lowquality.net

My hand isn’t as badly hurt as I feared. It’s get­ting bet­ter and  the Doc con­firmed that I didn’t break any­thing. I felt like a goon  ask­ing her to check it and all she said in response was “..boys.” Then we dis­cussed whether my med­ica­tion needed to be adjusted. The ques­tion was always raised  as to whether my gen­eral irri­tabil­ity was related to my dosage or if a com­pletely dif­fer­ent med­ica­tion was even­tu­ally going to be needed. Increas­ing the dosage on the cur­rent med is the first thing we’re going to try and so far it’s work­ing. Doc actu­ally pro­posed one the­ory was that I may have bipo­lar dis­or­der but, at this point, the dosage increase has worked.  I am now back to feel­ing bet­ter. It’s really  amaz­ing how quickly the stuff works on me (when it works).

It’s sit­u­a­tions like this where I become very aware that my brain is noth­ing more than a ket­tle of chem­i­cals and this thought makes me uneasy. While I am relieved by the effects of these drugs, I hate that I have to take them. I hate that I am more or less depen­dent on them. My ther­a­pist always tells me to think of my meds as a tool, some­thing to allow me to bet­ter con­trol my thoughts, and he’s right. The med­ica­tion can­cels out the noise so that I can really move for­ward with my thoughts, but there is always that nag­ging feel­ing that I couldn’t do with­out them. Even though I attribute so much of my anx­i­ety to my 9 to 5 job, I know there are times in my life where I have been panic-stricken over sit­u­a­tions that were not deserv­ing of it. I should not live in the past, but if I had been tak­ing these crazy pills back when I was in col­lege, my tran­script might look much dif­fer­ent than it does.

I’ve been play­ing with Luke Tay­lor at his open mic shows at HK on The Bay (and also tomorrow’s show at GF Keegan’s) and it’s been a lot of fun. In some ways an open mic never feels like a real gig because there’s a lax level of pro­fes­sion­al­ism inherit in the for­mat of jam­ming with total strangers, but get­ting paid at the end of the night is always nice and it’s great to meet some of these incred­i­ble musi­cians that come out to play with us. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there is some fan­tas­tic tal­ent in this area and a short­age of venues to see them play