Miscellaneous

This was, originally, a blog entry about something else, but I like to recycle, so it's being purged and rewritten.

I got a raise this week. Not a big raise, but it was still a raise. This is both good, and a huge deal, because I haven't had a raise in over three years.

It's not an economy thing; my company is financially healthy and reasonably well managed. No, the problem is me, and my brain. It's a repeating pattern of failure that pretty much defined my 20's; get a job, learn fast, impress bosses, lose interest, ADHD sets in, fuck up too many times, get written up or worse, and eventually leave the job before they get the chance to fire me for incompetence or insubordination or whatever. I saw the same god damn pattern starting up again, so I finally went to a competent shrink, figured out that I have ADHD, got on meds, etc, etc.

That's all been in the last four months. Those were a rough handful of months too, between getting doses right, rethinking my sense of identity, neurotically reviewing my entire past from the framework of my new knowledge, and just general life stress of work and animal rescue and trying to keep my shit together.

So when it came time for my annual review I went in braced for bad shit, just like always. I had some hope and some feedback that I was doing better, but you never really know. But it was good, and my bosses were impressed. Not just impressed, but actually really shocked and happy at the sudden cessation of me being a terminal fuckup.

They had to take the whole year into account, which is fair, so the review wasn't great, but the end of the year improvement was so dramatic that they pushed to get me a raise, even if I probably didn't warrant one all things considered.

So that was cool, and I was sort of happy, but there's always that little voice back there in your brain (asshole) that says shit like 'well, it should have been like this all along, loser. Try harder.'

So I was thinking I should be happy and stuff, but still felt shitty and weird and sort of shell shocked, and then it just hit me: this ridiculous, raging ball of emotion, like right in the pit of my stomach, and I started to cry at my desk.

"What... what the fuck, holy shit! WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME!!" I said to myself, as I scurried off to the bathroom to hid my nervous breakdown and, possibly, drown myself in the toilet to save face. It took about fifteen minutes for me to get a grip.

It's worth describing myself physically at this point: I look like a skinny viking. My nickname among my friends (well, one of the nicknames) is, I shit you not, 'Walking Swedish Murder Machine', in reference to Brock Samson, and it's not ironic either. I say that not to brag about being Swedish, or way taller than this world is built for, or a Murder Machine (of what? I don't know. My own sperm, I guess). I say it to illustrate how ball-crushingly ridiculous my blubbering all the way to the cripple bathroom must have looked.

Fortunately, no one saw me (I hope?), so I was able to fake having some dignity once I dried my eyes and composed myself.

That was some heavy shit. That was some seriously repressed stress and fear and worry and anxiety and all that after this ADHD mess, that just spilled right the fuck out without so much as a friendly acknowledgement of my social anxiety and sense of shame.

The last four months of finally being able to think clearly, to keep track of things, to stay interested or at least fake being interested in something for longer than five minutes... has been stressful. Really, really stressful.

I realize that after ten years of fail, I had pretty much stopped trying anymore. I mean, why bother? Although as I type this, it occurs to me that this has gone all the way back to my childhood, with my D+ average grades and three years of summer school to barely get out of high school on time and with a diploma.

So really, this is more like... 25 years of fail. I mean, I've had some successes in spite of it, but that's the pattern. It sucks.

For the past four months of actually doing things well, of not fucking up, I built up a bowling ball sized know of stress I didn't even know was there. So bad that I've got neck pain and I sleep like shit, and maybe it's the meds, who knows... But a big part of it is that I have no fucking idea how to handle success. This isn't even big success, this is tiny every day shit, like holding down a job or remembering to take out the trash. I am actually overwhelmed by being less of a screw up. It's a lot of pressure. I'm so used to being a disappointment to family and authority figures that I don't know how to handle being something different.

I'm going to try to just roll with it, because I don't know what the hell else to do.

That mini melt down was good though. I needed it. I feel like an asshole, but it still had to happen. I've barely drawn in months, been withdrawing from everyone I know, just trying to keep it together and sort out shit in my head.

So after crying like a wuss for a while I feel better. I know that bottling up emotions is a bad thing, and we're supposed to express ourselves, and it's okay for men to cry in this day and age and all that, but there's a big difference between knowing these things conceptually and going through it for real. It feels bloody emasculating, whether it should be or not.

Well, I have a bunch of puppy-drunk women yelling at me to get food, so I'll end this for now. Next up: New Years Resolution Bullshit, or maybe more mental issues. Or maybe both.

43 days.

That’s how long I’ve been getting treatment for my ADHD. In case this is the first blog entry of mine you’re reading, I’ll recap: At the ripe old age of 32 I finally figured out that I have ADHD. The shrink put me on a low dose of Adderall, and the rest is history. Ok, so it’s only like a month and a couple days worth of history, but you know what I mean.

