Was it in the last post that I wrote posting here daily was absolutely inviolable? And it’s been how many days?

Over the past couple weeks I’ve fought off a cold, had a couple of extra hectic days, and gotten food poisoning from one of the divey taquerias I love so much—this one with a little cutie mexicana taking orders. (A shame, but she was probably far too young for me anyway.) It doesn’t sound like enough to knock a person out of his routine for two weeks—and under normal circumstances it probably wouldn’t be—but in my still-weakened healthy condition, it is.

I think.

See, it’s brought up some interesting issues. Confusions, really. Why am I so tired all the time?

• Fighting off a cold and food poisoning?
• Still regaining my health after not eating or sleeping for the better part of 10 months?
• Allergies? (It’s already spring time here in Arizona, and gets a cough not unlike mine from certain pollens and when I asked her, she said it does make her tired. But I’ve never had allergies before and I hate the thought of starting up with them now.)
• Budding lung cancer from inhaling hot, noxious chemical vapors and holding them in a long and tight as possible on a regular basis and smoking Winston Lights in between?
• Worms that are growing a multiplying from my stints in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico? Or Cuba? Or Malaysian Borneo way back?
• My medications, Prozac and Wellbutrin, which my doctors claim should give me energy but which the pharmacists have labeled with red “May cause drowsiness” stickers? (Check any medication listed in the PDR and it will tell you it may cause drowsiness and inability to sleep, may cause nausea and increased appetite, may cause fuscia urination or a complete drying up of the well…)
• Now that I mention it, I do have more fitful sleep and nightmares than I used to.
• But I’m not that exhausted; if I had to go to work, for example, I could and would. But I don’t have any obligations and am relying on nothing but the self-discipline of a drug addict. Am I just plain lazy?
• Or, is it the opposite and, especially with my doing over an hour of cardio plus abs everyday in the gym, I did too much too soon?
• Or, is there an underlying depression that is making me want to stay in bed all morning and afternoon?
• Or, considering all my ambitions—develop a content management system for years worth of notes which I have to type in and organize, train a perfect dog, learn a new musical instrument, go to the gym everyday, recover from drug addiction and post about my progress every day, eat meals with my mother and do my laundry from time to time…—am I simply overwhelmed?
• Or, does the Devil see me doing good and less evil things in my life and command his minions to thwart my every effort? Using today as an example, the day I’m finally getting back to “My Program” and also the day in which the water goes out, my server goes down, and Mom is off on religious errands, which three things combine and conspire to keep me from doing any of my plans as planned, I’d say that’s an arguably valid hypothesis.
• Or, is it a combination of some or all of the above?

See what I mean?

Mom has also theorized the onset of diabetes since it runs in the family and I do complain of constant dehydration and urination. She says I need a chest x-ray and that I should see an internist, but I’m going to give it some more time. I do feel better than I did—not like I want to run a marathon, but…—and expect to continue to improve. Not to mention that I don’t have insurance and am already putting psychiatrist visits and two meds on the ol’ credit card.

And then there’s the confusion surrounding the meds themselves: Do I need any of them at all? The Prozac was my mom’s and first doctor’s idea and I thought it was probably a safe bet partially because I’d had a couple depressive episodes or some ongoing low-grade dep, and partially because I knew I was about to hoe a difficult row and thought of the med as a crutch, a cushion to my fall, a safety net alternative to the drugs I was used to; I was never seriously majorly depressed. I had resisted the pharmacology for awhile knowing that what I needed most was to get off the vicious cycle of artificial feelgood and ever-harsher come downs as I watched my life swirl down the sewer pipe; I knew that simply not smoking crack and snorting coke for days on end would have me feeling better.

And it has. That and my Most Improved lifestyle. I feel pretty cheerful most of the time, even despite the demoralizing effect of following my most productive, get-everything-done-in-one-day day with two weeks of the National Geographic channel and ice cream.

Or is it the Prozac that has me generally upbeat? And the Wellbutrin? I told the psych guy on the first visit that it’s hard to tell and he said, “Yes, it is.”

My second visit was yesterday and I was really anxious to see the results of the blood work he ordered. He may not have gone as deep as an internist hearing my catalog of hypochondria would have, but he ordered some basic, common tests, and I wanted to know either that I had a thyroid condition that needed patching-up or that I just needed up buck up and plow through.

Everything came back normal, except my cholesterol, which, if I heard him correctly, was an especially high 315. 200 is the limit, I believe. So, it’s old fashioned Quaker oats for breakfast from now on. But I left the office a little irritable. Maybe partly because, despite the relief that the labs came back with positive results, having a concrete problem to blame my malaise and lethargy on might have been a bigger relief.

Not helping my confusion and frustration is the fact that the guy doesn’t tell me what he’s thinking or what things mean very well at all. All this put together had me ready to throw in the towel on the medical scene altogether by the time I got home. I told my mother I would give it another month and if it wasn’t clearly helping me, I was going to quit. At least until my brain righted or reset itself or whatever and the doctor could give me Stratera (sp?) or Ritalin or some other normal drug for the ADD that he diagnosed. That’s really what I’m interested in trying. Wellbutrin is primarily an anti-depressive that he’s using to treat it for now (which, by the way, he upped my dosage of to 150mg twice daily).

Mom got that frightened look on her face and said she thought that would be a mistake. She said, speaking with a psychiatric nurse’s authority, that the number one mistake mental health pacients (not a demographic I relish finding myself in, by the way) is to start feeling better and wonder why they’re on medication in the first place or at all, and decide to quit taking them, putting them in a downward spiral that leaves them worse off than ever.

Good point, but there’s two significant differences in my case than in the majority of those. I wasn’t seriously affected by depression (or ADD) in the first place, and I’ve made significant changes in my brain and body chemistry, as well as in my life, that, to me, deserve far more of the credit for the immediate improvements.

