Adderall is a miracle drug. I read and read and read, and no one can stop me, God or man--and least of all: the spasticity and mania of my own crazy brain. Adderall sits my brain in the corner for a time out and doesn't let it up to play. I listen to Adderall. It gets through to me. I read till I'm sick in the head, dehydrated, jumping up and down with epiphany. I make notations in the margins of my books. I LEARN. Oh god, it is magical this drug.
Aside from the shakes and sweaty pits. And the TMJ and the IBS. And the pervasive paranoia I often call "Ninjas in the bushes" syndrome, a syndrome I doubt is specific to me, but since I lead a very solipsistic life, I'm claiming that and you can't have it.
But I recently read something that got my brain all fussy and full of new notions. I'm going to write about that now, and you're going to read it.
I assume, dear reader, that you are one of the three types of people who read my site.
1) The cutters. The sad people. The depressed. These are the strugglers, who get to come here and read something they identify with; something that makes them feel less mad at the end of the day.
2) The voyeurs. The ones who like the trainwreck. These people work in offices and fear the world. They are very grown up. They like the kid in me. I'm the frosted side of their shredded wheat.
3) The haters. The downers. The Negative Nancies. These are the men who suffer under homosexual desires they feel socially unable to express; the men who enter into obsessive shared realities with my ex-boyfriend, and thus carefully study and hack away at--as much as is possible via the Internet--what they interpret to be the bud of his Hydra, or me. These are the women who have either slept with and been rejected by my ex-boyfriend, or were just flat out rejected by him altogether; the women who find it necessary to seek out the only girl he ever loved and prove she sucks to assuage their ego.
Now. I never write to number threes. They can suck a dick. I usually write to number ones, and then number twos tend to find what I write kinda wacky and interesting, and everyone is happy, and we all get a good laugh, ha ha ha, silly rabbit, and her silly misadventures.
But in keeping with the theme of this entry I'm crafting, the differences between the ones and the twos are very important to note.
Are you a one? Are you one of those people who finds it very difficult to blend? Are you socially anxious, given to fits of boozing or drugging or any kind of "let's just leave reality for a bit" behaviors? Are you paranoid you're never "normal" enough?
Or are you a two? There's a way of going about living life, and you do it that way? It doesn't seem odd to be around people? Instead, the extreme self-consciousness of a number one seems very odd? Why wouldn't you just get up, go to work, come home and watch TV? Why so many questions? Life just isn't that hard. That's you, Mr. Two. Easy peasy.
Did you know that Adderall is the new weight loss drug of choice? Or rather, it's an old one now. I'm a little behind the 8 ball on weight loss drugs, as I'm not interested in them.
Women in Los Angeles have been going to their doctors and faking ADD to get on Adderall so they can "starve down" so to speak. Women have been buying it off the black market like they do coke, speed, meth or that bizarre racehorse crack called "cutter," the one that forces the body into a skeletal state as if adipose tissue cells were parasites. They don't take Adderall because they can't read. In fact, they don't give a crap about reading at all. Adderall and "starving down" are what they use to look good. To control their body. To be beautiful. To be as materially beautiful as possible, in as limited an ontological understanding of beauty as can be.
Speaking in ontological terms, can't we call this Materialism? That's my new word. I'm so excited to use it, for I always thought it was a word that pertained only to consumption of material goods, or a way of explaining drug use among soccer moms and high suicide rates among suburban dads. It's not. It's an ontological term. It means, philosophically:
The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena.
Do you see what I did there, right before I explained what the term "Materialism" means? I linked it to drug use and suicide, right? That means I don't like it. I'm only making a value judgment because I prefer the immaterial, not because a life filled with lots of solid, pretty stuff--stuff that makes one comfortable and happy--isn't valid and worthy pursuit. I'd say the majority of people are these number twos, people who prefer to live a material life because it suits their ethos. So why should they reject the material? It wouldn't make sense.
But that's not me. I don't see slaving away at the same menial task to buy another object a good idea. I don't get comfort or pleasure from objects. Things have never moved me. On the contrary, I can pick up and move my entire world in ten minutes, twenty tops. The material aint my bag, never has been, and at 31 I'm going to make the prediction that it never will be. I'm comfortable declaring that.
So I will never use Adderall to look better, to have a more beautifully-shaped object for my brain to sit within, and frankly, I never considered that to be one of the reasons to buy such a drug, but then, I'm one of those number ones.
Last night I walked to a bar down the street from my hippy den. I drank some red wine and had some Ahi tuna with a lady named Thunder. She's a member of the Mowhawk tribe, on a special healing mission, the spiritual immensity of which was lost to me and my WASPY/material ways of thinking--leftover habits from my upbringing among very material Boomer parents. The bartender was a German guy named Christian, a Satanist named Christian. We all thought that was very funny, as were his stories about smuggling diamonds from France into Berlin. "If the French police stopped me, I would slide a diamond into their glove. And they would always let me go. I would drive 120 miles per hour on the Autobahn, white-knuckling the steering wheel. By the time I got back to Berlin, I would be down six quarts." And his accent was such that "the Autobahn" sounded like "zee Autobahn," and "six quarts" sounded like "seex qvorts."
