At least weekly, some jackass writes an article reminding us just how ignorant most folks are about AD/HD. Today, Brian Orelli was that jackass.

Writing on fool.com—a website that offers money advice to people infatuated with money—Orelli found it newsworthy to mention the FDA’s formal approval of Concerta for use in adults.

At first I thought, that’s weird—I know dozens of adults in their twenties and thirties who have been taking this drug for years. Had they all been paying teeny-boppers under the table before last Friday? Actually, eMedTV explains that prior June 27th, using Concerta for adults with ADHD was “considered an ‘off-label’ use of the medication, meaning that even though the FDA (had) not approved the medication for this use, your health care provider can prescribe it if he or she believes it is appropriate for your situation.”

I learned this from a twelve-second excursion in which I typed “Concerta for adults” into a search engine. Orelli could have discovered this to, if he bothered to Google the topics he poses as knowledgeable about. What else did this pseudo-expert have to say about AD/HD?

Contrary to what you might think, ADHD isn’t just for kids anymore. The potential market size for adult attention deficit disorder (ADD) is 30% to 70% of the childhood market. As many as one in 20 adults has ADD.

The biggest problem for drug manufacturers is getting those potential patients onto their drugs. With a stigma that rivals that of erectile dysfunction, manufacturers will be hard-pressed to get prospective patients to talk to their doctors about this problem.

First of all, let’s cut the dickhead some slack. His target-readership is not the A.D.D. patient, but the investor who is trying to decide which pharmaceutical stocks to buy. Still, let’s explore all the things he got wrong in the preceding excerpt of his vomiting up of total nonsense.

“Contrary to what you might think, ADHD isn’t just for kids anymore.”

Who said it ever was? Is “conventional-wisdom” dumb enough to presume the spitball-throwing “time-outers” perpetually in the kindergarten “corner” will eventually, miraculously, grow out of their A.D.D., or is this just the author falsely projecting his own ignorance onto his readers? Neither would surprise me.

And what does “anymore” mean? That it used to be “just for kids” but now the disorder has evolved to conquer adults’ too? Sounds like a virus that mutates and develops a new strain that helps it beat a vaccine. Scary.

“With a stigma that rivals that of erectile dysfunction, manufacturers will be hard-pressed to get prospective patients to talk to their doctors about this problem.”

Say wha…?? Slow down, buddy. E.D. is correlated with clinical depression and suicide. Where is there any data suggesting grown-ups who can’t focus at work face similar inner demons as dudes with floppy, dysfunctional cocks? Might Orelli have pulled it directly from his ass? I think so, in fact, I’d bet my own anatomical functionality on it.

And if one can so flippantly scoff at the importance of having data to support one’s assertions, then why would prospective financiers and stock traders (whose monetary decisions and obsessions must at all times respect and be sensitive to numerical realities) listen to a goddamn word of this bush league loser’s bullshit?

But let’s suppose some investment clown suffers from A.D.D. symptoms, and does read Orelli’s garbage. That reader may now be less likely to talk to about it or seek a diagnosis, because he’s been subliminally informed that having A.D.D. is like having a defective penis. Way to perpetuate stereotypes, assclown!

“The biggest problem for drug manufacturers is getting those potential patients onto their drugs.”

Here the writer does get something right, if inadvertently. To some people, financial triumph is tantamount to happiness itself. Such individuals have little time to worry about the wellbeing of others. Orelli’s writing style reflects beautifully that mentality. Pharmacists and doctors and drug manufacturers are in the business of earning a profit, as are the financial investors who fund their research and purchase their stocks. So the issue Brian Orelli sees as worth commenting on, the one his readers care about, is not whether or not some new product will improve the quality of human lives, but whether that product might lead to lucrative profits for the corporation producing it. Thus, the article is all about market share, and Johnson & Johnson’s struggle to get patients to come to see themselves as A.D.D.ers.

That’s business. The common good often is counterproductive. Of course, if we happen suffer from some treatable disease, something the pharmaceutical industry has a cure for, then everybody wins. They get paid and we get better and capitalism is fantastic.

But what if we suffer from nothing at all, or if our disorder can’t be fixed by any prescription? Then we’re screwed on two counts. We won’t get better; but they still want our money, and they will invent disorders for us, new problems they claim their drugs can solve. The spirit of this capitalist mentality is abundant under the breath of Brian Orelli’s blind spots.

