I was quitting coffee with Kim for Lent prior to getting on this anti-anxiety med, but now I am so sleepy in the morning that I need to imbibe some kind of caffeine to get by. I’m not drinking in front of her (this whole Lent thing is really more for her than me, I was just trying to be supportive), but I get some opportunity for coffee at work. I am finding that the combination of the caffeine and the SSRI are amazing. Not am I just in a better mood, but I am goddamn happy.

Weight is still down near low 220’s. Going to the gym tonight. Been playing bass a little more often than normal, the desire wasn’t quite there for the first week because I felt so dopey. Have noticed a stronger desire to be listening to music at home, which has been almost non-existent for some time.

In case anyone was wondering, I have been intentionally avoiding the use of the brand name of my medication just to keep the comment spam down. Ironically enough if you go to the old, hyphenated version this domain (that I no longer own) someone is selling the specific drug on that site.

I still hate my job. There’s no medication for that, I think. I still feel totally trapped but not quite as overwhelmed. The panic is gone but there’s a lot more apathy in it’s place. Were it not for the fear of Kim and I living on the streets (or worse, with our parents) I think I could easily walk out of there without a second thought.

Weighed myself this morning, 221lbs., which is unbelievable. My original diet goal was 220lbs but I didn’t think I’d ever get close. Don’t know if it will stick, though. I haven’t been eating like I normally would. I have an appetite but I am also a stress eater and– even since I’ve been dieting, this hasn’t changed. But since a lot of the stress is gone I’m not snacking as much. Also my blood pressure went down like 10 points in a week. Pretty crazy.

I sit down at my computer almost out of habit. I would normally do this as a kind of “veg out” activity to get my mind off of whatever I was freaking out about. But I sit down now, click few a few things and get incredibly restless because it just isn’t entertaining me. I find that I have an amazing amount of focus now, but I am just not focusing on anything in particular. The anxiety is gone but the ways that I typically deal with it remain.

It’s so early in the game to beat myself up about any of this, but I definitely see myself having to make some changes. My daily activities just don’t make sense anymore. On one hand, my anxieties were overwhelming me, but, on the other hand they were a stimuli. It’s probably safe to say that, at one time in my life, anxiety / depression was a motivator for me to do more positive things. My interests as a musician certainly stem from that. This is true for a lot of people, I’m sure. When I listen to Elliott Smith’s music I always wonder how he could possibly be able to write ONE song and exist in the mental state he was obviously in, let alone hundreds of songs. I know that he did it because you really feel like you don’t have a choice. You do whatever makes the pain go away– for better or worse. Elliott reached the end of that rope and so did I. Obviously, my anxiety / depression wasn’t driving me to suicide, but it became bigger than I could handle on my own.

I feel like I’m probably making a huge mistake by publicizing all of this. While I wouldn’t tell a co-worker I was taking psychiatric drugs, I don’t seem to have a problem publishing it on the internet. I want to keep a record, at least, of everything that’s going on and I’m not particularly ashamed of this process.

As far as physical side-effects, only a mild headache. Not sure how long that will keep happening, maybe it will eventually go away. Also, I get a dry mouth a few hours after taking the pill but that goes away. Not aware of any sexual side-effects so far (I know you’re all dying to know that).

I am so hesitant to be the guy who preaches the gospel of Psychiatry– especially so early in this process– but I do feel as though this is something that needed to be done 10 years ago. Maybe not specifically medication, but this process that I have begun in the last few months is something that was so long overdue. I normally do an awful lot of living in the past, and my time spent there is almost always negative. I’m noticing that my reflections since I’ve been using this medication have been more constructive, at least in the light knowing what it feels like to be somewhat more peaceful than I am aware I’ve ever been. I’m not trying to dwell, but its hard to not say, “Wow if I had felt this way during my 2nd semester proficiency exam my entire life might be different.”

It’s only day 2, but in a lot of ways I feel kind of fearless. That scares me, funny as it sounds, because I’ve been ruled by irrational fears for most of my life. I’ve been scared and worried so much of my life that it felt normal. It was accepted because I didn’t know any different. Now that I think I can alleviate that sensation I am kind of excited to see what I could be capable of.

That’s another thing, being on meds has turned my daily life into a big experiment. I am fascinated by my new reactions and / or lack of reactions to outside stimuli. Whether it be traffic or my wife or something I overhear a stranger say or even my job, I now notice that my reactions to any given situation are a complete a surprise to me. I know how I would typically feel and I know that I don’t feel that way. It’s like my whole boring mundane life has boiled down to that scene in Half-Baked with John Stewart smoking weed and staring through a telescope.

So today I joined the millions of Americans who solve their everyday problems by imbibing psychotropic drugs. I’m not 100% excited about this, but after a series of talk-therapy sessions, I realize that this avenue has gone long untraveled and it’s time that I explored it.

Apparently I have what is called Generalized Anxiety Disorder which just means I worry about a lot of shit that I shouldn’t be worrying about to the point that my thoughts are intrusive on my daily life. Technically what is happening is a constant misfire of my synapses that gets my natural “Fight or Flight” function confused so that it’s basically “always on.”

Actually, that little tidbit of biological information explains a lot about my last 5 years. I’ve been constantly running away from, or irrationally avoiding, situations that– although not totally enjoyable– were only moderately uncomfortable. This anxiety has not only permeated my well-documented distaste for the IT field but also created barriers in endeavors I should have been more excited about. In the past five years I’ve turned down last-minute calls for gigs because of my anxiety. I’ve had terrible on-stage experiences that I would attribute entirely to over-thinking the situation and irrational panic. This only takes into consideration about the last five years, but looking through the archives of this blog, I can find plenty of examples in reflections on my college years and my anxiety was no doubt an intrusion on my learning experiences at Berklee and ended with a crescendo of full-grown panic attacks during my last weeks living in Boston.

