Not Off to a Good Start

2017 is already sucking donkey dong.

It began New Year's Day, when I woke up sick, extremely depressed, and without any hot water.  As had happened before, I knew that probably meant all the water would stop running.  Which it did in a matter of days.  Fortunately I managed to save up a bunch of potable water, but that's about gone.  So I'm melting snow for cooking and drinking as well as washing dishes, bathing (if you can call it that), and flushing the toilet.

It's a good thing there's lots and lots of fresh snow every day.

I'm snowed in again.  Assuming I find a plumber, they couldn't reach the house.

While I'm not feeling sick any more, I'm still too depressed to try to deal with the plumbing.  Or getting more food.  I needed to buy groceries before this happened.

At least I have about three months of cat food, so they won't starve.

Playing with Lists

I've been too depressed to get much work done.  My life, like my house, is falling to pieces around me.  I'm beyond caring.  So what do I do all day?  When not sleeping, watching TV, or reading (usually re-reading) comfort fiction I'm messing around with Spotify playlists.  Auto-Tuner has ruined radio for me.  Even the BBC World Service has been seduced by its ear-torturing evil.  I can no longer shop at the better of the two grocery stores within a 25 mile radius because they now pipe in the All Auto-Tuner station.  So it's either assorted nostalgia stations via satellite or my own playlists.

Current top jams:

• One of Those Days 
• House of Games Homage 
• Stone or Rock? Part 2: I Never Exhaled 
• Winter is Coming

All playlists, both mine and those created by other people.

Internet Radio Sucks Syphilitic Donkey Dong

How the fuck am I supposed to avoid my life by losing myself in my work if I don't have a good soundtrack?

Last.fm: I now need to restart Spotify and Last.fm (in that order) after five or six songs.  And it's now impossible to skip something when the YouTube selection is some fucked-up cell phone-recorded live performance of an artist who consistently does awful live performances.  Anyone who has had the misfortune of seeing J.G. Thirwell (Foetus) live knows what I mean.

Spotify:  No equivalent to Last.fm's randomly playing my library.  The closest I get is playing it in alphabetical order or by length of song.  It keeps dropping songs I've repeatedly added.  Is there an upper limit to the number of songs you can have in your library?  Not only do they have a shitload of ads, they have a shitload of ads featuring people using Auto-Tune, so I have to keep turning off my speakers.  Upgrade?  With what money?

Pandora:  Sounds like a CD player on permanent skip.  Plus huge gaps in their database of artists.

KEXP and other stations that still stream now that iTunes doesn't carry them: The CD-skipping effect isn't as bad as Pandora, but it's still bad.  And more talented idiots are using Auto-Tune when they don't need to, so I have to turn off the speakers.  But the taskbar doesn't show me the song title unless the cursor is on it, and that is delayed anyway, so I keep missing parts of other songs.

Satellite radio: It comes with my satellite TV service, so, radio on the TV.  Not Internet radio, but close enough.  In addition to being mostly genre-specific, and I like a lot of variety, I'm stuck with things like nostalgia and jazz stations because of the increasing use of fucking Auto-Tune.

What's my problem with Auto-Tune?  It physically hurts.  Fingernails on chalkboards don't bother me.  Sirens don't bother me.  Auto-Tune causes eardrum-shredding pain.  It has to be an autism thing because my daughter and many of her friends have a similar reaction.

I don't understand how someone singing in an empty room with bad acoustics while failing to harmonize with Stephen Hawking is supposed to sound pleasant.  Especially if they're singing off key, because it doesn't fix that.  Why the fuck do people like Megan James (Purity Ring) and Lauren Mayberry (CHVRCHES) use it?  Their voices don't need any help.

Fucking #whitepeopleproblems #firstworldproblems

This Place Ain't What It Used to Be

I've been ill for over a week.  It's whatever the fuck I had last time, only worse.  I may not be the only person in the area with it, as my newspaper neighbor - the only person interested in the Missoulian who lives beyond the end of the carrier's route (AKA my property) - has been letting his papers accumulate in his box as well.  That rarely happens.  A few other services no longer go much further than where I live, as a couple of trash bins and a mail box have sprouted just over the cattle guard (think supersized storm drain).

My neighbors put their house up for sale a couple years ago and it sold, along with a couple others that have been on the market for at least 12 years.  Next door (i.e. 100 yards from my house) there are goats (which I'm OK with) and a passel of kids who seem to be home-schooled.  Given this is Montana my money is on their not being vaccinated.  Fortunately I had my shots earlier this year, and I know the pertussis vaccination works for at least eight years; and I didn't get rabies after handling a rabid bat that drooled on an open cut after getting the rabies series.  I'm not all that worried, it's just the principle.  Plus I could be wrong, and they've had all their shots.  Even if they don't get flu shots I'd get it anyway.

What really bothers me is some asshole with a boom-boom car moved here.  Why the fuck would someone who drives one of those things move out here?  The only scenario that makes sense is he lives with his parents, they moved here, and it's not his idea.