Who knows how many so-called disorders are bogus? Individual people & brains differ. Sometimes that’s all that’s “wrong” with us. Is different always bad? Must everything unconventional be drugged out of us, just so that we seem ordinary in the naked eyes of others?

Some of us are well-equipped for the boring human lifestyle of the 21^st century. Others would have faired better in the past, when at any given moment some electrifying danger lurked around the corner that required quick-thinking, high-octane people to save the day. In the past, we’d have been heroes. Today they have pills to cancel out our weirdness, which they’ve named “attention deficit disorder.”

My roommate left for class a few hours ago and I know he’ll be back soon. He’ll nod or briefly say hi as he passes through the room I’m working in. Something will ruffle in the adjacent kitchen. If I listen carefully I’ll hear pantry doors opening closing, microwave buttons beep-beeping, light switches on/off. But in a few minutes the silence will prevail. My roommate will be in his room with the door shut behind him, where he’ll likely remain until morning.

Though our interaction promises to be brief and pleasant, its inevitability—along with my inability to predict precisely when it will occur—renders me unable to function at full-strength capacity in the meantime. That’s because intellectual energy that belongs in my dissertation is wasted trying to anticipate the interruption.

I had the same reaction the other day when our landlord announced he’d be by to fix the sink “sometime after lunch.” All afternoon I just dicked around, vowing to get back to work after he left.

By the time the landlord finally showed up around 7pm, my day was shot. I had rearranged my MP3 collection, caught up on Sox drama and Pats’ offseason losses, and browsed the day’s headlines on non-corporate news sites like RawStory and AlterNet—to find out what had really happened in the world. These accomplishments were of tangential importance, relative to me finishing my dissertation.

It completely screws with my head whenever I know something—anything other than me sitting here in a vacuum, reading and typing—is scheduled to occur in my vicinity in the immediate future. Why am I so distracted by these minor distractions? My roommate is a nice guy. His presence in the home we rent together hasn’t once felt like a nuisance (unlike virtually every other roommate experience I’ve had in life). Nor does the landlord expect the hospitality of a four-star hotel as he fixes my appliances. My anticipation of these mundane events is more disruptive than the moments when they actually occur.

Is this an A.D.D. thing, an Adderall thing, or just further evidence that I’m quirky and completely discombobulated?

“The pink Adderall doesn’t work as well for me. Do you carry the orange kind?”

No time for bullshitting. No desire to be bullshat.

The lady behind the counter contemplated me. Then she gave me the standard response we get from all pharmacists these days; a generic answer about generic drugs.

“All generic pills are identical to their brand name counterparts, and to each other.”

Um, first of all, that wasn’t my question.

She continued. “The only thing different about generics is the price. We carry generics in order to save the customer money.”

I assumed that would be her position—that whatever differences I perceive between generic pink Adderall (CorePharma, ‘cor 135′) and the generic orange Adderall (Barr Laboratories, ) are entirely in my head. She seemed paranoid; as if she knew I was going to challenge the efficacy of her bullshit pamphlets and wanted to delegitimize my concerns before I could voice them. Then she tried to land the familiar knockout punch I’d taken on the chin earlier.

“Actually, this is the first I’ve heard of anyone noticing a difference. I’m not suggesting differences don’t exist, just that I can’t recall any other folks voicing your concerns.”

Why do they always say that? Are my concerns less valid if the world doesn’t voice them with me unanimously and in unison?

And what the fuck should I care what other people think, anyway? It’s as if I’m expected to piss my pants and retract my statement, rather than trouble myself with the prospect that my body is indeed unusual. Even if 0% of people taking pink Adderall are aware of its inferiority, I still am! Should I second-guess my body’s signals? Do they think I’ll be embarrassed that my already unique A.D.D. brain responds unconventionally to some external stimulus? If so, think again, lady. I have A.D.D.—that’s what my brain DOES. It behaves unlike other peoples’. I’m over that part.

Besides, just because she “can’t recall” anyone reporting differences doesn’t mean people aren’t noticing them. I waited two years, because I thought I was imagining things. Even then, I had to write about it in my blog and discover others felt the same way before I felt confident enough to talk to a pharmacist about it. Yet here they were, two separate pharmacies on two consecutive days, jerking me around because corporate alliances are more valuable than trust and integrity these days.

It was clear, no matter what I said, that she would continue to insist the two generic brands were identical.

