimes it is aggressive and hot, but lately it has been the mellow sounds of creatures waking up as the sun rises.

Up all night again
As for sleep: no comprende
I don't sleep 'cause sleep is the cousin of death
Least that's what Nas say

Sleep is a state of mind
And to know is to be on your way
I bought some bad drugs
Off these snotty little rave kids I met
And I shuffled off to Buffalo...

(This is a posting about sleeping potions. It will likely be of little interest to most people; I am writing it in order to better catalog my thoughts on the differences between Ambien and Lunesta.)

About two years ago I was having these weird heart problems. Mostly tachycardia, but at random and disturbing intervals. It was scary enough that I actually got off my ass and went to a doctor about.

He did a bunch of tests, drew a lot of blood. No problems were found; in fact, my bloodwork was ferpect. In the end the heart issues came down to being stress related and mostly because my natural sleep cycle is completely and utterly screwed up (there were other factors but that was the kicker). He was of the opinion that I hadn't actually slept for longer than two hours at a time for several years.

At the time, my sleep schedule was "awake for four hours; sleep for two; awake for four; sleep for two; repeat." It made keeping normal business hours impossible because three hours after I got to the office I'd need a nap.

Anyways. He prescribed this drug called Lunesta, which the marketing term for a drug called Eszopiclone. Eszopiclone is "sedative hypnotic," which had a bunch of interesting effects on me.

The biggest effect was, of course, that I slept for eight hours straight for possibly the first time in my life. I woke up feeling radically different, and in fact asked Gnat "Is this what normal people feel like all the time?"

Over the past two years, I've kind of come to depend on it. This bothers me both a lot and none at all. It bothers me a lot because I don't like being dependent on anything but then it bothers me none at all because I remember how weirdly staccato my life was before I started taking it, and how stressed I felt all the time, and then look at how I actually look forward to going to sleep now. It's a trade-off; better living through chemistry.

(There is another effect it has on me: once it takes hold [usually about 15 minutes after taking it], it acts almost like a truth serum. Everything I say or type is going to be honest.

I've done some thinking about why that is, and the best I can figure is that whatever "dissembling" filters people put up in front of their brains, either to lie, or to decide not to say something, get disconnected.

This does not mean I just start spouting where the bodies are buried. In fact, I'm told conversations with me at this point are surreal events - mostly because I apparently say exactly what is on my mind right then, and that may only be a half-completed thought.

Caveat emptor when one is trying to interrogate me for launch codes.)

Anyways.

On the first of the year, I switched insurance providers. The new insurance provider balked at paying for Lunesta without a bunch of crappy papers being faxed back and forth. And, well, while this was happening, my supply ran out. The insurance company said that they would pay for Ambien (or Zolpidem), which is a similar sleep medication (a hypnotic sedative).

So we switched to that. I've been taking it for a couple days.

First off, the sleep . . . quality. . . between the two drugs is very different. On Lunesta, sleep was kind of like a rock: it was a very dense experience, filled with dreams that I remembered. Waking up from Lunesta was almost instant: my eyes flickered open, and that was that. If I napped during the day it was a hit-or-miss prospect.

Ambien, by contrast, seems to be much fuzzier. I am dreaming, definitely, but the dreams are just as interesting, but there seem to be fewer of them. Waking up is a slower process: I'll wake at, say, seven, and fall back asleep for an hour, then again at eight, and sleep for another half hour. Napping the past couple days has been a glorious experience, to be honest: I'm completely capable of zonking out for an hour (or even three, yesterday!).

I have not experienced any "truth serum" effects on Ambien yet but I haven't had any conversations with people. The one thing I have noticed is that there comes a point where I don't remember anything. This morning, I woke up and my end table light was still on and the book I was reading was lying beside me. I don't remember reading the last chapter or so of it.

"Retrograde Amnesia" appears to be one of the side effects (another is increased dependency in heavy drinkers, so, uh, that may be a problem). Going over the list of side effects for the drug, I'm not so sure I'm comfortable with them (decreased libido? sleepwalking? sleepdriving? seriously? urgh.)

