Usually I can't write inside my own home.
So I'm not. I write while I sit on the back step of my basement suite, looking outwards onto the pristinely cut middle-class lawn, partitioned at the base of two sheds to separate us from our vertical neighbours. There's a floral-patterned white sheet blissfully dazing softly in the mellow breeze. I can hear seagulls, lawn mowers, laundry ventilation, and lifting aircraft in the distance. Birds chirp on all sides. My slightly-mutilated iPhone sits atop my newest intellectual fling-book: Native Peoples and Cultures of Canada. Karen Armstrong's A History of God sits to the left of an empty plastique of Canada Dry ginger ale.
I work in 2 hours, give or take a few minutes, meaning I have to be showered and ready to go within an hour and a half. I, in part, desire a cigarette to celebrate a day like this (slightly haunted by the visage of flooded nicotine butts in a cup we have utilized as an ash tray, an empty pack of Canadian Classics from a potluck we hosted upwards of 2 months ago lies patiently at the other end of the outside table) as these are the times I find best to choose the smoke-aesthetic over the phantasmal possibility of longevity.
I am getting hours enough between Chapters and the Clay Pigeon, but when isolated into one or the other, it makes me worried that my foothold in both is precarious, at best. Tonight I intend to approach my boss at the Clay Pigeon and kindly (yet assertively) let him know that I'm going to need at least 3 nights a week at this restaurant if I am going to comfortably survive. If hours don't start picking up likewise at Chapters, I will have to kindy assert myself in the same way 2 weeks from now. Of course; I did only start there again about a week ago, so I'll give it a little time for the dust to settle before I start pressing hierarchical buttons.
Jen is reading her new book in my bedroom (Scar Tissue by the lead singer of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers). We both slept late for having remained up until the wee hours of the morning partaking in psychonautic adventures to the antipodes of the mind. Tomorrow morning, I start work at 11:30 at Chapters, so I am thankful for melatonin and let's hope it works this time around.
About a week ago now, I tried to quit using the antidepressant I am on cold turkey. Although my mood felt much more stable in the wake of the sudden cut, I experienced some of the typical (yet disturbing) withdrawal effects which go hand-in-hand with a daily habit of chemical ingestion. I experienced the strangely intriguing skin-wave medically known as 'brain zaps,' in which an occasional pulse will ricochet most prominently within the skull, yet dipping to every other extremity of the body in a fashion that the name accurately conveys; it's like a great big static shock throughout the entirety of the brain (as a source point) which moves in surrealist shock waves through the rest of the body as if I had been fooling around with a wet fork in my teeth and an open electrical socket.
As well as I could understand and as much as the limited research on the phenomenon could tell me, it's just my synapses blazing off in a fashion that implies the continued assistance of the chemical intervention. Due to the lack of escitalopram, the 'brain zaps' are the brain in spaced-out confusion assuming the chemical is still present to 'zap' from one-end synapse to another.
I ended up going to a pharmacy for an emergency dose of 5 pills a couple days ago, as I soon learned that, although the withdrawal symptoms do dissipate over time, there is a chance that going cold turkey can cause a 'snap-back' effect in which the brain will return to its prior state of chemical imbalance (depression and anxiety in my case). Not wanting to risk this, I am instead cutting my dose at intervals of 3 days to slowly wean off in a way my chemistry can manage. The first three days, I cut my dose by 15% and bit off (give or take) 75% of a pill. On the fourth day, I cut 25% and only bit half. Today is my last day of a 50% dose before I cut another 15-25%. At this rate, it shouldn't be much less than a week before I am completely off the drug.
There is plenty more to say; but these are my field-notes for today. I've got to get ready for work.
Huzzah, blue planet.
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