Okay, let’s go with that: I’m imagining disparities that don’t exist. Can I still have the orange kind, just for chuckles? No? Why not?

As I suspected, Walgreen’s does not carry the orange generic Adderall. Like my university health center, they’ve signed a long-term contract with CorePharma, the company that makes the shitty pink shit.

Once again I walked out without filling the prescription. I felt defiant & independent, almost triumphant, though I’m certain the pharmacist couldn’t have cared less about my plight or about losing my business.

I’ve decided to boycott Walgreen’s until they discontinue these exclusive alliances they have with drug companies that cut corners on their products. If more of us refused to settle for crappy products, companies would stop making them and start listening to consumer needs again. Until then, we can expect that prices will keep rising and quality will continue to plummet.

Tomorrow it’s on to CVS, where I know they still carry the orange Barr Laboratories brand.

I was too polite & passive this morning with the pharmacist at my university health center. I phrased my question as a question, deferring to her authority as a uniformed expert.

She probably figured I’d believe whatever she told me, so she told me the more convenient thing, like when parents tell their kids the belly-up goldfish is in heaven with Grampa.

If people think you’ll believe whatever they tell you, what reason have they to tell you the truth? The truthful answer this morning would have been for the pharmacist to admit the two drugs were different or to admit that she had no clue. But both answers would have been for business, since they only carried the shittier (pink) generic Adderall. So she either was knowingly dishonest about the facts, knowingly dishonest about her ignorance, or ignorant about her ignorance.

How embarrassing for her. It’s one thing to be wrong and to know you’re wrong. But to talk out your ass and falsely assume people are buying it—that’s downright humiliating. That poor lady this morning had no idea what an asshole she looked like in my eyes. She didn’t realize I’d given much thought to the matter, compared and contrasted the two generic Adderall brands—CorePharma (pink) and Barr Laboratories (orange)—and that I had discovered/decided that clear disparities existed between the two.

This afternoon I’ll be more direct, so the Walgreens pharmacist doesn’t also mistake me for someone he or she can push around. I’m 95% sure that Walgreens, nationwide, carries only CorePharma. Stay tuned!

This morning I went to refill my Adderall prescriptions at my University Health Care Center. I figured while I was there I’d “consult” with the pharmacist about the differences between pink and orange Adderall. Before I could talk to an actual pharmacist, I had to convince two of her minions that my query was in fact worthy the pharmacist’s time. (Why is it that wherever we go these days we have to wade through several layers of clueless assistants before earning the right to consult with someone who knows what they’re talking about?)

“Is the pharmacist here?” I asked the teeny-bopper undergrad employee, whose job duties aren’t supposed to exceed pushing cash register buttons and confirming that my face somewhat resembles the one on my Student ID Card.

“Uh…”

He did that thing people do when they’re clueless about what they’re supposed to do. In this case, that entailed swinging his head in the direction of the second least qualified individual in the room, a twenty-something guy in a dress shirt counting pills in the corner. He popped his head up and asked in a salesman’s voice, “Can I help you?”

“Are you the pharmacist?” I asked, though I knew he wasn’t.

“She’s in the back right now, sir. How can I help you?”

What is it about folks who aren’t allowed to wear white lab coats? What are they attempting to prove? They’re like high school rent-a-cops who wave around their pepper spray as if it were a flamethrower.

The Salesman was in no hurry to fetch the pharmacist, even when I made clear my extreme skepticism that he could answer it. I’m convinced this system is designed to protect the people who actually know what they’re talking about from having to interact with customers trying to find out whether or not we’re getting screwed.

When the pharmacist finally emerged, I told her about my dilemma with the 20mg Adderall: that I much prefer the generic orange Adderall (Barr Laboratories, inscribed ‘b 973’) to the generic pink Adderall (CorePharma LLC, inscribed ‘cor 135’).

She seemed astonished, as did her little helpers. They all acted as if it never before had occurred to them that different drug companies’ drugs, and their varying ingredients, might chemically affect one’s brain chemistry in different ways.

When the pharmacist realized the brand I was saying sucked (the pink Adderall) was the only one they carried, the campaign to vouch for the integrity of pink Adderall immediately got under way.  Out came the dubious misinformation.

“Well, the two brands are technically identical in terms of their compositions.”

I kind of froze, knowing her assumption was false, but realizing my seven years of anecdotal evidence would do little to refute whatever empirical journal articles she had read and believed. All I could manage was, “Really?”