I got a surprising amount of feedback on the whole ADHD thing, including a few people asking me if it affected my ability to come up with novel ideas. There seems to be a lot of creative types out there who are holding off on getting treatment because they don’t want to turn into a mentally blunted zombie. I get that; I had those fears too. Continuing on the same blundering path would be kind of shitty though, so I read up on all the available meds, edified myself, and took the plunge.

The Good: Adderall is Kind of Awesome

All advice is autobiographical. There are no exceptions to this statement. Keep that in mind when you hear my take on this whole ADHD thing. Everyone has different genetic and epigenetic variations and combinations that affect the levels of neurotransmitters in their brains. Never trust someone who tells you they have ‘the answer’ to anything; they are, without fail, going to be full of shit. Maybe not entirely full of shit, but anyone who can put aside rational doubts and uncertainties is not to be trusted. I could write a whole book on this topic, but that’s a tangent for another time.

What I’m getting at is that this treatment is working for me, but it may not work for everyone. Some of the ‘new and shiny’ aspect has worn off, and my brain has acclimated to a little bit to the stimulants, but they’re still remarkably effective at clearing out the sludge and cobwebs and getting my neurons back in line.

I have a funny habit that my shrink observed, where I’ll stop in the middle of a conversation when I’ve been trying to explain some complex topic and ask ‘does that make sense?’ I no longer need to do that. I never even realized it, but I will lose track of my own topic of discussion if I go on for more than a few minutes. I can also code things now. Since I work in IT, this is incredibly useful. I’m actually not sure how I coded anything prior to this, but seeing the volume of comments I put in my code before I can hazard a guess. It’s like having a damaged short term memory, where you’ve only got so much space to work with. Ever see the movie Memento? It feels a little like that, only without the gaping plot holes or Joe Pantoliano.

Post-it notes are my friends. I need less of them now, but the number of reminders and notes and personal instructions I have to record have been cut in half. This stuff has cut down my stress levels tremendously. There’s a natural sort of uncertainty and anxiety with ADHD, where you can’t tell if you’ve forgotten about something or lost track of something, and you’re always worried you’re going to fuck something up. Keeping on any sort of task is exhausting, and even the thought of certain tasks is panic inducing. Dumb stuff, like scheduling appointments, planning trips, cleaning the house, walking the dogs, etc. These are things that are no longer new and shiny, so your brain knows it’s not going to get the dopamine fix it desperately needs. Somewhere in the back of your mind the spine-crawling anxiety of being trapped doing something un-stimulating for fifteen minutes feels like hell on earth. Some of the animal rescue work my wife and I do requires us to call people and interview them for fostering or adoption; doing that filled me with a level of dread I can’t properly express. It was so damn easy to forget key questions that you need to ask people, and I did it all the time. The constant threat of failure for even simple, mundane tasks like that is awful.

There are a lot of things that I do, and I think a lot of ADHD people do, that make them come across as complete assholes. Obstinate, stubborn, argumentative, difficult, inattentive, etc. It ain’t deliberate. Things that used to make me insane are now tolerable. Sort of… normal. I don’t mind making those calls, or planning stuff that takes more than a few minutes.

ADD/ADHD is kind of a dumb name for this disorder, if I may interject some more random only vaguely related opinions. Something more serious sounding like “Dopamine Deficiency Syndrome” would be better. ADD has such cultural baggage as being a non-condition or an excuse, but this shit will seriously fuck up your life if you’re not aware of it. Ok, tangent over. Well, this tangent. There’ll be more.

But the answer to the big question that people asked me is that this stuff doesn’t mess with your creativity. I still have no problem coming up with ideas. Dextroamphetamines are kind of weird; they’re not like long term meds like anti-depressants; they don’t really cause any major brain rewiring, there are no withdrawal symptoms if you go off of them. The human body is so good at processing them that the problem is actually keeping enough of them in your system to be effective.

I’ve gone a few days or a weekend here and there without the Adderall, and I went back to my normal disoriented self. In theory I think if someone did find that their creativity was impacted by these types of meds, you could just pick a day or two and go off of them and let your scattered brain go berserk. Record your ideas, and then go back on the stuff so you can focus and work on them. I don’t need to do that, personally, but it’s a viable option.

It’s not all unicorns farting rainbows and shitting daisies though.

The Bad: Welcome to the Exciting World of Drug Interactions!

Many years ago I was diagnosed with PTSD and clinical depression. I was put on a very low dose of an SSRI: Zoloft. Tiny dose; only 5mg. That’s a barely therapeutically effective dose.

Recently I bumped up to 10mg, after I really came to the conclusion that my brain was just not working right. This was a few months before the ADHD revelation. No side effects; I felt a little less miserable about failing at all of my life projects and being in a constant state of mild confusion, so that was good.

About a week into taking the Adderall I started getting side effects. These were not fun. Tolerable, but not fun. I was hot all the time, and I was sweaty. My heart would race from time to time, and it felt like it was beating harder than normal. I started flinching at things that startled me way more than I really should. My fight or flight reflex was in complete overdrive, to the point that playing video games would get me so amped up that I’d start to get tremors and muscle spasms.