But that maybe cedes the point that two months (or even the three that it will be when this coming probationary month ends) is too early to decide. I’m watching, though. And if I do decide after four or five or six months that the dosing has served its purpose (or not) and run its course, I will wean myself under the guidance and supervision of a medical pro.

In any case, the medication is in the background. It won’t solve my problems. If anything it will grease the skids a little and make solving my problems a little easier for me.

I attempted to skeleton-out the core of my problem-solving attack for two of my sisters with whom I’ve had talks recently and, despite this already being a long entry (perhaps appropriately so given my absence), I’d like to synthesize those conversations here with a bit of the polish that comes with hindsight.

I got a call from my oldest sister—the one in her final semester of a Masters in Social Work—as I was entering Safeway (the greatest-named grocery chain in the world, incidentally). I sat on a bench outside and we talked for 45 minutes. She admitted to me that at first she had an agenda in her conversations with me. She didn’t specify but I knew that she meant her advocating a professionally guided and formally structured recovery schedule for me—I may have steered the conversation in that direction. In any case, I liked that she recognized and ‘fessed that. She then said that she no longer had an agenda. I liked that, too. She said that was because of what she’d learned about me in the intervening weeks. I liked that, too. She knew from our talks as well as her conversations with Mom that I was taking positive steps and being proactive, which is what I told all the doubters from the very beginning would be the difference between me and all those others that simply decide to not smoke crack any more.

I told her that there were many times when I was about to go cop crack and felt it to be a chore and a burden and a mistake that I would regret but that I would go anyway, despite all my heartfelt better judgement.”So what are you going to do when that urge strikes again?” she wanted to know.

I said that having an emergency contingency plan for such occassions is like sticking your finger in the leak in the dam. That it was too little too late and that the change had to be more fundamental; it had to be…

“…building a whole new dam?” she asked.

“The dam metaphor might be stretched to its limit,” I said, “but you get the idea.” And I told her that going to group sessions and doing what other people told you to do were nothing more than in-the-meantime strategies that weren’t likely to succeed in the long term because they were external and that I was looking to cut to the chase and work on the very internal faults, fissures, foundation and fortresses (to get sickly alliterative).

That idea dovetails into the shorter conversation I had with my next oldest sister. She thoughtfully asked about the results of my bloodwork and then how I was doing, sympathizing pre-emptively that it must be hard. I told her that truthfully it wasn’t that hard right now. Although I think and even dream of doing crack and coke all the itme, that I haven’t really had to sweat out a powerful temptation. I haven’t even come close to going on a drug run.

But the trick—the thing that scares me, I said—is making sure that lasts and that my abstinence now is a forever thing. She said, “Yeah, you’re in a controlled environment now.”

Yes, and that’s the help I need, not some peer group’s empathy or some camp counsellor’s introspection exercise. That allows me to make the hard daily changes that I know I need to make in order to build a reliable foundation for me to stand on, by myself, when I cut the apron strings the second time around, the foundation upon which I’ll stand for the rest of my life.

Incidentally, and without any judgement whatsoever, it’s been interesting to see how and to what extent my siblings have been curious or taken an interest. The soon-to-be social worker gets top billing. The next oldest next. My younger sister might be next, followed by the youngest, my brother. Or those two might be tied or even reversed, but either way, they’re both lagging way behind the older siblings. Again, not that it matters to me, just an interesting observation.

And now one last thing that I’ve been wanting to record these last few sleepy days. I was a couch potato, which made for good Discovery, History, TLC, and Nat Geo channel watching. On one of them, I watched a documentary on transexual and transgendered people. Of course there was a segment in which one of the subjects reveals the anguish of not being accepted by people, being considered wrong or a freak, laughed at and scorned, and I am 100% unquestionably sympathetic to that. But as her tears came and her plea for understanding reached its most heartfelt, she said, “It’s not like I’m a crackhead.”

That struck me for a couple of reasons:

• It says a something about society’s hierarchies of transgressions; as fucked up as turning your penis into a vagina is, smoking cocaine is worse. And,
• Isn’t it ironic—dontcha think, Miss Morrissette?—that the one who has suffered from and publically eschews prejudice, is guilty of that very thing?

Granted, drug abusers may have a somewhat higher rate of crime than so-called sexual deviants, but those are criminals and not all crackheads are criminals (except in the strictest sense, since the drug is illegal). Closer looks and more careful treatment is called for in both cases.

But I did see something heartening on TV. An anti-drug campaign, which as a rule irritate me, how ever anti-drug I might be. This one was different because it took a stance in the direction of the one I’ve been advocating for some time. There’s white block lettering on black with a voiceover that says, “Will every kid that drinks or smokes a little weed become an addict? No. Can you predict which ones will? No.” And when the organizational logos, URL, and phone number appear, the guy says, “But if your child never experiments with drugs, the chances that he or she will become an addict are zero.” I’m sure I’ve mungled the quotes, but the essence is there. It’s those first two points that rarely get acknowledged. If ever. I’m glad to see their day arrive.

Well, today I take one of the biggest steps of these past few months. My biggest most overwhelming objective in this strategic process is to key in, review, and organize my notebooks. It’s the most important component. And the most daunting. So far, I’ve had more pressing matters to attend to. Legitimately so. And, I still do. At least one major task (getting this site indexed in the search engines, for example) is a more crucially time-sensitive to-do. But I’m so tired of time slipping and slipping by without even a word transferred, electronicized, and catalog-a-molized. It has to start. That will certainly take a bite out of the inertia I started this post complaining about. And that will lift my spirits at least as well as any brown bottle. It’s the step that will (finally) get me going. Get the main thing underway. I’m excited.