It has been a while since my last diary and that’s because I stopped taking my medication. Many people will equate the phrase “stopped taking my medication” with paranoid schizophrenia and the self-infliction of scissor cuts, but in my case, it only meant getting a DVD pass from Blockbuster and watching 60 movies in 30 days. You’d think this would provide an abundance of material to write reviews with, but I can do that very quickly right now- On a scale of popcorn toppings, where pepper is a 1 and sugar frosting is a 10, I give most of the movies I saw the rating of something I found in my kitchen cabinet called Instant Bouillon Chicken Granules, the numerical equivalent of a 2. As for the rest, Freddy Vs. Jason and Seabiscuit, I give them the rating of pepper.
When I last wrote, I was about to start Paxil. I don’t think it did anything but my girlfriend said she heard “it makes you hate people”. Since I already hated people, I couldn’t tell a difference, but it did pique my curiosity about the unqualified opinions and shared myths of lay persons about medicine. So I did an internet search for the side-effects. I found one site, www.prozactruth.com, asserting that all psych drugs can result in horrible nightmares, nipple discharging, joint pain, profuse sweating, and best of all, depression. I laughed, I mean really laughed, for the first time in months.
So, I went back to my doctor for something else. He offered me a list of new antidepressants to choose from but provided no real information as to the difference between them. Put in this type of position, making a completely blind selection, I do what I usually do – pick whatever sounds most like a character from the He-Man: Masters of the Universe cartoon. I took home a prescription for Effexor with new hope.
I’ve tried this only five times, but each time has resulted in thirty minutes of calm, followed by an hour of crippling nausea, and then 3 hours of clement nausea. I don’t know the molecular apparatus by which Effexor works, but if it’s supposed to make you forget about the farce of human existence by inducing diarrhea, then it really works!
I am thinking about giving up on the anti-depressants all together, but then I look at my feet, and I am always wearing at least one of the pairs of socks you can see in these pictures. Yet, it is never Christmas or Easter or even gay pride day, so something must be wrong.