It’s like that Mike Ness lyric: “you can run all your life but not get anywhere.”

When I expressed my reluctance to taking meds to the Doc she even said “If you had high blood pressure you wouldn’t think anything of taking medicine. Sure, you hate your job, but you do have anxiety. If you had another job you’d still have anxiety.”

Cold hard medical logic. She’s right.

So here we are.

Bottoms up.

That is not to say that taking medication every day is going to make me suddenly love working in the IT field. In fact, I am hoping for the opposite. I hope that getting my head straight is what I need to either propel myself out of this field and onto something I truly enjoy, or give me the calm required to plan and execute a geographical move elsewhere or maybe even a new plan altogether that I haven’t even considered under the influence of my own negative thoughts.

A lot of nostalgia gets spent on Yo! MTV Raps, but back in the olden days, 120 Minutes was the bleeding edge of all things hip in pop music. With so many hard-focused music blogs with their ears to rail it’s really hard to imagine a tv station ever being able to predict (or even dictate) the trends in hipster music, but 120 Minutes foretold of the coming of the “alternative” music genre several years before it hit the mainstream. Quite simply, that moniker perfectly describes 120 Minutes, because they basically played anything that was not in MTV’s regular rotation and not generally accepted as hip-hop or metal (because they had other shows for that stuff).

One of the most interesting parts about this archive is some of the “top Alternative albums” lists (such as this one from March of 1995):

Top Ten Albums on Alternative Radio
10. Green Day- Dookie
9. Live- Throwing Copper
8. Adam Ant- Wonderful
7. Nine Inch Nails- The Downward Spiral
6. Mad Season- Above
5. Bush- Sixteen Stone
4. Juliana Hatfield- Only Everything
3. Matthew Sweet- 100% Fun
2. Elastica- Elastica
1. Better Than Ezra- Delu

It’s hard for me to remember a time when Green Day fell into a niche market and wasn’t one of the biggest bands in the world. I do remember an awful lot of people being into Better Than Ezra when I was in high school, but I don’t quite remember them EVER being bigger than Nine Inch Nails.. and I’ll be damned if I hadn’t almost totally forgotten about that Mad Season album.

120 Minutes Archive: Episodes from MTV (1986-1995)

Ratings:
Justin: 4 ^1/2 out of 5
Kim: 4 out of 5

Notes: Yeah, I know October is over now but we attempted to rent this one a few times and it was out.

It’s hard to believe there is a growing generation of Sam Raimi fans out there that only identify his work with the Spiderman movies. I really enjoyed the first Spiderman but it would never fill the place in my heart that I have for Evil Dead II, which is my favorite of that trilogy. There’s something about Drag Me To Hell, however, that bridges the gap between old Raimi and new Raimi. This is very much how I think the Raimi Brothers might have done Evil Dead if they had hit it huge right off the bat and had millions of dollars to spend. Essentially the film is about a self-absorbed country girl, Christine, trying to get ahead in the big city (isn’t amazing how many stock characters there are in horror films?). When Christine forsakes her sense of right and wrong to do what she thinks her boss would approve of, she burns an old gypsie woman pleading for an extension on her mortgage and in return the old gypsie sicks a supernatural leg-breaker after her immortal soul (it is noteworthy to mention that the gypsie drives the famous yellow Oldsmobile that has appeared in every film the Raimis have made.) While this is mind-expanding cinema, this flick was fun on a bun.

Christine’s desire to have nice stuff and escape her redneck past is really what sets her on a moral decline in the first place, and even though we like her so much we know she isn’t really a very good person deep down inside and that’s why its pretty apparent that she’s had this coming for awhile.

Some of the CGI effects were disappointing but this is, overall, a very satisfying return to comic-horror form for Sam Raimi and crew. Justin Long’s character is just plain annoying but that’s hardly a new thing for him. A couple of the gross-out gags very much reminded me of Evil Dead, not just in style but in the sense that the poor girl playing Christine (Alison Lohman) gets put through the ringer much in the way that Bruce Campbell did for the Evil Dead films (the grave-digging scene especially was very “Ash” to me). The reason she won’t get the same level of respect from me is because I am sure she got paid way more than Bruce did as an actor for those films (and she lacks a prominent chin).

Speaking of Bruce, where was he in this film? I am surprised by his absence, as he almost always has a cameo in Raimi’s films.

Ratings:
Justin: 5 out of 5
Kim: 5 out of 5

Notes: I have nothing new to say about this film other than it is one of my favorite movies of all time. Everything in it is completely unnecessary, and just when you think it can’t get any more over the top… it totally does. Ass-kicking preacher? check. Zombie baby? Check. Personified rubber digestive organs providing the best acting performance of the entire film? Big check.

Most people are probably familiar with Dead-Alive by now because its director, Peter Jackson, has gone one to do one of the biggest movie trilogies of all time: The Lord of The Rings.

I don’t know if there is really anything scary in Dead-Alive, I’ve seen it so many times now I don’t think I am scared by it, but I am not sure that I ever was. It isn’t that kind of a film, really.. it’s just pure unmitigated gore, gore, gore and more gore. But it is also hilariously well done and the crescendo at the end of the film (keyword: lawnmower) usually has people cheering for more.

The custard scene always makes me feel sick for some reason.

Bonus: if you’ve seen this film but not Jackson’s 2 other gross-out films: Meet The Feebles and Bad Taste. Do yourself a favor.. especially Meet The Feebles which is like Dead-Alive plus Muppets.