I'm going to continue with it for a week and see how it goes. I may go to the doctor and try to get all the paperwork filled out to force the insurance company to give me the change up.

First, the good news (relatively speaking, because there really isn't any good news with cardiac episodes: just bad news and worse news): Dad is alive and is now at home.

The best news is that enzyme bloodwork says that he did not technically suffer cardiac arrest. I'm not a cardio-thorasic specialist so the differences between definitions is shady for me. However, this is "good" because it means that there was no heart damage.

They put a stent into his heart, just like my mom. While they were in there, they found 90% blockage to one of the major arteries or summat. He spent the night in the ICU, which he hated, and then was released to go home this morning.

I spoke to him at length this afternoon, after he'd had a long nap. I told him that he and mom had to stop with this new hobby of having cardiac episodes they picked up.

The really fun bit is this: like me, my father's bloodwork has been perfect for years. Low cholesterol, the whole works. So how does it happen that he has a heart blockage? According to the doctors, it's "just hereditary" and "not detectable". My grandfather died of a heart attack at the age of 50 or so and his father died of a heart attack at about the same age.

This pretty much means that I'm screwed. Thanks the awesome DNA, parental units!

Man. The prednizone I'm on has got me super twitchy and feeling a bit aggressive. I feel like I'm on speed or something, and one of my kidneys aches.

So, I've had this chest cold for a week now, and it really hasn't been getting any better. Yesterday the crap I was coughing up changed color to yellow, and I ended up blowing a bunch of green crap with blood flecks in it out of my nose.

That wasn't the worst, though. I've been having *really* tough times breathing. I'd be fine, and then I'd have to cough up some phlegm, and the simple act of coughing up the stuff would trigger *something* where I just wasn't able to breathe for crap.

Last night I freaked out. I freaked out *bad* and had a panic attack because I wasn't breathing well, and the more scared I got, the worse my breathing got, and then the more scared I got. . .

I almost blacked out it was so bad.

I've had problems breathing before. Like, really bad problems. Collapsed lung, sucking chest wound type problems. And I felt the fear then, and it sucked. It was a fear about being in pain. I knew I would survive but that it would suck for a while.

But this fear - the one I had last night - it was so much worse. I literally felt like I was going to die. There was not going to be an "alright"; there was going to be a gasping for air followed by blacking out and eventual death.

Maynard calmed me down from the panic attack, and I ended up drinking some coffee (as caffeine helps to open bronchial passages). I even unlocked the door to my apartment in case I needed to call 911.

Seriously. Bad.

So this morning I went to the doctor. "Dude," I says, "I can't be-fuggin' breathe. Me cold is gonzo berzerko and me lungs is wheezy and not in that Jeffersons way." And he did the listen to the chest thing, and we determine that it is not a pneumothoratic episode. So he goes over to the closet and digs out this weird respirator machine with tubes that spits out a bunch of vapor and says "Toke down on this like it were Purple Kush."

So I did.

And five minutes later I seriously felt like a completely different person. One that could breathe.

Anyways. I went in to find out what was up with my cold, ended up being diagnosed with Asthma, and got sent home with five prescriptions (including antibiotics for the brand spanking new bacterial infection that the chest cold turned into).

So. . . uh. Hooray? Boo? I don't know what to think. "Yay" that maybe I'll start to feel better? "Crap" in that I have a new Kryptonite? WTF?

Yesterday, I neglected to pick up my nightey-night sleepy-juice drugs. Result: Brandon gets a mere four hours of sleep or so before the pain of an obvious lung-relapse wakes him up and keeps him up.

This is pretty high on the suck-o-meter scale, this continual health whirlwind I've been subjected to for the past couple months, if one counts the crippling chest colds I had.

So, being up early, I ended up catching a broadcast of Romeo + Juliet. Well. More like "got sucked into by accident".

