I’m positive I took my “24 hour” Reactine this morning and yet here I am in the grips of a moderate allergy attack around six hours later.
I am actually pondering hunting up that nasal spray I got when I had that pain over my right eye and seeing if it contains an antihistamine or is just a decongestant.
Decongesting is fine – I could use some right now. But what I really want is to stop my nose from becoming a snot faucet in the first place.
Sorry. That was gross. But it’s how I feel.
My feelings of “Is this it?” about my life continue to grow. And that’s a good thing. Hopefully it will build to the point of a useful crisis that finally smashes the walls of this cage of mine and lets me do the things that could advance my life.
It takes a crisis because I am incapable of willingly moving from a state of (fatuous) comfort to a state of exposure and discomfort, ergo the only way progress is possible is if I become uncomfortable where I am and need to move to regain comfort.
So letting things like restlessness, boredom, and ambition build within me until I just can’t take it any more is actually a great plan for me.
Sad. But effective.
Gave lorazepam another shot this morning. This time I made sure it dissolved completely under my tongue.
The bubbles tickle.
But the strength of the effect was about the same. Noticeable, but not dramatic. Didn’t seem to have much of an effect on my anxiety, but then again, I was alone.
So I may try it “under load” when we go out to do the usual Sunday shopping and McD’s with Miss Felicity this evening.
It does seem to help me get to sleep and stay asleep. Hopefully I don’t end up asleep in the back of the car tonight, but if so, lesson learned.
Just in case, though, I won’t take the pill until I have completed my shopping and have eaten my McD’s meal.
I mean, the stuff is supposed to be super fast acting, hence the whole tongue thing, so it should be a sufficient test to use it while we’re chatting after our meals.
Can’t find the other one, whose name I have forgotten, at the moment. It is not sublingual. Taken the usual way.
I suppose I feel/felt something from Lora Ze Pam. A sort of warm, solid calm. But not a wholesome one, I am afraid. Feels more like it’s made part of my mind fall asleep, which is the point I suppose.
But I don’t care for it. It feels…. wrong.
Might just be the sleepiness talking though.
One of the conundrums (conundra?) of my life is that both good and bad sleep can leave me feeling terrible when I wake up.
In fact, the worst waking conditions tend to come from these “catching up” periods where my brain is finally getting the deep REM sleep it needs and is burning through the backlog as fast as it can.
Like a home reno, it’s a great thing to have done, but a bitch while it’s happening. I wake up feeling ten dimensions of awful because all that heavy dreaming using up all my brain calories and I end up feeling like a god-ridden Voodoo mystic right after the god leave their body.
What? It’s a perfectly normal image anyone can relate to.
More after the break.
About hard science fiction
My opinion on hard sci fi can be summed up in two simple, elegant words : fuck it.
Fuck it in the ASS till it DIES.
I may or may not read it, but I am sure as hell never going to write it.
I came to this firm conclusion based on this book I have been reading about how to write science fiction.
I’ve had the book for a while but hadn’t read it because I don’t take writing instruction well. My writing is a deeply personal (and personally deep) process and I do not take kindly to others poking their dirty fingers into my innards by presuming their understand me well enough to tell me what to do.
This is neither healthy nor sane, but it is nevertheless true of yours truly.
But recently I got over myself enough to start reading the thing, and I greatly enjoyed the first bunch of essays. Lots of useful insight by people like Heinlein and Asimov and other sci fi luminaries.
But in the next section, it all turned to hard science fiction bullshit. How to generate a new planet based on scientific principles. How to do the same with the lifeforms on that planet. And the society that arises when said lifeforms become sentient.
And all in dreary and irrelevant mathematical detail.
I mean, the section on society starts off with a spreadsheet, god damn it.
And I truly, deeply, and vehemently do not give a shit. In fact, my apathy is so profound it generates negative shits – antishits, if you will – that collide with other people’s shits and annihilate them in a perfectly efficient shit explosion.
To me, all that rigorous mathematical and scientific calculations is worse than pointless, it gets in the way.
The stories I write come from deep inside my soul, and those are the stories I am going to tell no matter what “research” has to say about it.
I am never going to ask research’s permission to write the story I want to write.
What I write will be consistent with what I know of science, and I know a fair bit, but I am no expect, just a well informer bystander.
But for me, it is always all about the narrative. The story. All else is subsidiary to the needs of the story and must be aligned with the story and its purpose.
Hard science fiction, at least as represented in the book, has, to my mind, its priorities entirely wrong. Who cares if the setting and creatures are perfect in some abstract way.
What matters is whether you have a story worth telling with them!
That’s my curmudgeonly shillelagh shaking for the day.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.