But then the tremors stayed… and the random muscle twitches were pretty constant. An average person could probably accept a certain degree of trembling hands, but for an artist? That’s really shitty. It got to the point where it did impact my ability to draw, and I was starting to get worried that the side effects would force me off of the stuff.

But I’m a little OCD, so I’d been reading up on all sorts of interesting things about brain biochemistry, the history of pharmaceuticals, neurotransmitters, etc. I’m a nerd, so I get into that kind of stuff. Part of it is probably that it’s novel, so it makes my brain light up and triggers the whole dopamine release thing.

So in my research, I stumbled upon something really interesting: Adderall is really not supposed to be mixed with SSRI’s. SSRI’s are Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors. I know how they work, but to put it simple, it keeps the serotonin hanging around longer in your brain to do its job better. Adderall does a similar thing with Dopamine, in addition to making your body produce more.

But Adderall also makes your body make more serotonin too, and that’s the problem.

Serotonin Toxicity: The Fun Never Starts

Too much serotonin is bad. In fact, it causes those exact symptoms I outlined above, among other things. Adderall side effects overlap with a lot of those symptoms, so it’s very easy to overlook. But a few of the symptoms, like the weird muscle spasms and tremors, are nearly unique indicators of Serotonin Syndrome. The severity varies, as with anything, and I believe I had a mild case of it. Severe cases can just outright kill you though, so this is shit to take seriously.

Interestingly, it only took a minor dose of each of these meds to trigger those symptoms. It’s like a combination of menopause hot flashes and roid rage. I mean, I don’t know what either of those things are like, but you know what I mean.

So the obvious solution was to stop the Zoloft, so that my Serotonin levels, which are rather clearly at or near a normal level, could calm down a bit. So I did, and the next day they were gone.

Oh but if only it were that easy…

The Ugly: Brain Zaps.

I’ve never written about this before, but I know these fuckers all too well.

A few years into taking Zoloft I went cold turkey for a bit, to see how it was affecting me, and see if I still needed it. A few days later my head started to explode.

I didn’t register what it was at first, but soon I put two and two together.

When you go cold turkey off of an SSRI, your brain goes a little ape shit. SSRI’s do make long term changes to your brain, unlike plain old stimulants. The human brain is very malleable and adaptive, and it responds and adjusts itself to whatever chemicals are in your body. Food, drugs, etc. The brain undergoes clear changes when you get an SSRI in your system, and it takes some time for your brain to finish the rewiring. Most of these types of things are of a risk for young kids, but there’s some evidence that even an adult brain will have some permanent or at least very long lasting brain changes from it.

So, of course, if you go off of the stuff it takes a while for your brain to un-wire itself.

That’s where the zaps come in. It sounds like a dumb name, but that’s the best term for it. It’s got a whole formal name of SSRI Discontinuation Syndrome. Brain Zaps sounds more interesting though.

It feels like you’ve hit your funny bone; a really bad hit, the kind you feel in your toes and belly button or even under your tongue. Only it starts in your brain. For me it seems to be related to the balance system, as it’s tied in to vision. Turn your head too fast? ZAP! Look left or right with your eyes too quickly? ZAP! Stand up too fast? ZAP!!

Sometimes they just hit you out of the blue for no clear reason too. And boy do they feel shitty. Some of the big ones can hit so hard that your hearing cuts out for a second and your vision closes in a bit, like if you get up too fast after playing a marathon game of Tetris or an average Warcraft raid and go all light headed. It clearly sends some kind of insane signal through all of your nerves, because the really strong ones will make your tongue, belly button, toes, and the head of your wiener go all pins and needles. Pretty much anyplace in your body with a shit load of nerves gets blasted with unfiltered nerve signals.

Yeah, that’s right; I said the head of my wiener. It’s over-sharing day today, didn’t you know?

It takes almost a month for SSRI’s to take effect on most people. And it takes the same amount of time, or longer, to wean yourself off of them. I can only hypothesize that the drugs themselves don’t directly curb depression, but it’s more to do with the neurological changes they induce. I don’t know though, I’m just some random game geek on the internet, so don’t take any of my rambling speculations seriously. My symptoms and side effects are about as accurate as I can report them though.

And After the Ugly: the holding pattern of moderate annoyance:

So that’s where I’m at now. I’m walking an annoyingly fine line between brain zaps and hand tremors, while trying to get a better handle on how long the Adderall lasts in my system.

Take the Zoloft too infrequently or cut the doses back too far, and my brain starts trying to give itself electroshock therapy to punish my poor decision making. Take it too close to the Adderall and I start doing involuntary jazz hands.

I’ll get over it, of course, but it’s going to take some time. Hopefully not too much longer than a month, but we’ll see.

The real crazy thing is that the doses I’m on are pretty small. There are people on ten to twenty times as much Zoloft as I was on. There are people taking five times as much Adderall as me. There are people on both of those drugs, at the same time, along with other shit to control other symptoms or side effects.