“Yessir, it’s mandated by law that all generic brands of a medicine be the same as the original. They’re basically equivalent.”

I thought I saw the wannabe Salesman smirking from behind the medicine cabinet.

“To be perfectly honest,” the pharmacist added, “you’re the first customer who’s ever noticed a difference.”

“Ever? Really?”

“Yessir.”

You should read my blog, I felt like telling them. If these drugs are so similar, then why do I have over 90 comments from random strangers agreeing that they’re distinctly different? Instead I just stood there, rather unprepared, not confident enough to put what I knew about my own body up against whatever some lady who had never taken and compared the drugs herself had read in some book or been told by some drug company rep.

I felt embarrassed, even though I knew these pricks were dead wrong. The dickhead Salesman looked at me victoriously, like he’d just fucked my girlfriend. The frat guy cashier dude wasn’t even paying attention anymore.

Other students in line behind me looked annoyed. I felt like I had to salvage something, some inch of dignity.  So I walked out, rather than let then fill my prescription there and spend another month with that jittery pink garbage. Hell with that place.

Later on I’ll stop at Walgreens on my way home from campus and try to have that conversation again. Stay tuned!

For those unpatriotic bastards who forgot, today was Memorial Day.

Did you put your flag up and say a prayer for the fallen soldiers? Today’s the day you’re supposed to do that, you know. That and have a barbecue picnic in the cloudy sun.

Such is how we show appreciation in America–with scheduled “thank yous” and obedience to norms; appropriate, mandated responses at the correct time.

We need these designated calendar holidays to remind us to remind the people we care about that we care about them.

A few weeks ago was Mother’s Day, so we all called our moms. Several months ago, on Valentines Day, Hallmark regulated that it was our duty to make sure our significant others didn’t feel insignificant. Nothing says “I love you” like chocolate, white fluffy stuffed bears, and really expensive rocks that once were as plentiful as seashells on African beaches.

But you didn’t play taps on Valentine’s Day, or call your parents to say you loved and missed them, did you? That wasn’t required, not part of the rules for that particular date. No need to be superfluous and express love or appreciation that’s beyond the scope of our structured love and appreciation zones.

We’ve become a nation that needs to be told everything: when to live, when to love, when to mourn & pray.  Humanity has etiquette, kindness follows its own strict decorum. A rose is a rose is a rose, but it smells so much sweeter on culturally prescribed special occasions, wrapped in expectations from which we’ll be excused for the next 364 days.

Of course, those of us who have A.D.D. are notoriously bad at remembering to give the proper performance on these arbitrary dates. So cut us some slack if and when we forget. It’s not that we don’t care; in fact, we care so much that we don’t limit when and how and we show it.

How’s that for an airtight excuse?

It’s that time of month for me: that half-week after the old prescription runs out before my new one gets refilled. Over these four-to-six days I sit stagnant, reminded of how insufficient I am sans Adderall.

Maybe it’s not so bad, going without the meds for awhile. Absent Adderall there’s no anxiety; no guilty conscience when I don’t follow through on whatever I promised myself I’d do today; no rigid, self-imposed deadlines and hence no angst about not meeting them.

I can drink Honey Brown from the bottle and not keep calorie tallies; I can watch movies with no intrinsic intellectual value and not feel sorry for laughing; I can appreciate sports again, as superior to ridiculous & slightly less trivial than pointless.

After two days without Adderall, the swift droop in my brain activity is manageable, almost pleasant. The harder challenge is facing myself—the real & undrugged version of me—and realizing the character I pretend to be most of the time isn’t really real. Everything I think I am, as the pink & orange chemicals trespass through my veins, is just a simulation, my clumsy attempt at imitating a person with a purpose.

My strengths & triumphs aren’t real, or even capable of sounding realistic. I appear ready at last to abandon impractical plans, long shot dreams that seem evermore absurd. Those who forever have doubted me begin to salivate; they grab pins & nails & needles, as one does when bubbles look ripe for bursting. I beg don’t pop me—just let me deflate, fade away not burn out, skip the spectacle of messy implosions and loud sloppy debris.

Finally I surrender; to absorb their negativity and heed their doubts about me; to accept and own the gloom of being normal; to embrace as mine, too, the generic cynicism that exudes from Any-Town, U.S.A. like water gushing out of a thick fire hose.