Thursday I badly needed groceries, so I managed to make it to Saint Regis to get some food, and grabbed the mail and newspapers on my way back.  When I get inside I notice that not all of the papers are there.

I didn't get the paper on Friday.  Today I felt well enough to get the papers this morning, and found only today's.  My neighbor's box had only last Sunday's.  The carrier never removes papers.

Someone has been lifting the newspapers.

What's next, the mail?  I don't get the mail every day, and when I do get it I usually do so when I'm walking the cats around nine or ten at night.

I moved out here to get away from that sort of shit.

The bright side: less culture shock if I ever manage to get the money to move to Seattle.

Mind's Eye Blind

This has been bugging the shit out of me since I heard it a few of nights ago:
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054
I've always taken "mind's eye" and "to visualize something" as metaphors.   As in, "The only time you see anything when your eyes are closed is when you're dreaming." Or if you have some kind of special gift that let's you do that.

Then I heard that story and learned 95% of the planet can conjure up an image of some sort if they want to.

This isn't a side effect of meds or complications from kindling due to seizures and mood swings.  I've never been able to visualize shit.  My entire life.  

While it explains my nearly-nonexistent visual memory, I feel really cheated. If most people can close their eyes and see their past or what's written in a book why the hell is television so popular?

I don't understand why this is bothering me so much, it just is.  It's not as if something has been taken away from me.

Full sensory dreaming doesn't make up for.  Especially now, with my memory being so fucked-up I'm having difficulty differentiating between real experiences and dreams.

If I could visualize things behind closed eyes I would probably spend every day in bed remembering a life less fucked-up than the one I have now.  I can't tell if that would be a better way to deal with things or not, because by not trying it's impossible to fail.  I don't know how much more failure I can deal with.

Why Bother?

I have been so fucking depressed for the last six, maybe seven months.  I don't know why I bother getting out of bed.  Sisyphus had a more meaningful existence.

Retail Therapy

It's a fucking struggle to do anything.

I've been trying to buy groceries for over a week.  Even shopping online is too much effort.

Yet at the same time I feel as if buying a bunch of kitchen gadgets will solve all my problems.  I haven't thought like that for 13 years.

Once upon a time I could go garage saling, looking for obscure utensils.  Even if it was something I'd never use, a couple of cheap, culinary geegaws would frequently cheer me up.

Now that it's no longer a good idea for me to do any cooking more complicated than rice, the urge to buy kitchen gadgets is a sick joke my brain is playing on me.

What would really be useful: updated glasses.  The depression has reached that point of intensity and duration where it permanently affects my vision.  This has happened to me often.  I can go years without needing an adjustment in my lens prescriptions, or maybe just minor ones.  But there comes a time during these long-running periods of intense depression when my vision will begin to rapidly deteriorate and I need a significant change in my lenses.

The problem is: there's no point in seeing an eye doctor until it's over, as my eyes are just going to get worse until this episode is over.

I'm well aware of outdated lens prescriptions triggering depression.  That's not how it works with me.

Of course this has to hit me this time of year.  I'm much more depressed when the sun is out.  I've tried going nocturnal, but it doesn't work.

I'd really hate my life if I bothered to care enough about it.

You're Killing Me, AdSense

Seriously Google?  Three ads for Dunkin' Donuts on the Wellubtrin page but only one on the Remeron page?

Don’t you read what I write?

At any dosage it will make you crave doughnuts. Seriously. You will want to invest in Krispy Kreme stock (or maybe something along similar lines that isn’t tanking); as Remeron’s antagonism of the serotonin 5HT2C and H1 receptors gives you the munchies for carbohydrates and sugars like you were 16 and smoking the best pot ever in the parking lot of a strip mall with a 24-hour doughnut shop beckoning you with glazed and jelly-filled ecstasy. People dipping spoons into a bag of sugar and eating it as is – not unheard of when on Remeron. This stuff is nothing more than legal marijuana, and if I knew crap about biochemistry I could probably prove that crazy statement.

People who take Wellbutrin don’t want to eat anything. It’s the “happy, skinny, horny pill”, remember? People who take Remeron want to eat doughnuts all day long.

Since writing the above comments on the Remeron page I've learned Remeron is also a 5HT1A agonist, and that is a key part of the sugar-and-carb-craving MOA.  I know this because my daughter and I each take a different TCA, and we both added BuSpar to our cocktails.  BuSpar + TCA = Remeron, and we've been craving doughnuts ever since.  It's hit me a lot harder, probably because there are gluten-free doughnuts she can eat, but none that I can.

This post is brought to you by:

The Remeron Made Me Eat It t-shirts.

Health Insurance Follies

I've needed to see a doctor for over a year.  Maybe even two.  I've got all sorts of symptoms that can't be written off as age, side effects, and/or depression.  I have health insurance, and I'm finally getting my act together to choose a PCP and make an appointment to see him.