I’m scientifically literate, financially stable, and reasonably intelligent and well informed on matters of medical importance. And in spite of that, I can just barely navigate all of this madness to get myself correctly diagnosed after twenty five years of symptoms starting when I was a kid. I can’t even wrap my head around how hard it must be for people with less means and less information to navigate these types of issues.

I don’t mean to end this by going all bleeding-heart-liberal-commie-socialist whatever on you guys, but this is heavy shit. What I’m dealing with is insignificant compared to what others have to deal with, and my issues have half fucked up my entire adult life.

That’s one of the pernicious things about names and labels. I wrote earlier that I thought ADD and ADHD had too much cultural bias attached to them, and I’m dead serious. Screwy levels of one or two chemicals in my brain, cause by one or more dysfunctional and all too common variants of a gene, have caused me to get fired from jobs, nearly fail out of school, screw up one opportunity after another, and lead to depression, self destructive behaviors, and an impressive collection of idiotic decisions over the years.

And I got really lucky. Even with my late diagnosis, I’m doing pretty well, and avoided all of the worst ADHD pitfalls.

I ain’t saying none of this is my fault. It’s all my fault, and I’m ok with that. I don’t like it, but it’s my bullshit and baggage to own. But bloody hell, our system isn’t well suited to help people with mental issues, is it?

A lot of people seem to have the opinion that mental issues like depression or ADD or mood disorders or what have you are moral failings, a character flaw if you will. Just a result of laziness, indifference, weak will, or whatever dismissive term you want to write on a label and slap on someone’s forehead. I’ve met a lot of people like that. They exist; there are a lot of lazy assholes out there, both physically and intellectually. But not everyone with trouble getting by is like that. I doubt that even a majority of people with issues like that are malingering exploiters.

I’ve gone my entire life, except for the last couple of months, assuming that my problems with work and life in general were because of something that was wrong with me. I bought in to the idea that I had motivation issues, or perhaps my screwed up childhood damaged me and made it harder to get shit done. That’s the kind of thing a person should be able to get over. Strong people are able to overcome crap like that, persevere, and be successful. So for my entire adult life I’ve thought I was a lazy shithead. I’m smart, I can figure stuff out, and yet I can’t finish a damn thing and sometimes just holding down a job has been an unbelievable struggle. I’ve never once blamed an outside source for my shortcomings. I’ve always turned it inwards. Try harder, think harder, concentrate, don’t be so scattered, stop wasting time, don’t fixate on useless stuff, don’t be such a failure.

That’s some rough shit. It’s no wonder my previous shrink thought I was depressed; I fucking WAS depressed, but for legitimate reasons. Treating the symptoms wasn’t going to help; the root cause needed to be identified and treated.

But that blame, that accusation that you’re just another lazy fuck who’s blaming their laziness on ADD or depression or bipolar disorder or whatever… that can be some seriously debilitating shit. Even if most of it is coming from you, yourself, it eats at you.

And like I said, I’m one of the lucky ones.

My disorder is simple, if hard to pin down and complicated by other issues at first. It responds well to treatment, and now I can focus my energy on getting my shit together.

…

But I still think about people with worse problems and less resources. How the hell would anyone expect them to excel in the face of that kind of adversity? Even in countries with medical systems that are less hindered by infantile ideologies than ours it’s tough.

…

I’ve got no solutions for this. I could think up plenty of stuff, sure, but I doubt any of it would be useful. I don’t know enough about it to come up with a plan that would be worth taking seriously. But I will say this:

Everyone has their demons. Never dismiss someone out of hand, because you never can tell what’s going on in their head.

Hell, even they may not know.

Yes, yes, I am in fact alive. Shocking, I know.

A few things before I launch into my... whatever stream of conscience madness I'm preparing to unleash.

COMMENTS: I believe that I have fixed the comment issue that was screwing up registered users; I finally set it so they can just straight up bypass the spam filter.

So that's good. Also, I've now disabled anonymous user registrations. If you want an account, or I inadvertently delete your account when I finish purging FIVE THOUSAND #$*&ING SPAM BOT ACCOUNTS just go right ahead and leave me a human-sounding comment and I'll manually make you a new one. Anyone can leave a comment, but it will be going into the spam moderation queue. Can't be helped; just too much spam. Try to compose your comments to look as non-spammy as possible and we should be good.

Ok, well, for the other stuff. Ummm... yeah, ok, where to begin...

I have ADHD.

Yeah, I know, big deal, right?

Well, I didn't figure this out until this month, August 2011. Note that, next month, I turn THIRTY-FUCKING-THREE. This is, to put it mildly, something that should have been figured out decades ago. At least two would have been nice. Earlier would have been fantastic.

But no, no such luck. I won't try to be one of those insufferable high-road pricks and say that I'm not bitter and annoyed about the whole thing. I'm bitter, and annoyed. Really bitter, and really annoyed, actually.