Every time I read or watch a version of this play, I find myself devastatingly depressed - and not because the story itself is so tragic. Rather, standing face to face with the sheer genius of the story's construction and execution from beginning to end humbles me and my meager talent with words to a degree that causes my bones to ache.

I can only imagine what watching the play would be like if one were not already intimately familiar with the plot. Here we have a lighthearted comedy - an uplifting love story - through two and a half acts.

Until the murder of Mercutio by the Prince of Cats. This is a brutal, jarring event - one that is completely unexpected and yet completely telegraphed from scene one via Tybalt's irrational rage. And here is where the wheels come off and we find ourselves Bat Country. A chain of events set in motion that can only culminate in, well. You know. The deaths of our titular characters.

What a brilliant sucker punch.

And I fall for it every. time.

In other news, I think I need to pick up a copy of Guitar Hero III after playing it at JD's birthday party last night.

Pro: the vicodin is making me voraciously hungry, so I'm actually eating.

Con: I am now out of food.

I forgot how mind-numbingly boring being on this much vicodin is.

Results: Not gonna die; pretty much exactly what I expected.

So now I'm in a shit-ton of pain and bored out of my skull but I don't really care because, you know, Vicodin.

Fastest. X-Rays. Ever.

Drive time: 10 minutes.
Parking time: 5 minutes.
Finding the right place in the hospital time: 1 minute.
Wait time for registration: 3 minutes.
Registration: 4 minutes.
Wait time to be brought back after registration: 0 minutes.
Wait time for x-rays after that: 2 minutes.
Time for X-rays: 1 minute.

And parking cost all of a dollar.

Are cats supposed to groom each other?

I'm watching Clementine give Simon a bath. And it's freaking me out. I can't figure if she's doing some sort of weird submissive cat thing or Simon got a bunch of catnip spilled on his head.

Also, I have the attention span of a smothered dolphin.

Also, Chelsea Handler is one of the funniest people I've had the pleasure to observe in years.

Anyways.

The lung thing happened about, oh, half an hour before the kick-off yesterday. Since I wasn't sure if I hadn't simply pulled a muscle carrying a big tub of ice or not, I swallowed a fistful of Ibuprofin, three or four beers, and some excellent Italian meatballs and watched the game.

I realize that fully 90% of the people I know are "football stupid" but I'm gonna talk about it anyway for a minute:

Which was kind of boring for the first half - but this was too be expected (coaches are always more conservative about offense in bowl and playoff games). However, the second half was just excellent. In fact, the last 5 minutes were better than Superbowl LXI's entire broadcast (which was like watching two sucky high school teams play).

I thought both teams played well, and the last play (you know, the fourth quarter one pulled off with 1 second on the clock) was very classy.

Anyways.

Dinosaur Comics makes me laugh my ass off. Which is kind of painful right now.

Oh, yeah: Ms. Kbk is giving me a ride tomorrow.

El Doktor sayeth that the lung has indeed collapsed. He gave me some vicodin.

Then he wrote me a prescription for an *x-ray* - which I didn't even know you could get prescriptions for. And I have to get to a hospital tomorrow morning (somehow, what with the vicodin and massive pain) and get the pictures taken - which, apparently, only takes like, ten minutes if you have a prescription.

Unless, of course, it gets worse tonight. Then I am supposed to go to the ER ASAP.

Or, I suppose, die. Which is always an option.

My apartment is very, very clean.

Given that 2007 was the Year of Changes, I decided to end it by getting rid of my glasses.

I've worn glasses since I was seventeen. Back when I was first kitted out with them, we tried out contact lenses but they hurt and stung so bad at the optometrist (like, serious, burning evil pain) that the experiment was aborted and I never tried them afterwards.

Since then, I've had a couple collapsed lungs. So I'm a bit more familiar with pain, and decided I'd give it another shot.

Turns out, getting contacts isn't just as "grab and go" procedure. I've got to use them for a week or so with increasing time every day to see if I adapt. I'm on, like, day three or four (they didn't have my prescription when I first went to the optometrist).