And underneath that hose, once, I was the flame—just not consistently, not overwhelmingly, and not for long. The shine in me was dubious and unreliable.

Now I’m smothered—forlorn, yet oddly free. I have scrubbed away the issues I cared about, for I can only care about them for 26 days at a time, and then I abandon them randomly for the slowest of long weekends. Without my drug, they are stupid, futile projects; they are problems I cannot change no matter how eloquently I overthink them.

For all the ways I tell myself the Adderall helps, only in its dearth do I feel empowered. Refreshingly, I’m sick of empathizing, bored with trying to understand everybody else. And that feels good. Cold turkey, I quit all my default assumptions. No more calling others’ grievances legit while degrading my own as impulsive & somehow irrational.

Soon this cycle will become that thing in my life I’m no longer able to accept. I’ll stop letting Adderall decode who I am, as if without it I’m nothing. I’ll stop asking it to draft life for me and counting on the happy endings it pencils in.

I will not put more faith in a pill than I have in myself.

Still, it’s tempting to float through the rest of our lives on this prescribed high, isn’t it? Such an easy out it was and is for us, a great escape: just close our eyes until the stimulant takes hold, transforming who we are into the selves we’d much rather be, convincing us our bogus projects are useful & worthwhile & selfless & righteous after all.

Make us forget: if we weren’t here all the clocks would tick without us. All the stars would still resist our gravity. Trees falling in empty forests would remain as silent as dreams that die alone in the bleak night, as now. So why waste our energy, when nothing or no one new needs us? Why shout and scream, when there’s so little left to say?

Even as these thoughts unfold, almost instantly their flimsy walls crease, crumpling in on me like a fajita until I’m trapped inside of everyone else’s simplistic depression, imprisoned by your failures to reach what you couldn’t understand.

And right about now I start to scare myself and others, so I stop typing. I interrupt the inner dialogs and I watch baseball, and I walk the neighborhood with my neglected retriever, past all the empty homes busy with drained human beings barely living. And I look at the fake light as it leaks under door frames, and think about the unfinished dreamers on the other side who can’t smile, can’t shine behind the shaded, shuttered windows that shall divide us always. And I wonder if I can elevate myself to their level, these faceless neighbors who want nothing more than nothing at all. I wonder if I too can find bliss in the vacuity of human frowns. Someday.

For now though everything stays inside, packed up and concealed, like a trigger holding out for just the right moment to click. I wait for the calendar turn over, to make my mind correct again.

If I had a little foresight, and wasn’t hungry for a better world, I’d think more strategically about “professionalizing” my portfolio. I need to reframe my brief streaks of insight into a more coherent shtick, something “academically marketable.” Then I can devote an entire career to perfecting my diatribe. I’ll stay current with all the pertinent jargon, whatever’s relevant to my irrelevant niche. Every year or so I’ll publish a new article, each mimicking the last though slightly nuanced in some new way. I’ll take care not to step on toes, of course; not to trespass in the substantive territories where fancier scholars have already squatted.

That path leads to tenure, the world we’re told to covet. Most grad students anticipate feeling at home here, once tenured, at 40-ish.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I haven’t even professionalized yet.

The trick to “professionalization”, my ex-mentor advised, is to “network, network, network, network!”

Here’s how it’s done. You shoulder your way into the groveling pools—semicircles of grad students kissing ass and hoping for future favors. Get to know “the big names in the field,” especially the “stars.” Watch how idolatry follows them at national conferences, be jealous. Pretend they’re baseball players, and gush like groupies. Bond with them; and, again, be jealous. The bonds will feel forced, the jealousy contrived. Welcome to academic life.

“Don’t dwell on the bigger problems,” or the implications of living a life that implicates nothing.

So says my ex-mentor. His body language carves an epilogue, admits what his words never will: that if you spend too long living inside a box it stops mattering what happens outside. That’s why somewhere along his prolific marathon, his printed tour of the unread & unreadable prestigious-journal circuit, my ex-mentor happened upon a happy-medium citizenship, whereby not caring became okay and suddenly felt normal. Now he moves confidently through the world without ever really having to exist in it.