Of course it can never be that easy.

First is choosing a doctor.  My insurance provider's website is one of the most user-hostile sites I've come across in some time.  My premiums hadn't been paid for three months because I thought all I needed to do to get the bills paid automagically was to sign up for it and enter all the information they need to pay the bill.  Turns out there's another page you need to go to in order to activate the fucking thing after all that.  And the first letter they sent me asking for the cash didn't arrive until two weeks after the second, which wasn't their fault, that's just how the mail is around here.  I'm glad they didn't cancel my policy.  

Trying to find a doctor through their site is painfully ... I don't know what the fuck they were trying to accomplish.  You can enter only one. parameter. at. a. time. regarding where you live, how far you're willing to drive, what sort of doctor you want to find, and what sort of coverage you have.  I can understand if they coded it that way in an attempt to speed things up, but the only thing it sped up that I can think of is how fast the code monkeys delivered it, because that's just lazy-ass coding.  Worst of all is the selection based on your coverage.  I can't remember what type of coverage I selected.  Can I look that up anywhere?  No.  It tells me where on the Olympic podium my plan is, but it doesn't tell me which network option I chose.  It's not on my card either.  As far as picking a local PCP is concerned, it didn't make any difference, but when it came to finding a shrink, therapist, and neurologist, I may as well just ignore their site and pick doctors based on whatever other info I can find.  Most of the shrinks they have are at the clinic where I went when I first moved to Missoula.  The clinic that was one of the reasons why I moved up here.  The clinic where every shrink I saw there retired on me and the EEG registered inconclusive when I was having a fucking aura during the test.  And the info they provide when comparing doctors is content-free.

Looking through the website of the regional health center to find a doctor was enlightening.  Two osteopaths (no thanks), three MDs, and five PAs.  Normally I would have gone with one of the PAs, but I think I need stronger medicine.  So of the three docs: 

One's an ENT.  Other than frequent nosebleeds, which are probably a side effect of fish oil as I used to get them all the time when I was a kid, and the occasional bout of tinnitus, those parts of me are OK.

One is ex-Navy who looks like he could play the part of a Navy doctor in a movie set on a ship during WWII.  He specializes in sticking things inside you and, based upon the results, cutting out stuff that's between your ribcage and thighs.  Ex-military I'm OK with.  I think I'd have a hard time convincing him I'd rather live with frequent minor kidney stones than seizures, or this fucking jamais vu I'm currently experiencing.

The third one is the Chief of Staff who specializes in family medicine and sports medicine.

The PAs are looking better and better.

I go with the Chief of Staff because he's also close to being a diagnostician, and that's what I really need.

So that's all set up.  The insurance company's website is happy I selected a PCP.  But it wants to know why I changed PCPs, and I can't update my policy without telling it something.  Selecting one because you enrolled in a new policy isn't an option.  Previous doc chosen in error is.

But can I make an appointment online?  Through either site?

Of course not.

I still have to deal with the phone.

I've been needing to make all sorts of fucking phone calls for three fucking weeks now.

On top of all that they limit prescriptions to 100 pills per fill.  That's 17 days of protriptyline, 20 days of 25mg topiramate and 25 days of buspirone.  My drug regimen is difficult enough as it is.  Not being able to get all my refills at once just makes my life that much more of a pain in the ass. 

I really need somebody to manage my life for me.
 

Plumbing Mystery Resolved

Mystery solved.  Thanks to a burst pipe.  In a wall.  Along the only pipe in the Monty Pythonesque plumbing that can't be isolated from the water pump.  So no running water, and the downstairs apartment is flooded.  I expect a nice crop of Peziza domiciliana any day now.

Fortunately I have 5 - 7 days of drinking water stashed away.  And plenty of snow.  It's not the heavy wet stuff, so bringing it to melt will be a pain, but at least I have something to wash with until I can find someone willing to come out here to fix the plumbing.  But I need to deal with the insurance first.  When they open on Monday.  

No matter what, I need to take care of this before all the snow is gone.  With any luck it will keep snowing and I can put this off indefinitely.

I'm so fucking chill...

What's the difference between yesterday (top) and today?

Yesterday I had hot water.

I'm close to my limit.  Really.  Fucking.  Close.  Crazy Meds isn't making enough money to support itself and now this. 

I'm pretty sure the water heater itself is working, and something is preventing the water in it from getting anywhere.  There's a leak somewhere, or the pressure tank is about to die, or something.  My guess is a leak, because the pressure tank kicks on once or twice an hour for no good reason.  And a leak would be the most expensive thing to fix.

I'm not even able to care all that much at the moment.  Right now I want to sell this dump to whatever "we buy houses for cash" douchebags will give me the most cash, sell Crazy Meds, clean out my IRA, buy a shack somewhere, and just drop off the grid.

Roadblocks. Everywhere Roadblocks.