I didn't know shit about ADHD until recently. It's one of those mental conditions that a lot of people think is just laziness and a lack of discipline and motivation. I admit, I once thought that as well. Let's just chalk that one up to ignorance. As it turns out, it's a brain chemistry thing. It's not laziness or any sort of moral failing... it's tough giving every last ounce of energy your brain can muster to focus on the simplest task, like drawing for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch. Hell, sometimes more than five minutes.

It's like having hundreds of little mini anxiety attacks every day. I never really knew what boredom was because I always kept my brain engaged thinking about stuff. For me, and other people with ADHD, I assume, boredom is like death. You've got to do anything you possibly can to keep the dopamine levels high, to get that little burst to keep your mental gears churning.

There's plenty of literature on it and a ton of information on the internet. I won't bore you with more details about what it is, just a quick overview. It's a dopamine dysfunction, plain and simple. Some combination of screwy genes making screwy proteins making your brain permanently short on dopamine.

It's a huge part of why my artistic productivity is so inconsistent. I love art. It's what I want to do, it's what I think about all the time. And yet, I hit patches where I just can't do it. It's not a traditional art block; it's something else.

Imagine if there was something you loved, that you were good at, that you wanted desperately to work on all the time, that everyone told you you should be working on.

Now imagine that you have a mini anxiety attack after five minutes of doing it. That you have to go and do something else or it feels like your spine is going to crawl out of the back of your neck to go do something else, dragging your brain with it.

It's exhausting and miserable. Especially when you think it's just some kind of motivational failure on your part. Imagine beating yourself up for being a lazy fuck for twenty years, of thinking you're destined to be a failure because you can't get off your ass and even start new projects. You develop a real love/hate relationship with whatever it is you're good at. I certainly have.

I have had some really dark moments where I've completed some awesome epic picture, and felt nothing afterwards. Maybe a minute of happiness, but that creeping little anxiety doesn't go away. Nothing makes it go away except intense mental stimulation; video games, complicated science articles, taking apart machines, puzzles, etc. That quiets the little bastard, as long as you keep doing it. Once you stop, it's back again. And if you keep at it for too long that itchy brain feeling comes back anyway.

Well, you get what I mean. It sucks. Certainly not the worst thing in the world, but when you think that the problem is a matter of your own personal weakness and laziness, it can turn you into a miserable, self loathing douche.

This whole thing was a long time coming. There was a slow build up of awareness that something was seriously off. It actually started in earnest with the art commissions. Or rather, the fact that I just couldn't fucking do them. Just finishing one commission became a mini psychological trauma; an exhausting exercise in self contempt.

For a while I thought it was just that old saying: if you turn a beloved hobby into a job, you'll hate it. I've gone through this cycle many times before... trying to do pen and ink work for a gallery, different aborted comic ideas, web comics, game designs, etc. I never finish them. I burn out after a few months, and then go inactive for for a few more before I can will myself to get back to it.

But that wasn't it. I stopped even working on my own art, once I hit that threshold where the internal dopamine reward diminished. You do something interesting long enough and it stops being novel and interesting. Art is hard work; many hours just putting down lines and colors. It's fun, but it has some seriously monotonous moments.

DeviantArt helped too. There are so many incredibly productive and talented people on that site... and I realized that I just wasn't one of them. Sure, I have a screwed up imagination (a plus if you're a fantasy artist or cartoonist), but I couldn't put in the time needed. Couldn't beat my brain hard enough to make it let me do the work.

So one day I joke to my shrink (yes, I see a shrink) about how I wish I could take some ADHD meds sometimes to help me focus, even though I don't have ADHD. I had read an article about people abusing Adderall and Ritalin in college to help them study, and thought it was fucked up but interesting.

So my shrink says "well, maybe you have ADHD." And I says "No doc, there's no way. I'm not hyper or anything like that." and she says "Well, let's do a quick test and see."

So I take the little anecdotal test, and score a couple on the hyperactivity scale, which anyone can hit. But then I went nine for nine on the inattentive scale.

At that moment, my mind was blown. A little. There was more to come. You go through that reflection phase, where you try to evaluate your past in light of new information. I think we all do that when we learn something sort of heavy. I read books about it, rampaged across the internet digging up info, and came to a startling conclusion: My brain was messed up.

It all fit. The big one was reading Delivered from Distraction; a hell of a good book on the topic. It 'resonated' with me, as my shrink phrased it. I didn't have a word for it, at the time. I've known I was sort of fucked in the head for decades now; lots of mental illness in my family, and I've always thought it was OCD or PTSD or depression or dysthymia or maybe some borderline personality disorder or somehting. Nothing ever quite fit right, and I never even considered ADHD.

I'm not a religious person. Anyone who's been following my art or website for whatever reason should be pretty aware of that by now. But reading a book about ADHD, by someone with ADHD, was the closest thing I've ever come to having a religious epiphany. A dawning awareness of something profound that hits you like a wave. A mixture of hope and fear sadness and happiness and just overwhelming emotional shit. Buckets of it. Hitting you in the brain. Monkeys throwing buckets of emotional shit at your brain, while laughing at you for being so idiotically unaware for so long. Yeah, like that.