At any rate, I'm finding them to be weird. For a few reasons:

1) I'm not used to what I look like without glasses. Every time I've looked in the mirror for the past 17 years I've either a) had glasses on or b) my vision was too blurry to really get an idea of what I look like (which is: old).

2) Glasses have a 'static' vision. I know (or adapted to the idea) that if I looked out of the frames it was blurry, but otherwise everything was always in focus. Thus far, my experience with contact lenses is different: from time to time, shit blurs up hardcore. Then, five minutes later, it's all golden.

3) I keep doing things by muscle memory that imply that I'm wearing glasses (like trying to push them up my nose, or taking them off when I put on a shirt). It's a weird feeling.

4) I have to get a good pair of sunglasses.

I have difficulty putting them in. It isn't the problem of sticking something to my eyeball; the issues are getting them clean or figuring out which side is "out". It's a pain in the ass. I'm sure that it will become easier over time, but right now it takes me about half an hour (easy) to put them in.

(The biggest problem being weird bits of lint and skin that get on them no matter how much I wash my hands. If there are any tricks that people know about this, I'd love to hear them.)

I woke up this morning wondering, "holy shit, how come I don't have a hangover?"

Then I realized: "oh. I'm still drunk."

Ugh. I just can't get "creatively" productive lately. I can fix bugs, but I can't create new things. It's irritating - I have a hellish lack of focus problem, and even minor interruptions can throw me off for the entire day. Simply the anticipation of an interruption will screw with me: I will sit, refreshing the same five or six web pages, waiting to go run an errand.

For example, today, I woke at 8 a.m. and started working around nine. But I had a guitar lesson at one, which meant that I had to be out of the house by 12:30, so lunch at noon (most days, lunch isn't really an interruption - I treat eating the same as I do going to the bathroom: it is a biological function, nothing more). My teacher and I are friends, so we sat for an extra half hour shooting the shit (mostly about Kurt Cobain). Back by 2:45. Fine. Normally, gnat23 gets home around seven, so that's four hours of work.

eerrrrrnt. No; today we had a meeting with a lawyer at 5:30, and since the place was in Union Square that means we have to be out of the house by 4:30 to find parking. So, what's that? An hour and a half? Why even start?

The problem is actually even deeper. I find that I will procrastinate about doing work by doing more work. To avoid writing some of the more complicated features in Steam Front, what do I do? I switch the JVM from version 1.4 to 1.5, which necessitates a huge amount of code refactoring. Not only did I do that with Steam Front, I did it with Nexus War. And the sekrit client project. Sure, the stuff may run faster and be smoother and smarter, but I blew out several days rewriting everything I already did. Optimizing before optimization was necessary.

About two, maybe three weeks ago, my mother stunned me with a revelation that I was unaware of: I had been diagnosed as a child with attention deficit disorder. She never told me and I was never put on medication for it for the exact same reason that I'd never tell any children of mine: she didn't want me to use the diagnosis as a crutch. I have met several people who claim to have ADD and, more often than not, they struck me as being lazy rather than having difficulty paying attention.

Gnat and I talked a lot about this tonight on the drive to Union Square, and she absolutely believes that the diagnosis is correct, and the more I think about it, the more I agree. I have several behaviors - ticks, mostly - that point to this.

For example, I often - and I mean all the time - stop speaking in mid-sentence. Just stop. Not trail off; not pause as if I'm trying to come up with the right word. "Hey, did I tell you about the." The reason why I do this is because in my mind, I have already finished the sentence and something distracts me. Normally, there is a sort of mental subprocess that tells my vocal center, "Yes, I know you've already finished saying the sentence in your head, but you actually haven't, so keep talking, dumbass." The distraction interrupts it.

Another thing is that I obviously have an internal censor that limits what I talk about. There are times (such as when I'm extremely tired or drunk) that this goes away - and I get chatty. Very chatty. And I talk about anything and everything that rolls through my skull - no matter how banal or pointless - and all in a stream-of-consciousness shotgun spatter. Gnat thinks it's funny when I get like that.

