Well, I liked the results of my previous melatonin experiment so much that I went and bought me some.

Still in sublingual form, of course, which is annoying. Sorry I said “intralingual” before… dunno what I was thinking. Doesn’t even make sense. What the hell would “intralinagual” even mean? Sounds like something you would have to inject directly into your tongue.

That would not prove to be a popular drug delivery system. Well, except for hardcore masochistic piercing freaks, I guess.

But they are not exactly a large demographic.

So anyhow, I bought myself a bottle of 60 of the things. I noticed on the box how it said it was “extra strength”, but there were no other strengths available. Another example of how the world of advertising and marketing (are those the same thing yet?) rapes the English language by misusing words and phrases until they lose all meaning.

Are we really so fucked up in the head by marketing that, as consumers, if it didn’t say “extra strength” on the bottle, we would sneer at it and say “Well, I am certainly not going to use the normal strength. That might be enough for the peasants and the rabble, but my pain and insomnia is far too important and strong to settle for their meager dose!”

The advertising people sure seem to think that.

Anyhow, I bought myself some. It was around $14 for 60 of them. I could have got twice as much for three bucks more, but they were all out of that size.

No big surprise there. People ain’t dumb. Still, sucks to pay more that I could have done.

Oh well, now I got me a solid supply for the next while at least, and I doubt I will use mroe than one a day… at least, not again.

This morning, I took one when I was watching stuff with Joe and Julian and Felicity. At that point, I thought I was around an hour before going to sleep, so taking one then made sense.

But as it turns out, I was quite off in my guess as to when I was going to bed. I didn’t end up going to bed for at least five hours after that. And by then, I was not feeling the effects of the first dose any more, and I knew I still had enough caffeine in my system from diet Coke at Denny’s the previous evening to make getting to sleep different.

So I decided, as an experiment, to take another melatonin. It had been five hours, I figured, so surely all the previous dose was out of my system now, and therefore taking another should be safe.

Not gonna do that one again. The nicely mellow relaxed feeling I get from the pill increased to the point where I actually felt kind of numb and cold, especially in my legs and hands, and that was definitely not a pleasant effect at all.

Plus, as a diabetic, any kind of numbness freaks me out and makes me think I am experiencing nerve damage or a pulmonary collapse or some similar horror. So yeah. Not going there again.

But still, it’s good stuff for getting to sleep, so am I glad I have it around. I am just going to limit myself to one pill per twenty four hour period. That ought to be safe.

In fact, my plan tonight is to take one when I am done this blog entry. I am already feeling pretty sleepy, so the pill should really boost me into dreamland.

If I am very lucky, I might actually get enough sleep in a row to have a normal REM cycle and get some good, deep, restful sleep, instead of being stuck in the extremes of either no deep sleep at all, or hyper-deep extreme REM sleep which leaves me feeling like utter crap.

For a person who describes himself as a “radical moderate”, I oscillate between extremes a lot. I can’t help but feel there is some kind of connection there, but if there is, it is too subtle for my current somewhat groggy mind to capture.

I also finally got around to buying another big bottle of multivitamins. The first ones I saw, it was actually sixteen bucks for eighty pills. Too rich for my blood, man. Cause I got very poor blood.

That is, in fact, part of what the damn multivitamin is supposed to help cure.

After some more hunting, I found a bottle of the special “weight loss formula” I bought before, containing something called ECGC, which I think is supposed to be the active ingredient in green tea or some such thing.

Dunno about that, but I have noticed that since I started taking them again, I have had more color in my urine, and have a kind of pleasant “flushed out” feeling, and if that means I am being detoxified by this magical ingredient, so much the better.

Mostly, though, I just want to shore up my nutrition. My diet is not exactly horrible, compared to some people anyhow. I get plenty of fresh fruit and veggies, most of my carbs are complex, I get enough fiber to stay more or less regular.

But I worry. Come to think of it, I should have bought just plain calcium supplements instead, or as well, because what I mostly lack is dairy products and other sources of calcium.

I don’t drink milk, I eat cheese but not regularly, I hardly can afford ice cream much (the sugar free kind is pretty expensive), I am not exactly keen to start eating a lot of kale and almonds.

I know all this lack of calcium must be doing me harm, but I never quite seem to get around to doing something about it.

Well, at the very least, calcium is next on my list of things to buy at the drug store.

Either that, or I am just going to have to rent a cow….