Long story short, I had to find a psychiatrist. Psychologists are a dime a dozen. MD's who specialize in mental stuff? Harder to find. Harder still to get an appointment with. But I did, and I got me some amphetamines. And even that's hard, because that shit is a schedule two controlled substance. You need authorizations on top of authorizations and signatures and insurance approval and a nightmare of red tape to get it.

So I annoyed my wife to the point that she nearly stabbed me in the neck with a butter knife for talking about it incessantly. It turns out that once the depression and self loathing go away, the hyperactivity comes back. Sometimes a lot. But she didn't slay me for aggravating her, which is more a testament to her tolerance than anything else. I finally got the stuff, and, well, ok, time to try it out.

That's a scary god damn moment. What if it didn't work? What if I was destined to be a scatter brained, unproductive schmuck for life? Fuck. Then there's the idea of being on another stupid pill to function, and the condemnation a lot of people give to anyone who needs any kind of chemical crutch. It's hard to drop that kind of shit. Rationally I know better; I know that there are a billion things that can go awry with the brain or body and that there is absolutely no guarantee that you're going to be ok. There's no ideal state of humanity that we can all achieve if we just try hard enough. But still, you just can't shake that idea that it's a moral failure to need this stuff. 'You don't have ADHD, you're just being lazy and whiny, and your parents didn't discipline you enough, blah blah judgmental drek blah blah blah'.

...

So I took the pill. I was sitting at work, waiting to see what would happen.

Yep, waited a while.

Felt like an eternity. That's another thing with ADHD; we don't track the passage of time very well. Humans are bad at it in general; people like me are even worse.

And then, quiet.

I never really understood how loud the inside of my head is. I knew that I had racing thoughts; hell, it's kept me from sleep as long as I can remember. But the quiet... was not what I expected. The idea of taking an amphetamine (technically dextroamphetamine) is sort of nuts in general, and the idea that it would lead to such quiet and calm is even more so.

But it did. Just quiet, and calm. No racing sounds and images, no anxiety from every little thing going on, no exhausting fight to keep things focused in my head.

I admit I actually got a little emotional at work there, what with my new found super powers of normal concentration. I never even realized all of the mental tricks and the little techniques I have for managing my job. Dozens of post-it notes with little processes and reminders, saved files with lists of steps and procedures for even simple things that shouldn't be hard to remember. No more triple checking numbers and information and names and dates. I've been written up for poor job performance over this stuff before. Hell, I've been fired from jobs for being careless and inattentive before.

It's like having a computer with too little memory. In order to move on to the next task or set of steps in the process you have to unload everything from the last thing you did. Only the computer is your brain. I probably didn't need to spell out that analogy, but what the hell.

The meds shouldn't have worked this well. It's too simple an explanation. It feels too easy, to obvious in hindsight. My shrink even asked me how the hell this was missed when I was a kid, given how glaringly obvious it was once we knew what to look for. I'm still not sure myself; the signs were all there, and it wasn't like I wasn't a pain in the ass kid in school. I had shitty grades and behavior problems and was constantly distracted, drawing when I should be paying attention. I guess there's not much use in dwelling on what might have been, but we all do it anyway.

The real moment of truth was sitting down to draw. There have been times, usually after a long hiatus, where I can feel myself getting into the flow of drawing. It's not just drawing; it can be sculpting or programming or carpentry or anything... just making stuff. You hit a zone where you just go, you know what to do and just work on it, and it feels fucking great. It's not euphoric, just deeply satisfying. Maybe it's a zen sort of thing, I don't know.

But I sat down to work on some art, and just got lost in it again. I haven't had that in so long, just a memory of what it was like. Even the monotonous parts of it feel... good, I guess. I'm not used to that. I can get caught up in my work without every little tick or noise or itch or distraction intruding and breaking me from the flow. I can work without that brain itch trying to claw out of the back of my head after five minutes. No more fighting my own biochemistry just to do fifteen minutes of art a day.

So that's where I'm at. It's been six days on this stuff, and I've already done more art than I was able to will myself to do in the last month. Yeah, really, six days, that's all.

I can't make any promises about where this is going, really. I'm awesome at doubting my own thoughts, so maybe this is just some early crazy phase where everything feels wonderful and shiny and new, and it's bound to wear off. But I don't think so.

So now that I've gotten all this long winded self indulgent crap out of my system, I think it's time to pick up the pen and go draw. I'll let you know how it goes.

I am so busy.

No, really. This isn't like 'busy getting top tier gear through raidng in warcraft' busy, or 'I took a second job scrubbing shitters for cash desperation' busy.