[Aside: Christian teaches Tantra by day to make ends meet. Who teaches Tantra for shits giggles?]
I got very drunk on wine with my number one friends, and then stumbled back to my hippy den. It was a dark night, too dark to see the road, and so I decided to sit on a log aside the road and sing songs until it was daylight again. I sang every song I could remember, and then got very bored and started text messaging everyone in my phone the same thing, or:
"The eagle flies at midnight."
I thought it was so very funny at the time, though only two of my friends texted me back. I wanted to share with them the hilarity of Christian, and the earnestness of Thunder. I wanted them to know I was totally surrounded in blackness and stars, and couldn't have cared less about the darkness. I felt in total isolation and very good about it. They should have known that Adderall is wonderful drug, and that I have LEARNED on it.
But no one knew anything because it was a Thursday at 2am mountain time, and they were all sleeping, getting ready for a day at their very sensible, grown up jobs, getting ready to call me at 2pm mountain time the next day. A call I won't answer, for sensible friendly conversations with number twos at appropriate hours aint my bag.
No one knew, and as you can see, I felt very unloved. Irrationally.
I could have one of those jobs they go to. I have had them in the past. The whole world has jobs like that and does just fine on them. But then, it seems, the world is run by number twos, and I'm one of those kooky number ones, often plagued by loneliness at odd hours--number one hours--I feel totally alive at.
It's a number two world.
I got to thinking about the material versus the immaterial while reading this wonderful book. It's called The Mind and the Brain; Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. It was written by a doctor named Jeffrey M. Schwartz whose specialty is in the treatment of Obsessive Compulsive patients by use of redefinition of negative memories and the often destructive behaviors connected to them into positive behaviors. In doing so, Dr. Schwartz discovered that patients were often able to use their mind to change and reshape their brain. Again, his patients were using their mind--the immaterial "them"--to reshape their brain, the complex lump of cells in their skulls, the place where everything can be explained by cause and effect Nueroscience.
So that's quite shocking, no? Dr. Schwartz says the immaterial changes the material. He says the power to change lies in the immaterial part of our mentality. No one agrees with him, of course, and this is why:
The neuroscientist has precisely described the stimulus--light of a precise wavelength. She has meticulously traced the brain circuits that are activated by this stimulus. And she has been told, told, by her volunteer, that the whole sequence adds up to a perception of red. Can we now say that [a] neuroscientist knows, truly and deeply knows, the feeling of seeing red?...there is a very real difference between understanding the physiological mechanism of perception and having a conscious perceptual experience...a neural state is not a mental state.
Well, no shit. Any number one understands that implicitly.
Materialism, of course, is the belief that only the physical is ontologically valid and that, going even further, nothing that is not physical--of which mind and consciousness are the paramount examples--can even exist in the sense of being a measurable, real entity (This approach runs into problems long before minds and consciousness enter the picture: time and space are only two of the seemingly real quantities that are difficult to subsume under the materialist umbrella).
He goes on to say:
For the most part, the inevitable corollary of materialism known as identity theory--which equates brain with mind and regards the sort of neuron-to-neuron firing pattern leading to the perception of color as a full explanation of our sense of red--has the field by the short hairs. The materialist position has become virtually synonymous with science, and anything nonmaterialist is imbued with a spooky sort of mysticism (cue Twilight Zone theme). Yet it is a misreading of science and its history to conclude that our insights into nature have reduced everything to the material.
Whoa. Without getting too extreme. Without going off on an otherworldy tangent that'll blow this cute little musing out to the end of one of my poles--black or white. Without casting hipster fire and brimstone at anything mainstream, I have to say I think Mr. Schwartz is right on and a hip cat. I've never liked Science. It rejects the immaterial, and I'm of the number oneish ilk, the rejectors of the material.
But this raises all sorts of fuzzy questions.
Could it be that there's an ungathered, unorganized society of number ones living uncomfortably in a number two world with no representation, screaming "There is more!" while told their very immaterial interests and perspectives are bizarre, or "spooky mysticism," or just plain erroneous? Could it be that a number one in a number two world doesn't have a chance at normalcy or comfort? Or does it mean, perhaps, that by taking a more material approach to life, a number one can tether themselves to a healthy middle ground, where slight kookiness is balanced with stability and reason?
Shit, I don't know. I'm just glad I know mainstream Science is a little bit full of shit, because I always thought it was me who was wrong. Suddenly, I feel kind of good about my inner kook. Thank you Mr. Schwartz.
Posted by The Bunny at 4:27 PM