#304

We're going to blame the seeking of neurochemical stability and balance on the lack of posts and creative output in general. Guess also I should admit to myself that my office is not a super great place to write in yet, but making it better seems like too much hard work at a time when there's lots of other hard and necessary work to choose from and also I just want to chill a bit.

Back to to the brain chemistry: it's not strange being off everything, which is the strange part. I mean, because I'm the type of person who invests a lot of energy into the types and forms of bodily, psychic, and spiritual consumption they're undertaking in particular, I am concentrating on vitamin intake, nutritional supplements, and the timing of hydration and exercise with more zeal then when I smoked and drank--weed, tobacco; caffeine, alcohol. Once was a time I would eat a big spoonful of wheat germ for breakfast, have a small lunch at the Chinese place I worked at, and take the rest of my calories as brown liquor and foamy beers, smoking all the day and night. Occasionally, eggs, or a peanut butter sandwich. Didn't drink coffee back then. Started with the coffee in earnest when I quit drinking the first time. I would also drink cans of flavored sparkling water by the case, and smoke my cigs, though I'd left weed at that point as well. Even at points when I'd quit the rest, I'd stick with one; caffeine and nothing else at one point, weed and nothing else at another. But I haven't used nothing, nothing at all on the daily, since schoolboy days, basically.

Feeling fine, but at the same time, there are things I have to figure out how to do and carve the space for again. Writing is the main thing. A better chair, a lower desk, time, better organizing the writing space. In truth, I've done a great bulk of my writing recumbent, which is part of why my laptops tend to fall apart, but that's my most habitual zone. The most important ingredient will be time.

Truly, I am exhausted from merely this small effort. But I will nail myself to the duty of getting another one out tomorrow, The discipline must begin again. 

--JL