Embrace that tunnel vision, young scholar. Make it your asset, your confidante. If such private esteem doesn’t excite you, neither will this boring vocation. For my ex-mentor, few things in life were more fulfilling than out-sparring a less-credentialed man in a trivial debate. Nothing cranked his joy-buds like the insular orgies of academia, its geeky circle jerks and anticlimactic climaxes. It amused him to expand his inner empire, to surround himself with grad students who promised to pretend to admire him. Protégés are validation for followers who need to feel like leaders. I could build a bubble just like his, he promised, with round soapy walls to polish my presentation, wash my mouth out, cleanse the frat guy I’d been before, and smooth over the coarseness in my truer inner voice.

But the perks of being comfortable only douse my spirit. Polite golf claps can’t silence the disquieting noise of nothing happening, nothing changing, inside or out.

The longer I sit still in my ivory tower, the more I’ll come to resemble something else. Who I am today will surely dwindle, with dreams of youth falling off me like hair from a widow’s peak on an aging scalp.

And what, in silence, would become of all my words? Somehow I know they’d stop sounding original. They’d learn to reveal little about my country & my own voice, more about my subculture—the nuanced academic circle in which I chose to voice it. My message itself, whatever it grew into, would become less important to me than how it was received. This happens when one connects with likeminded others, or when his mind starts feeling at ease among those to whom his random decisions randomly connect him.

I have nothing against connecting.

But I am petrified of disconnecting.

To become the professors I pass in these pointless halls would require all the passion & energy I have today to slowly drain out of me.

I wonder if passion is indeed like energy, like atoms we recycle when we die; if the fire inside my belly now came from somewhere; if previously it belonged to somebody else, someone better; and if it might migrate elsewhere, later, whenever I set myself ablaze or fade like a hologram. I wonder, will the zeal I know only as my own float off to something new. If so, where will it go? Will it get snagged on another trap, caught in another circular life like this one? Or will it flee to the paradises I never found but in my head, those magic hotspots more receptive to passions?

I wish I had some say in the matter.

Every day I wake up remembering yesterday–not the recent one that still existed when I went to bed, but the more distant variety that died years ago.

I journey backwards inside my head, however far back I need to go, to get back to that place in time when my goals were clearly articulated and yet still seemed plausible. There in my waking minute—those magic moments of morning when old dreams are malleable to a new day—mistakes are reversible. I find hope then, pure and unadulterated, as it looked before it went to cower in the closet, before vague promises that I could be anything fell silent.

I miss those promises, laughable as they seem now in a world that rewards creative thoughts only when the thinker commits them to the status quo. Even if they only come out at night, I need those promises: “You will succeed at whatever you do.”

But each morning it’s the same, the way they break again. The clock awakens before me and sword fights with my fantasies. It takes a few moments of being awake before reality kicks in, like Klonopin cutting off Adderall. Then the cold air outside my blanket touches all my uncovered parts, startles hope like an icicle to the testicles, sends all my American dreams fleeing for cover—back to wherever they hide while I’m wake.

If, while you’re on Adderall, some aspect of the sameness in your everyday routine gets flung awry, you might find you have no choice but to overreact.

Depending on the time of day, and where you happen to be in that day’s Adderall cycle, the extent of your overreaction may vary–from an annoyed jaw-clench to a bizarre anxiety that consumes the rest of your afternoon, and a fixation with getting some sort of revenge against whomever, or whatever, you decide is to blame for things not being “just so.”

Suppose, for example, a website you regularly visit unveils a brand new design. What do you do?

The answer, to the non-geeked-out you, would be simple: get over it. Adapt. Adjust. Be okay with the fact that nothing becomes familiar without first feeling strange and weird.

But on Adderall, you won’t see it that way. You’ll see whoever was responsible for the new design as crafty and conniving, jerking you around for an assload of money—those shady shitheads! And you’ll decide in your frenzy to combat their shadiness by clicking the “Contact Us” icon and writing a lengthy protest email. It won’t matter what you put in the email itself; the company doesn’t hire people to read them. But you feel like you’re on a mission now, that you’re achieving some pseudo-victory that will let you feel afterwards that an objective has been accomplished.

So, you might write:

To Whom It May Concern:

I noticed your site’s design suddenly changed, and I thought I’d write to let you know I’m hoping it changes back just as abruptly. Unlike the site’s old design, on which RT’s advertising endeavors took a backseat, the new site privileges sponsors’ by putting their superfluous ads front and center to distract and test the patience of long-time, loyal visitors.