I've been trying to buy groceries for almost two weeks.  I dropped off a prescription a week ago.  Today I finally have it together to drive to Superior, pick up my meds and buy some food.

My truck has a flat tire.

The tube may be punctured, or the problem in the valve stem has become worse.  It doesn't matter.  I can't deal with AAA or anyone else besides the people at the pharmacy and the grocery store, as they were the ones I was prepped for.  I tried pumping it up, but even after jacking up the truck, inflating the tire to the point I could drive a mile and a half without fucking up anything is beyond the capacity of the bellows pump I have.  Although I've used it before, for some reason the can of fix-a-flat was too complicated for me to operate.  

I gave up after about half an hour.  An unusually short time.  Either I immediately collapse into despair or I worry at something until it's solved, I've tried every possible solution - no matter how ridiculous or unlikely they are to work - numerous times, or I finally give in to exhaustion.  Whatever it is that is causing me to be wiped out after something like vacuuming or just 20 minutes of Yoga, plus the depression and depression-induced absence of appetite, reduced my usual never surrender attitude from hours (days, weeks, months, years - it all depends on what the problem is) to thirty minutes.

Lately it seems like there is nothing but obstacles in my attempts to do anything.  It's hard enough for me to just get motivated to deal with my life, I'd rather completely ignore it, but when I try to accomplish the least little things some random event has to happen to make it all the more difficult.  If life is a journey, why does it have to be filled with so many fucking roadblocks and detours over shitty roads through bad neighborhoods?  I used to like getting lost, but that was when I had it together.  More or less.  Now that I'm barely functional, getting lost really, really fucks things up.

The agoraphobia and social anxiety are getting so much worse, and depression exacerbates them.  My latest theory on why they suck so much more these days: it's become much more difficult for me to pass as an NT.  Which is ironic, because autism, especially being in the Asperger's part of the spectrum, is socially acceptable.  So I shouldn't have a problem with people knowing I'm autistic, but I must be really fucking crazy to not give a rat's ass about people knowing I'm bipolar and have been in a psych hospital.  From an intellectual perspective I don't care, but in the real world I can't deal with people as I really am.  I've spent so much time passing as an NT it's automatic; it would be more work to not do so in public.  Either way I don't have the emotional energy to deal with people.  


Looks like another day, or two, to be spent watching DVDs and dwelling on my mistakes.  While I like the isolation I have, and would feel vastly more lonely were I surrounded by people in an urban area, or anywhere with a population density greater than...something more than the 5 per square mile I now enjoy, I miss a lot of things.  The two I really need are food that is delivered and being able to shop at 3:00 a.m.  I could theoretically drive to Missoula to shop at 3:00 a.m., and if this depression shows no sign of letting up I might just start doing that.  Make that 4:30, as I don't want to be on I-90 soon after the bars close. 

Assuming I ever get that fucking flat taken care of. 

"The dead do not have problems." - Kai, Last of the Brunnen G. Lexx episode 4.5 "Xevivor"     

Countdown to the solstice

I'm looking at a good six weeks of severe depression, and nothing I can do will be able to fix it.  It's a struggle to comprehend e-mail, or much of anything.  Posting this much has taken me two hours.  

I'm trying to switch to a nocturnal schedule, just so it's not as bad when I am awake.  Damage control is about all I can do.

It's one of those times.  I need something completely out of my control to fix it.  Some random event.  Big, small, I've never been able to tell if there's a correlation between how fucked up I'm feeling and to what extent the universe's unexpected gift has to rock in order to drag me out of this pit.  

Another thing that makes me feel better is running away.  For someone who doesn't deal with change very well, the crisis of moving can really cheer me up.  But it's not a vacation.  The thought of a vacation depresses me further.  I want to just run away.  From everything.  Just keep going north.  More latitude, more altitude, and more solitude.  Whenever I get profoundly lonely increasing my isolation is faster and safer.  I feel like a psychic contagion.  I don't want to spread the misery.

The house is falling apart.  Lack of maintenance will do that.  Lichens and rust are covering more and more of the trees and shrubs.  The landscape of my despair is spreading outward like some miasma.  All the more reason to go off the grid.  Find some remote place and retreat into a the comfortable crazy of conspiracy theories.  There are so many new ones to keep me entertained, and old favorites like cattle mutilations are still around. 

There's not much point in continuing.

All I Want is a Burrito

All I wanted to do was mow the fucking yard.  Was that really too much to ask?  Two of the three local gas stations had signs up stating they carried ethanol-free premium.  Apparently not any longer.  Fine, I'll fill the gas can with ethanol-tainted premium and get some of the good stuff from Plains when I get bait for the wasp traps.  Then the fucking gas pump has an issue with my credit card.  That's all I needed.  I've been dealing with enough depression as it was, that one roadblock sent me spiraling down into alt.depressed.as.fuck territory.  I couldn't deal with trying another pump, or driving a hundred feet to the other gas station.  I drove home and spent the rest of the day watching Farscape.

I feel worse today.

