Brains

Working on your brain is difficult but rewarding.

The current medical regimen is the most helpful yet. I’m not happy taking 3 separate psychiatric medications (plus one other prescription and a regular OTC drug for other things), but we’re getting closer to a well-tuned head. The Adderall seems to take me to a more calm and focused place, and the other two have pretty much knocked out the anxiety and depression fits.

There are interesting links between depression and ADD. People with ADD do anything they can to fire up the forebrain, because it’s dead and that feels awful. Therefore we self-medicate with stimulants, or arrange a life full of emergencies and extreme situations, or play lots of video games, etc. One way to stimulate the forebrain is to force yourself into a problem solving and pattern recognition mode: the brain function that tells us that a twig snapped in the forest 50 yards away, or that the dot on the horizon is a ship, or that our keys are across the room next to the hat.

Unfortunately, one way to stimulate the forebrain is to keep pushing at an insoluble problem. If your problem is something like “why can’t I get anywhere in life?” or “why do all girls hate me?” or “how will I ever clean up this horrible mess of my existence?” it’s going to be refractory to the usual problem-solving methods. If you’re depressed, these things will come up a lot. And if you’ve got some form of ADD, working away at that problem will stimulate the forebrain and be irresistable, like picking at a scab or scratching an itch. What you get for your trouble is a spiral of repetitive negative thinking that gets tighter, and deeper, and worse.

This explains one of my worst depressive thought patterns. I do just that; I latch on to an unpleasant “problem” which is actually a reflexively depressive thought. Because thinking about it fires up the problem solving apparatus, I think I’m going to somehow solve the problem if I just think about it really hard. This makes the depression go deeper, and I’m in a feedback loop.

Long story short it’s way easier to get out of one of these spirals on 15 mg of Adderall XR. The forebrain is running about normally and isn’t saying “scratch my itch!”, and when I slide into some self-critical repetitive negative thinking it only lasts a short time; I can pull out of it faster now.

The next step in brain maintenance is: regular exercise. This is gonna be interesting. I’ve never succeeded at that since it was enforced in high school.

Is it better to have lunched and lost than never lunched at all?

+ received new remaster/re-release of Gang of Four’s Entertainment!/Yellow E.P. Sounds great, very loud and bright, nice packaging. Thank you, Rhino!

+ received new Umberto Eco novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. I love me some Eco. Will begin reading it tonight. Hurray.

– I have to fill out a complicated document (in Excel of course) because HR says I “failed my S.M.A.R.T. goals for the year” necessitating a complete list of my achievements for the last year, or something.

– Self-loathing again.

+ Pizza!

“Dog Guy” rides again.

David S. Harvey, the artist formerly known as Dog Guy and more recently the city council gadfly of Irvine, CA is now running for mayor of that city.

http://whosyourmayor.com/

To quote Mr. Harvey’s post on an old LJ entry of mine:

WHOS YOUR MAYOR is easy to remember because it’s kind-of like whos’your
daddy…

New photos in the Scrapbook Too!

Best regards,

David S. Harvey

“The Huell Howser of City Hall Reporters”

Who Loves Ya!

It appears that the dog’s name is “Papucho”, by the way.

The dog.

When I worked at the newspaper, we ran a comic strip written by David Lynch. It was called “The Angriest Dog in the World”. The strip had the same frames each time: a small suburban house with a very angry dog straining at the end of his chain in the front yard, with one frame at night. The “content” consisted of dialogue from inside the house.

Lynch phoned in the strip weekly. Someone would take down his instructions (“First frame nothing. Second frame balloon from inside the house saying…”) and then Geoff, the production guy, would make the balloons and text. All of the comic was therefore in Geoff’s handwriting.

When I saw The David Lynch Daily Weather Report and heard his voice I immediately flashed back to taking those calls. “Hello, Los Angeles Reader.” “Hi. I got a DOG for ya.”

I don’t miss the poverty, the craziness, the abuse, the other poverty, or the overall depressive funk of those years, but I do miss getting a DOG from DAVID LYNCH on the PHONE.

Geoff’s a big time music industry dude now, produces Velvet Underground reissues and stuff.