Navigating the new site is a hassle as well. I used to be able to type in a movie title and go directly to its RottenTomatoes page. Now there’s an extra step, and I have to sift through all the bullshit your sponsors are trying to sell me (all of which is unrelated to the movie) before I finally reach my desired page.

Trying to look at the actor’s pages is even more obnoxious! I’ve always loved how RottenTomatoes let me view an actor’s entire film history profile on a single page. Now it only shows five movies per page, meaning I have to click “Next” incessantly in order to obtain the entire list. What’s that about?

It has long been evident to me that whoever ran RottenTomatoes took great pride in the website’s continued success. To be frank, the sloppiness of the new site suggests the evidence to the contrary.

As any good businessperson knows, a product’s familiarity to customers is one of its key assets. RottenTomatoes.com is now completely unfamiliar to me. In essence you have tweaked a site for which no tweaking was needed, and the result is that many of us may finally migrate over to IMDB for our movie info needs.

One would think devoting five paragraphs of thoughtful writing to this minor issue would suffice. Writing a letter won’t be enough, though. You’ll find some way to connect your displeasure with the website’s new design to your disenchantment with the world in general. You’re pissed about the website changing its fonts & color scheme, a change emblematic of how you see society: eradicating its good parts and letting the bad ones multiply like viruses. You’re pissed at the website for changing without warning, and yet pissed at the world for changing too slowly. These two very real but very different sentiments blend, until each becomes what it isn’t. And this today will be the stimulus your unchallenged brain craves, the problem of the day for you to play with, to fabricate and exaggerate and amalgamate into a vast and paranoid conspiracy by everyone & everything against you & you alone.

The audacity of these webmasters, these arrogant pricks who think just because they own a site and have its passwords memorized they can rearrange all its buttons at their leisure, change its fonts and sell advertising to shady corporations whose politics you might not approve of.

Without your meds, you’d brush this off, all of it. Your mini-crisis would be a nonevent. You might not notice the change, not right away anyway.

“It’s just a website, dude.”

But Adderall scoffs at the pushover you’d become without it. “Just a website?” That’s what they’d have us think. They taught us to never be skeptical except when dark secret realities are revealed, to keep believing in all the things we hope are true. That’s why this is about sooooo much more than a website. It’s about a way of misunderstanding the world, as the virtues of knowing truth clash with an ignorant generation that committed too soon to a state of permanent disorientation. This is a huge fucking deal, emblematic of greed’s guilty grip on all that’s good, or could’ve been good. And you are so grateful now that you took the right pills today, even if they are pink and not orange. You’re fighting the good fight and you need whatever weapons happenstance provides, and for this fight and the ones to come, your sword and shield are both made of this grand drug, and of the way it influences you.

And as the little pills dissolve inside your belly you decide you’re morally obligated now to push back against this machine. The guy in your head won’t quit, he keeps the gerbil running on that little wheel inside your brain, the treadmill that leads absolutely nowhere. You still don’t care or realize how much time you’re wasting, you can’t yet. You have to make this war, make it about more. This isn’t about a website; it’s about a culture too distracted by flashy lights to appreciate the purchasing power of the consumer. And for now it’s just you & you alone against the corporate giant mega-elites who don’t yet see you as a significant enough threat to evacuate.

This is what you get when you mix a potent drug with the constellation of diverse thoughts & energies that plague and bless the underestimated, under-stimulated A.D.D. brain.

It is a thought process that judges and condemns, and one that separates the thinker from the thoughtless. Yet the very mindset that rails against fakeness is itself dependent on artificial stimuli. There is now no way for me to be normal. I’ve surrendered my right to be willfully ignorant. In order to be right I must also be the hypocrite. Nothing changes either way.

You feel like the fucking guy in “A Beautiful Mind.”

Sure, the undrugged version of you might ask, “What the hell are you talking about?” But to hell with the un-drugged you! To hell with the blindfolded and the enslaved, and those who are skeptical only if and when dark secrets expose the abnormality of norms.

Stop. You are now repeating yourself. I have just one piece of advice. Let it go. First of all, you’ll get used to the new site. And they don’t give a shit what you think, anyway.

Your words, these words, will make no sense ever to any human being—including you—in about fifteen minutes, when you slide out of this mindset and latch onto one that’s preoccupied with something else. So let it go. Adapt. Adjust. Tolerate the little unpredictabilities of life. They make it more fun than Groundhog Day— depending on the time of day, and where you happen to be in that day’s Adderall cycle.