I fed the cats.  Maybe I'll eat something.  It's a good thing I did a little more retail therapy a few weeks back so I have plenty of DVDs.  And lots of atlases and other reference books to browse.

A cross-quarter day is approaching.  Unless something miraculously cheers me up today or tomorrow, I'm looking at a minimum of six more weeks of severe depression.  Perfect timing, as it's worse during daylight hours.  I should just give up on the delusion that I'll start exercising, or even do yoga again and sleep as long as possible in the morning so I can be awake as long as I can at night.  If I can not beat myself up on yet another failure I can have more time each day when I'm somewhat less depressed.

I'm tired of all the pills. I'm tired of the permanent gluten-free, corn-free, legume-free, alcohol-free Lent.  Right now I'm even tired of the isolation.  I want a Mission burrito, I want some beer, I want to do something fun, I want my life to have meaning again, and I want someone to share it with.

The way things are now, I feel guilty about subjecting the cats to my misery.

I Think It's Funny, Even if It is Happening to Me

Medicare terminated me, so I guess there are death panels after all.  I knew my coverage was going to end eventually, as I'm not getting SSDI any more.  At least I shouldn't be getting SSDI, but they can't seem to make up their minds about that, as I still get money from them every now and then.  I've sent them another shitload of documentation to try to straighten it all out, along with an offer to write them a check.  Our tax dollars at work. Did Medicare bother to inform me that my coverage was going to end in March?  Nope.

As for the drug coverage, AARP MedicareRx/United Health Care did tell me.  Unfortunately they did so the same way they give my monthly statement, any minor update to the plan, change to their website, or similar "news" - a long e-mail with the subject "Jerod, a plan document is ready for you online" and absolutely no information in the e-mail itself about what that plan document is about.  I'd have to log in, navigate the site, and read a .pdf document.  They're as bad as the credit card companies with "important account information" letters containing balance transfer checks that I keep telling them not to send me.  

It gets better.  What to they do a week after they terminate my account?  They still deduct my monthly premium.  Now I have to decide if the $42 is worth dealing with their customer "service" department over the phone.  It's going to be bad enough trying to find some insurance racket to pay protection money to in order to get coverage for the remainder of this year.  I've been able to find all of two companies available in Montana who sell to individuals, and not a single plan that covers any of the drugs I take.  So I'll be paying full retail for my meds for the rest of this year no matter what.

The best part?  After taxes and everything else I'd have more money on disability than I do with Crazy Meds.  Before you suggest just going ad-free, non-profit, etc. I looked into that in 2004.  Aside from official non-profit status being a huge pain in the ass to do, with all the traffic Crazy Meds now gets, I can't afford to pay for a domain host to handle that load without ads or lots of grant money.

The reason I couldn't keep up on all the crap AARP MedicareRx/United Health Care was sending me is due to the amount of e-mail I get.  Excluding all the stuff relating to Crazy Meds I still get more e-mail than I want no matter how many times I click on "Don't send me a fucking thing not explicitly related to a specific transaction that requires an e-mail."  No wonder people are getting only five hours of sleep a night and don't get any work done, how the hell are they able to keep up with all the e-mail?  

Ted Kaczynski was right.  Technology makes everything worse.  Says the guy who makes his living off of a website.  Events like this rekindle the dream I've had for close to 40 years: to live off the grid.

I think it was Kevin Kelly who wrote an essay on the impossibility of self-sufficiency/reliance titled something along the lines of "Where Did That Hammer Come From?"  An essay the Internet desperately needs.  Complete self-sufficiency/reliance is next to impossible, unless you want to live at the technological level of 40,000 years ago. It's that time of year in the northern hemisphere when each day has significantly more sunlight, especially in latitudes above 40°.  The bipolar objectivists should be coming out of the woodwork with their plans for John Galt's utopia, often planned for in Alaska.  But who will make their fancy espresso drinks?  Who will grow their food?  Fix their 15-year-old cars?  Where will they find temp work?  It's easy for me to make fun of them, as I live in a house that's falling apart on two acres of land being reclaimed by local plants and taken over by opportunistic invaders. As much as I want to get further away from everyone and everything, I can't.  In fact I need to get closer to civilization, as driving and caring for myself in general are becoming more difficult.

Maybe I'll get lucky.  The icecaps could suddenly melt and civilization could come to me.

What Fresh Fucking Hell Is This?

In addition to doing some real work, or at least procrastinating from real work, I had planned to write about more great atlas acquisitions.  Instead I'm complaining about yet another problem with this fucked-up house.  The most fucked-up problem to date.