No, these are real, honest to goodness art commissions. I've got a bunch of them all rolling in at once. Hell, some of them are even paid for and just waiting for my ass to finish them up. I have a dozen Goblins to draw, Hip-hop themed and ethnically diverse angels, city skylines, men sitting on toilets with their laptop or rocking a kilt with attitude. And that's just the drawing shit I have to do, never mind my own slow suffering money-pit comic projects.

On top of that I started sculpting. I just sort of blundered into some awesome guys who make weirdo toys at www.HalfBadToyz.com. Sort of a happy accident really, so here I am setting up a sculpting station and trying to figure out what the fuck I'm doing with polymer clay; something I've really never worked with before. But man, it is interesting.

My shopping get a little sketchy when I have to set up for a new type of project. This latest round included 1500 and 600 grit sandpaper, neodymium magnets, a bar of steel, pin spreaders, a full set of dentist's picks, a heat gun, turpenoid mineral spirits, a wire brush, super glue, and all sorts of other crap that makes me look like I'm up to no good.

So, yeah... I'm busy.

...

It's a good busy though. A wise man once told me that a hard day spent drawing is better than a hard day doing almost anything else, and I think he's right. It's more than just drawing though, it's doing anything creative and interesting. Another wise man once said that you shouldn't worry too much about making money at your chosen craft. Just be awesome, and the rest will come inevitably. A little more optimistic than I prefer, but I think I agree with the sentiment. If you're just doing something to make cash, it'll probably suck. There has to be some heart behind it.

I actually collect little quotes and sayings like those all the time. Little motivational or inspirational sayings. I feel like a traitor to the cause of pessimistic cynicism when I do, but they keep me going, so fuck it.

...

In other news, I have hired a web master. He's a little slow, so I need to flog him with an electrical cord now and then to get him motivated. I can get away with this since he's living with us. I'm not very good at keeping my indentured servants in line though. I'm too soft. I think I'll go throw things at him until he starts working again. Later!

I had a request to add in some Cafepress junk based on my old raging code monkey pic, so I cleaned it up (a little; I'm lazy) and loaded it up there.

New store is: http://www.cafepress.com/raging_code_monkey

Which also sort of reminds me, what other images of mine do people want on shirts and other merch? (Hmm, merch is an odd word...) If there's something you want, I can probably be pretty easily motivated to add it. I'm a capitalist whore like that. :D

Stuff I'm obsessed with lately:

Music: Truth by Alexander Ebert

Game: Minecraft

and Robotic Snow Removal

...

Ok, so that's not an extensive list, but I hate when people are like, 'hey, here's my favorite music!' and spam five hundred links. So I shall give you one song, one game, and one miscellaneous thing I wish I had.

The machine above is... well, I dunno, some crazy sketch. I had a write up for it too:

Although originally built as a construction machine designed to lift heavy loads and aid in moving stone and beams, these machines later found good use as front line shock troops with a few modifications. Standing ten feet tall and weighing nearly two tons once fully armed and armored, they have a fearsome presence on the battlefield. They would often cause regular troops to break ranks and flee in the face of a war machine that's all but impervious to small arms fire.

The left arm is a mantis style cutter with hooked serrations for grabbing and tearing at larger foes. Against armored foes, it is used to pin and hold them.

The right arm is designed to latch onto armored targets and bore holes into them, with the intent of damaging vital internal parts. This is equally effective against armored or unarmored foes, although the results are rather horrifying in the former.

Dear Blog, I know I haven't been around as much lately, and that I've been distant and cold and somewhat indifferent to your needs. But that's because I've been spending time with someone who doesn't need constant updates, or who chews up and shits out incomprehensible CSS code onto the carpet, or who makes me jump through a dozen steps just to get one picture loaded properly.

But that's ok, because I still love you, and I'm not going to neglect you so much anymore. I'll try to fix up your annoying flaws and turn you into the type of blog I want to spend time with.

Anyway, enough of that, now for some art:

Click on this one to see the uncensored version. I figure some people may look at this at work, and I don't want to get anyone fired by flashing titties up on their screen right from my front page.

Yep, still here. Still busy as hell, but I got sick of looking at the same comic whenever I come here so I figured I'd bump it off the front page.

Art wise, not much... still plugging away all slow like on Steamvolt, and wedging in some sketches when I can. I decided to reboot my art mojo by forcing myself to do two sketches per day for 30 days. Once I get more time I'll set up a new location for them, and add an entry each day with whatever madness I come up with.

As I've said before, not too many people are interested in what I have to say (I think), so anyone reading this would probably appreciate more art, less chatter. If the thirty days go well I might continue it on and make it a regular thing. It would probably be good if this was just a proper art blog.

Oh, and while I'm here, Mumford and Sons are a friggin' badass band, Worms: Reloaded rocks, and Castle Crashers for the PS3 makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

The sketch above isn't all that meaningful... just a girl with mechanical arms. Might turn into a Steamvolt character, I dunno.

