Author's Note: There's a certain freedom in futility and tunnel vision. At this point, I'd discovered the ability to stimulate dreams with various legal substances, and was on my way to acquiring a pretty gnarly melatonin resistance. Strangely, all I could dream in were grey cityscapes that peeled away like onions into the monochrome of data centers.
I wrote a lot. Mostly because I had to, or I would go crazy.
15mg melatonin/1.2g piracetam
Melatonin, first taken, within the first few months, and without the saturation I've achieved, stimulates dreaming. The same for piracetam, if taken at half a gram. Piracetam, too, has an expiration date for dreams like acid trips and lucid wanderings through the back of the brain. Taken together, though, and in unreasonable doses, you conk out and dream, vividly, milking the glands until they pop out liquid stress relief in the form of brilliant visions behind the eyelids.
It's a comfort. It's not a comfort. It's a temporary solution at best. You get to know your brain really well. You get a softer edge to the fog that comes with several months of vampire shift, get a cool detachment, a lethargy. It's blunting down sharp things until they can break away and disintegrate or until they simply, silently, go away.
Speaking of sharp things breaking, on top of losing my paycheck and losing people, I've lost the tip off the black Benchmade I bought in San Francisco. It's my own fault - using the most fragile part to try and dislodge a stubborn server is stupid - and somehow, I'm not disappointed. The knife, like so, so many other things, reminds me of things lost, of people I dearly need to stop thinking of. So while I'm out a cool $100 and a Griptilian, I don't mind so much. I have another, pink, but otherwise just like it, that I bought right here in Virginia.
Work is work. Things continue to break in unfixable ways in ridiculous numbers at ridiculous rates, and there's no way to catch up. It remains supportable via Underworld and constant, reweaving beats and bits, lyrics and music that all MUX together. Overload, too, is dulling the edges down. Sheer volume makes this bearable.
And I'm raw, still, even with this, and this daylog, even, is more bleeding than I'm comfortable to do in public, too risky. I can no sooner stop writing, however, than I can cut off my hands.