The reality is, it feels as if there are maybe twenty microprocessors in my skull. Each one focuses on something and thinks about it - but then each one keeps bobbing up, asking for more time and attention. So actually getting any one processor to be the core of my focus is a difficult chore. Even writing this paragraph is a problem: I've open windows to wikipedia, and a chat room, and email, and the music on the headphones, and hey, I'm downloading a torrent, and I wonder what it's progress is? All minor, minor things - but they add up.

Once, long ago, a friend once told me that I programmed better when drunk. He had scads of evidence to back his point, too - I couldn't disagree. Looking at code I wrote sober versus intoxicated was a bit of a shock: the sober stuff was meandering, sloppy, unfinished, and I remember having difficulty writing it at times. By contrast, methods and functions written on the sauce were elegant and concise. Bulletproof, too.

The only explanation I have for this is that the booze would "shut down" 3/4s of the processors whizzing in my skull, leaving more time to pay attention to two or three that were still active (this is not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing; it just is: it exists in a moral vacuum as a fact).

I have never been interested in speed or amphetamines. Why in the name of all that is holy would I want to go faster? No, no. Slow me down, please.

I can point to a metric shit-ton of things in my life that could be tied to it. Some things are obvious - my weird natural sleeping habits. Others are not so obvious or ambiguous: do I have problems tracking my finances because I am just lazy or because I can't focus on the numbers for longer than two minutes at a time? Who knows?

In the end it really doesn't matter. I'm extremely unlikely to take medication (read: never gonna happen), nor am I interested in simply giving up and blaming shit on my weird brain chemistry. Quite the opposite, actually: I'm far more interested in solving some of these issues and developing new techniques to focus on things.

(Harh! Even writing this is a procrastination: I should really just go to bed, but hey, something interesting may happen that can keep my attention for a short time. I meant to just write a paragraph about my frustration at my lack of productivity, and look where we ended up? A nice, half-hour of avoiding any meaningful, productive coding.)

For various reasons I ended up going to th' sawbones last week. The big issue was that I was finding myself unable to fall asleep because my heart was *racing* when I was trying to lay down to sleep at, you know, five a.m. or whenever (for the past several years I've slept in 4 hour chunks, whenever I needed to).

I hadn't been to a general practitioner since, well, since, uh, at least 20 years.

I got an EKG done, they drew blood, yadda yadda. What followed was a conversation from Fight Club:

"You need to get some sleep."

Turns out, I'm not 25 anymore. I'm not even 30 anymore. So that entire sleep schedule I was on . . . not working out so much anymore.

So he put on these sleeping pill thingers. Lunesta. Pop one, and I'm out within half an hour. This, in and of itself, is totally awesome, because it usually takes me 45+ minutes to fall asleep once the lights are out.

Holy crap. I wake up now, and I don't need to nap. I stay up *all day long*; I have tons of energy. I mean, seriously: tons. So much so that I find myself getting bored because my routine hasn't adapted to handle the extra time.

So, is this what "normal" people feel like? Because seriously, sign me right the fuck up for this full-time.

The only drawback that I've noticed is that if I have to (for some reason) wake up before the pill wears off, anything I eat tastes like crap. But that's a known issue, and hey - I can deal with it.

Anyways.

Today I got back all the blood work numbers. Now, my father has to take a ton of blood medication, and has even had a stroke in his friggin' *eye*. And my mom. . . well. Mom is a bit overweight. Where "a bit" means "could stand to lose 150 pounds". Because of this, she's had tons of heart problems and cholesterol issues. Multiple heart surgeries and stents.

So.

He says to me, "you must have inherited some great genes to get this kind of blood."

My cholesterol is 168.

168!

I could eat butter and Bitburger for every meal for a *year* and probably still be in the range of "acceptable". Everything else is well inside the "safe" limits; the doc even used the word "perfect."

So. Time to invest in butter futures.