How the holy fuck is there fucking carbon monoxide in here when every fucking thing is electric?  The fucking water heater, the fucking clothes dryer, the fucking stove, all of that fucking shit.  My fucking lawnmower is in one of the fucking outbuildings and my fucking truck is parked next to that fucking outbuilding.  I don't burn anything in the fucking fireplace because that fucking thing is only useful for those fake fucking wax firelogs. The only standard fucking source of fucking carbon monoxide would be the fucking boiler, which I fucking broke two fucking years ago!  The only reason I know I have a fucking problem with fucking carbon monoxide is I finally installed a real fucking smoke alarm with a carbon fucking monoxide detector the other day and the fucker started screaming at me for no obvious fucking reason.  So I look up the fucking symptoms for carbon fucking monoxide poisoning and I've had all of those fucking things for a couple of fucking months, except for the fucking nausea, but I rarely feel nauseated from the fucking flu, or fucking meds, or most fucking things that make people fucking spench all over the fucking place.

So now I'm fucking freezing because I'm leaving the fucking windows open and I'm not turning on the fucking space heaters.  Those fuckers are filled with oil, so that's one potential fucking source.  I've been more fucking tired and have had more fucking problems thinking clearly in my fucking office, so the fucking cheap-ass flooring I put down to replace the fucking carpeting could be part of the fucking problem.  I've been waking up with fucking headaches, so something in the fucking basement could be the fucking problem.  As the only thing in there is the fucking pump for the fucking well, a bunch of fucking shit I need to take to the fucking dump, and one more possible fucking source that's doing the exact fucking opposite thing of what it's fucking supposed to do: instead of trapping the fucking carbon monoxide and other fucking vapors, carbon fucking monoxide from the fucking septic tank is making its way into the fucking vapor sink (or whatever those fucking things are called), filling up the fucking basement, and moving upstairs.  All contrary to how that fucking shit is fucking supposed to act.  I should get the fucking tank pumped anyway.  And take all that fucking shit to the fucking dump.

Can't Even Buy Happiness

I've been cycling through various stages of depression, each day, for several weeks.  At least it's not the hell of tripolar ultradian cycling where I'll swing between manic, mixed and depressed several times an hour.  This is the gentle wash flavor.  Although a mood state can still last no more than 20 minutes, I'm rarely doing anything extreme like plummeting from sub-baseline to in bed, fetal position, shivering, crying and scaring the cats.  It takes at least half an hour to get from one extreme, if mildly depressed can be called extreme, to the other, and six hours or longer to get back.  I'm not hitting bottom, not even close, and I don't even reach my current low point on a daily basis, so this isn't a particularly bad episode.

I can't decide if I should try the 25 mg of Topamax every hour.  Not being able to decide is a key symptom of depression.  When I cycle through mania and mixed along with depressed I know I'm fucked up enough to make the cycling stop no matter where I land.  When I'm like this, I'm not sure.  I could stop cycling, but where?  With tripolar ultradian cycling the decision is easy, euphoric mania, dysphoric mania or depressed.as.fuck is better than going through those and mixed states - I guess that really makes it quadrapolar cycling - every five to ten minutes, and I figure I stand at least a 75% chance of landing on something better.  Since I figure all that extra Topamax is going to knock the mania dead as well, the odds of ending up mixed or either flavor of manic are pretty long, so it's going to be baseline or depressed, and depressed is vastly better than ultradian cycling.  But now?  I have no idea how I'd end up.

The extra 10mg of protriptyline is helping, but only in keeping things from getting worse.


The local Equinox is Monday.  Looks like six more weeks of feeling like this.  Unless I manage to decide tomorrow to try the Topamax cure for ultradian cycling.  And it works.

I need to get my tax shit together.  I have most of it.  I'm stuck.  Dealing with my life is painful.

I tried some retail therapy.  I found some atlases from 1930s Germany and the USSR in the 1940s, as well as late 19th and early 20th century America.  I have my eye on similar items.  I picked up, all via teh interwebs of course, a CD of stuff from The Birthday Party that I didn't have and other music.  I looked around for records I used to own and miss.  The downside of having a bunch of vinyl worth over $100 the each means replacing a few lost items costs hundreds of dollars.  More reasons to buy current music I guess.

The Missoulian had an article about the Montana Valley Bookstore - a local portal to L-space - trying to reduce its inventory so they are closer to the advertised 100,000 books.  The article mentioned how the owners donated boxes of encyclopedia sets to the Missoula Library book sale.  Had I known they were giving away reference books I would have been there with my own boxes in the bed of my truck.  I have two full sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica, with books of the year, and various other encyclopedia, dictionaries, atlases, and other reference books going back to the 1870s.  I have four bookcases, two custom-made, dedicated to non-medical reference works, and two more for medical texts.  When do they publish this stellar news?  Right before my birthday.

Timing is everything.

I'm slowly moving the blogrolls back from my short-lived, personal crap-only blog.  The Panoply of Stupidity, Humiliation, Pain and Absurdity is up, although some of the defunct entries need to be added to the defunct list, and new sites need to be found to replace them.  The medical blogrolls need editing as well.