Lots of random shit today. For starters, the sketch above sucks, but it's the first chance I've had to really sit down and just doodle stuff. No real idea what it is, just some kind of beaked golem thing. Whatever. Finding free time is a real bitch, although step one is cutting out video games, quite frankly (ironic given my last post). Video games eat time and shit fun. If you want to get other stuff done in life, you really gotta cut back. I'm always amused by geeky gamers who trash professional sports or non-sports like golf for being a huge waste of time, while they'll burn six hours straight in a friggin World of Warcraft raid. I'm not a sports guy; I'm a gamer at heart, but I gotta call a spade a spade here. If you play copious amounts of video games, you probably should shut the fuck up about other people's hobbies being a 'waste of time'.

In other news, this: An asshole opines on how to screw people over and foster terrible professional relationships. This article generated a hell of a lot of furor all over the internet, particularly on DeviantArt where I'm pretty active. It's an incredible article, and a spectacular example of the kind of douchebag to avoid if you do freelance art. His basic premise is that you can save money on a game design project by hiring young, inexperienced artists and lying to them and manipulating them into giving you as much as possible for your money. he even includes social engineering techniques right from the Dilbert pointy-haired boss school of project management. While technically correct, that yes, you can often get some quick savings by being a sleaze, he's completely off base on long term success. Nothing he said in there is unique; it's all the same sort of techniques employed by used car salesmen and scam artist everywhere, going as far back as the concept of money and contractors.

I've got more thoughts and information on this topic, but it'll have to wait till I get home and can access my links. Ok, sort of changed my mind about taking the time to dig up more information and opinions on this. I think the guy's article speaks for itself, really.

And last but not least, all the World Trade Center Mosque craziness. In case you live under a rock, a group wants to put up an Islamic Cultural Center two or three blocks from the World Trade Center site in New York City, and a lot of people are freaked out over this. This center will be the equivalent of a YMCA, from the description, and the guy who's behind it has actually worked with the George W. Bush administration and Obama's administration on international programs to foster tolerance and cooperation between the U.S. and Arab nations. He's not a terrorist or any of that B.S., he's a liberal/moderate Muslim, just like most Muslims.

The issue is really simple: people who are opposed to this are shitheads. For starters, this is private property. The site in question is a run down old retail building. There are absolutely no laws that will prevent this from happening. Nothing. Debates about whether they have the 'right' to build there are idiotic. Secondly, the first amendment. You know, that whole freedom of religion thing. The part that a lot of conservatives seem to want to selectively apply when it suits their voting base. And third, the first amendment, because that's pretty fucking important here and deserves a second mention. Someone give this to Newt Gingrich, he could use a refresher:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

A lot of people, indeed, a majority of the country, seem to think that this is a bad idea and that they shouldn't be allowed to build there. The perception seems to be that this is an insult to the victims of 9/11, and they equate it to putting up a giant Nazi Swastika next to the Holocaust Museum. That's actually a pretty interesting mentality. There really are a lot of people who think that this is a religious war, and that we're at war with the entire Muslim world. I guess it goes to our tribal tendencies, and of humanity's tendency to separate into us vs. them camps. Hell, polls are indicating that twenty percent of the country think Obama is a Muslim, so who the fuck knows what these imbeciles are really thinking. This is the same as thinking all Catholics are child molesting pedophiles, or that all Atheists are immoral monsters, or that all Teapartiers are racists, or that Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world, or that all Black people are crooks and welfare exploiters. Pick a stereotype, almost any one can apply.

You just can't paint people with such broad brush strokes. The actions of a small subset of assholes in any group can't be applied to the entire group. It just doesn't work that way. But we all do it. Again, it's that idiotic tribal mentality our species just can't get past. The latest tack I've seen is a lot of commentors asserting that Islam isn't a real religion, it's a political system designed to control and oppress people, and thus it isn't protected by the first amendment. Ironic, given how people who espouse this attitude often want to force the rest of the country to bow to their religious beliefs and prejudices.

The angry backlash is just another indicator of a portion of our country's xenophobia and hatred, although it's a good way to spot people who really don't give a fuck about the constitution or the law.

Anyway, that's all for today. Fear not though, I've got more irrelevant opinions on the way!

EDIT: Ok! All better! Comments actually *were* working, there was some kind of glitch from an image I had renamed at some point that screwed up a node number in the database. I DONE FIXED IT! So go ahead and comment away. I'll keep my eye out for more bugs. :)

Looks like the comments aren't displaying correctly, so don't bother making any until I get it fixed. They're in the database, I think, so once I get some updates and do a little code tweaking and module updating they should be back and working right. I'll make another update here once that's set.

BACK IN ACTION! For once, something positive!

I have finally gotten all of my shit transferred to the new host, and even got this bucket of bolts website back up and running. I think there are a few hiccups here and there, but it seems to have gone well. I guess it helps that I've done this several times before, so it wasn't too painful. The most aggravating part was trying to get the information from my old host so I could actually get the transfers completed.

Anyway, that is all, and here, have a goofy sketch of... something. With bunny slippers and a lizard. I dunno. Um, never mind.