Hey J,
I heard you are in jail. That sucks. I am currently working at a place that scraps electronics. I audit the electronics we receive to see where we should send them. Sometimes I make minor repairs to computers and laptops so we can sell the fixed-up junk. It isn’t much different than my long hobby of taking junk I have around the house and hooking it up in weird ways on the network or whatnot merely for the challenge of it. I expect to move into just doing tech work soon.
I had a break down this summer. I hadn’t done pot since James moved out and wasn’t drinking alcohol. The cops searched my house. They didn’t find anything, even a beer can, because I was clean. I ended up in the hospital. I was working a night shift and drinking lots of coffee. I couldn’t sleep and kept telling my doctor I suffered from long periods without sleep. They gave me the wrong medication and I lost it mentally. I’ve found I damaged my brain from years of drug abuse, though I think I was always a bit weird and destined for some stupid shit. I have to take oxcarbazepine and abilify. I take super small doses, but I need them. Basically, they work with the R2 dopamine reuptake inhibitor that pot damaged to prevent schizophrenic like symptoms called Cannabis Induced Psychosis. Even though I have a long period clean, I can still suffer from insomnia and related psychosis without the medication. Otherwise I do crazy shit and I don’t even remember all of it. I’m not schizophrenic, but am bipolar and need my sleep. I can’t work night shifts anymore and coffee is generally a bad idea. All the labels are largely just ways of charging the insurance companies for the most part, but the key is how pot damaged my neural receptors for dopamine to be predisposed to not sleep and manic. Other drugs can cause similar problems and my years of alcohol abuse probably played a huge rule in the need for oxcarbazepine. Anyway, I may or may not need it for life, but it’s a struggle to keep my brain chemistry straight now.
Part of the problem with life is that it is largely an absurdly pointless painful existence where we are doomed to struggle through pain out of instinct to survive only for all life, right down to the universe itself, to die in the end. It’s sad, and knowing we bombed cities in Bosnia so that I wouldn’t face hard combat probably also played a huge role in my desire to obliterate my consciousness. I felt especially bad that to break the spirit of one’s enemy, it is best to just take out families, with women, children and other non-combatants. I joined to be a hero. Instead, kids were blown apart so we could pretend to be as such. My problem wasn’t really that my platoonmates were taken POW. It was that I lived with the guilt of someone who shouldn’t have survived at the expense of dead children. I’m not sure it would have even taken that to want to alter my brain, but I did seem to straight-up try to obliterate my consciousness after Bosnia. If I drank enough, I would black out but keep functioning. It’s like who I was knew I was about to do some crazy shit, and took off because it didn’t want to watch the bullshit that was about to happen. It’s not that I wanted to die. It’s that I couldn’t handle being alive.
I’m going to an AA/NA retreat this Friday. I try to go twice a year, but usually can’t make it due to my unstable life circumstances like being unable to hold down a job for long. There are some Catholic priests who give lectures and then we break out and talk about that and whatever. I tend to think of myself as holding up the non-theistic side of the fellowship, though I wish I were a better representative of non-spiritual, non-theistic, agnostic existential-absurdists. ‘Existential-Absurdism’ is how I’ve ultimately come to identify my mentality, not various mental health labels. Everyone I’ve met in the ‘Existential Absurdist’ group on Facebook seems to be extremely intelligent, and struggle with addiction and insanity. In the end, it’s kind of like Irving Welsh’s book Trainspotting. I decided not to pursue material happiness. I chose something else. What he didn’t directly say is that we found that we could directly trigger dopamine releases ourselves by imbibing substances to trigger extreme degrees of pleasure. I had to say goodbye to that shit, though it’s a struggle sometimes and luckily our former circle of friends avoids me, so I don’t even know how to get pot. Alcohol makes me feel ill at this point. I practically shit myself, and am sick of losing everything.
I have a great wife and kid(s), and a cool pit bull mix that is way too friendly to be any good as a guard dog. I’ll continue to write you if you like. If you can get your sentence deferred to KRPH, I lead AA meetings on Thursdays as a visitor for those locked up. Things have changed, though I wouldn’t say I’m much wiser so much as I just have accepted some hardships. Not being alone helps a lot. If I get stuck in my own head, shit can get really dark. Hobbies help a lot, but I can’t say enough that I am lucky to not know anyone who does alcohol or pot nowadays. That’s ultimately what saved me. Well, that and medication to deal with the brain damage to my dopamine receptors. I still struggle though. Life is a painful struggle and my brain is fucked up, so I fuck up sometimes. It’s less often though and it’s manageable rolling hills over an emotional roller coaster.
Best Regards,
– G
Joker's Wild 