Too Little, Too Late, Too Typical

I'm depressed enough as it is, so I shouldn't be too hard on myself. No one listens to the crazy when we speak for ourselves on issues that concern us. I expected it to happen. On the plus side the odds are nothing will change. Then again, maybe not. It wouldn't surprise me if things were set up in such a way that any random asshole could, under the guise of selling a gun, could run a background check to find out if you're crazy. Here is the entire text of SB 374 from the Library of Congress site:

S 374 IS

113th CONGRESS
1st Session
S. 374 To ensure that all individuals who should be prohibited from buying a firearm are listed in the national instant criminal background check system and require a background check for every firearm sale.

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES

February 25, 2013

Mr. SCHUMER introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

---

A BILL To ensure that all individuals who should be prohibited from buying a firearm are listed in the national instant criminal background check system and require a background check for every firearm sale.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the `Protecting Responsible Gun Sellers Act of 2013'.

SEC. 2. FINDINGS.

Congress makes the following findings:

(1) Congress supports and respects the right to bear arms found in the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

(2) Congress supports the existing prohibition on a national firearms registry.

(3) There are deficits in the background check system in effect before the date of enactment of this Act and the Department of Justice should make it a top priority to work with States to swiftly input missing records, including mental health records.

(4) If the citizens of the United States agree that in order to promote safe and responsible gun ownership criminals and the mentally ill should be prohibited from possessing firearms, it should be incumbent upon all citizens to ensure weapons are not being transferred to such people.

That's it. Score one for the proponents of simple legislation. 

There is nothing to clarify how crazy you need to be before they raid your home for your spouse's guns. I actually care more about how crazy you need to be to have your mental health records in the NICS database at all.   Guns aren't in the equation where I'm concerned.

There is nothing protect our privacy. Nothing to prevent a credit agency, or prospective employer or landlord from looking us up. Or any random person looking up anyone else, if you're in there or not. 

Fun fact for the one or two people reading this who aren't mentally interesting: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), AKA the Big Book of Crazy, is essentially nothing more than a bunch of billing codes for insurance purposes. Everything billed to your insurance with a code between 290 and 319 means you're nuts to a certain extent. All it takes is a transposition of a couple of numbers, a common typo, and you've gone from having secondary diabetes mellitus (ICD 249) to persistent mental disorders due to conditions classified elsewhere - generally, and permanently, crazy - (ICD 294). Could that get you in the FBI's database of potentially dangerous nutjobs? Damned if I know. The mechanism isn't spelled out. 


Hey, gun show firearms dealers: stop selling guns. Sell overpriced targets, scopes, and other non-ammunition, gun-related accessories and give a coupon for a free gun, to be redeemed by a third party if necessary, as a gift with purchase. You can still sell ammo, but linking ammunition and free guns would probably get a little too close to the edge with the ATF or someobody.  That may or may not work, but it's worth a try, right?  I know you guys understand privacy rights.


Anyway, lobbying Congress and protecting our civil rights, such as they are, is supposed to be NAMBLA's job, right? After all, they are the ones the alphabet soup of mainstream news organizations turn to whenever something is happening that affects the lives of the mentally interesting.  We crazies being incapable of speaking for ourselves when it comes to the actual issues, and not just our sob stories.  So where have they been on the issue of putting our medical records on display for anyone to see? Apparently in favor of it. Take a look at this screen capture (click to enlarge) from the front page of their site (after it begs for your money):


 

Lax gun laws = more suicide. And what did Executive Director Fitzpatrick have to say on Face the Nation? See for yourself. He wasted most of his short period of time talking about how difficult life is for the families of us nutjobs.

I guess this is all in line with the NAMBLA mission statement:  

Because mental illness devastates the lives of so many Americans, NAMI works every day to save every life.

"Every life" now meaning the lives of schoolchildren who would never be shot by the roving bands of heavily-armed schizophrenics who exist only in the minds of hack scriptwriters and similar fearmongers.  


And people give me shit for the Crazy Meds forum being only for the mentally interesting and not their families / caregivers.  This is one of the reasons why I have it like that.

I know life can be hell for the families of the mentally ill.  I know keeping guns away from some of us is a good idea.  But if you keep treating all of us like dangerous children, we're just going to live down to your expectations.

Tri-Ring Antidepressant Circus

There's a topic on the forum about the efficacy of different manufacturer's protriptyline.  The original poster wrote about how Sigma Pharmaceutical's protriptyline was only about 50% as effective as that made by Barr.  I'm now into month two of Sigma's - distributed by Rising pharm.  I wrote in an earlier post that it was acceptable. It is not.  My doctor raised my dosage to 60 mg a day, the maximum amount an inpatient can take.  It hasn't helped so far, but I've been taking the extra 10 mg for all of three days now.

Worsening secondary symptoms / side effects / WTF aren't helping.  Food continues to taste weird or just lose flavor.  The tremor is happening more often and is worse.  My memory is crap.  I shouldn't need ten hours of sleep this time of year, but that could be due to depression.

I'm trying to get all the shit together for my taxes and I froze.  I thought I had been putting everything that could possibly be tax-related in a folder in my desk, but as I dug through it I couldn't find most of the statements from the insurance company that covers prescription drugs.  It took me over an hour of searching before I realized I had that e-mailed to me.  Which is suboptimal, as the only way to get the total for a year is navigating their crappy website and looking up all claims for a year.  The only physical documentation I now have is all the receipts from the drug store.  Something like that is still enough to mess with me.

Of course Google is still fucking with me.  The site is all over the map, usually off it, when it comes to search results.  Anything not in the top ten doesn't exist, and if it's not in the top five it's fighting for crumbs.  Traffic is down, revenue is down, and that isn't helping things either.  If I had a real antidepressant I'd probably be dealing with this better.  Maybe.

Two more weeks until the equinox.

Fine. Birthday. OK.

OK, I'll give in to popular demand and blog about my boring, stupid life.  Here.  One blog to to rule them all...

I guess it's like cable/satellite TV channels.  Back in the YIIKes decade, which is when TV peaked, specialty stations aired programs about whatever their manifesto stated they were about.  The Hitler Channel, AKA the History Channel, was all about History - especially WWII.  Now it's the Superstition, Greed, and Conjecture Channel.  The main problem I have with satellite TV is how most everything has become the Miscellaneous Channel, showing the same stupid movies, stupid 'reality' shows, and syndicated repeats that have nothing to do with whatever the fuck their name is.  Not enough people appreciate specialization.  Fine.

I'm sorry I haven't replied to everyone's birthday wishes.   I've been dealing with a bad case of depression, not wanting to talk to anyone, and anxiety over Google hating me for some reason.   I've also been avoiding my life for too long, and I'm trying to deal with that as well.   By procrastinating, of course.  I really need a personal assistant to deal with my life. 

I hope the pharmacy was able to get Roxane's protriptyline this month.  The stuff from Rising is just like Barr's: acceptable, but my depression threshold is low.  Although the pills themselves are pretty cool, all nice and slippery with a retro-futuristic imprint of Σ (sigma) on one side and 7 on the other.

What did I get for my birthday?  Google changed their search algorithm.  Crazy Meds is plummeting in search results.  Again.  It's April 2012 all over again.  When you do a search for Cymbalta, or Wellbutrin, or Effexor, or Lexapro, or Topamax, or Lamictal, or Invega, or most any drug I have a page on, you should see Crazy Meds in the top five results.  Now I'm lucky if it shows up in the top ten.  Traffic was at 15,000 - 21,000 visitors a day.  Now it's more like 11,000 - 19,000, with revenue down just as much.  If you think that's still a shitload of people and I should be stupidly happy about it, keep in mind this is how I make a living, and one of the things I'm having a hard time dealing with is finding health insurance.  Even though in Montana there are all of two companies selling insurance to individuals, trying to figure out which plan to get is daunting.  No matter what I'm looking at $500 a month, or more, with no idea what meds are going to cost.  And the domain host costs $5,000 a year.  Don't bother telling me about how great your host is and costs so much less, even if you get 21,000 people a day, or more, visiting your site.  While running resource-intensive applications like Invision Power Board and downloading a shitload of .pdf files.  Lunarpages is a great domain host, and there's more to hosting a site than technology.  So grossing $3,000 a month isn't as much as it seems, and I won't be making that much if the traffic and ad rates keep falling.

Where was I?  So what may or may not be related to the decline of the Crazy Meds brand in Google's search results is vanishing +1 numbers and page rank status.  Take a look at the Crazy Meds home page.  Now look at it from this link.  Notice any difference?  The +1 count in the first one is 18.  I don't know what it is in the second one, but it's a fuck of a lot more than 18.  The +1 counts on some pages differ depending on if you look at it on www.crazymeds.us or crazymeds.us, on some pages it makes no difference, and on some pages they've just vanished no matter which version of the URL you use.  If you have the Google page rank indicator plugin you'll see that the home page is unranked.  It should have a rank of at least five.  A couple other pages that were ranked three or four are also unranked.

This is being discussed on a Google+ Developers' G+ Community, because anyone with a website who implements the +1 button is now a 'developer'.

Google has become the corporation Dilbert works for and I get to feel as frustrated, depressed, and anxious as some code monkey trapped in a cubicle without the pleasure being able to write code any more.

Depending on how bad my need to procrastinate gets, I'll move the Panoply of Stupidity, Humiliation, Pain and Absurdity back here, along with other bits and pieces of the other blogs.  Everything is miscellaneous bullshit.


Update 1: The +1 button problem apparently wasn't complicated enough.  It seems like the version at www.crazymeds.us is incrementing again, although it started at 18, so as of Monday, 25 February, it's at 20 something.  The count at crazymeds.us, no www, was over 200 yesterday.  This morning it was at 193.

Update 2: The pharmacy didn't have Roxane's flavor of protriptyline, so it's another month of Rising.