I wake up and I take my pill and I fully expect to be productive today. I brush my teeth and get a granola bar and I sit on my bed and I watch the morning news and I’m irritated when the half-hour segment on “gardening your way out of your midlife crisis” ends without ever becoming fascinating. The fact that I didn’t abruptly have an empathetic epiphany and suddenly feel compelled to compose a blog entry about the plight of soccer moms means something screwy is going on with my Adderall this morning.

Usually it takes between forty-five minutes to an hour. I immerse myself in something intolerably boring, like this shitty morning news show’s filler-story about aging housewives and their flower collections, and when it starts to appear useful and pertinent that’s when I know I’m “plugged in” to the Adderall. Then I can get to work on all the tedious tasks of academic life, temporarily convinced that all my pointless bitchwork errands are critically crucial.

But today everything pointless still seems pointless. Where the hell is my fabricated point? Why don’t I feel bad for the soccer mom or her overweight husband or the fact that the weeds and aphids are ransacking her poor Gerber daisies? Why isn’t the pill working? Did I take it? How long ago? Maybe I didn’t take it; guess I forgot to. I’ll take another one; I’ll take HALF of one—that way if I didn’t take the original I’ll at least have SOMETHING in my system, but if I DID take one earlier then this extra half-pill won’t put me anxiously over the top. Good idea. I grab a pill, put in my mouth, bite it half, spit one piece back into the container, swallow the other. Then I sit back down and look at stock prices chasing each other under the medical expert who wears a white lab coat to demonstrate that she’s a genuine doctor who REALLY knows what the hell she’s talking about. I wait and I feel uber antsy and at that 0:45:30ish mark where the focus usually kicks my sluggish brain into gear all I get is the speed, the anxiety, a double-dose of the negative side effects and a non-dose of the good shit.

I go to campus because I have to but I can’t concentrate and I can’t think dynamically. Whatever I say seems ignorant and incompetent. I can’t explain even simple terms and concepts to my students. Get me outta here—I need to be home, I need to write. But whatever I write is complete shit—uncreative and totally generic nothingness.

I’m not thinking clearly, can’t think clearly. More Adderall. Then paranoia follows, pouring salt into my wounded ego: what the hell is wrong with me, I suck, I suck I suck, I’ll never amount to anything, why am I wasting my life, IsuckIsuckIsuckIsuckI….

Calm down! You took too much. Your synapses are firing, but just too quickly. Slow it down and you’ll be ready to roll. You need sedatives. Get a hold of it, take control, balance this high. Slow it down. You’ll be perfect. Take the Klonopin you’re prescribed for moments like this, or even the Xanax you’re technically not supposed to have.

sl o o o o o w

d o w n .. . . . . . . . .

You bite into the Xanax (screw the sticker on the orange container that says to swallow whole to avoid uneven mood changes, swallowing makes it subtle, if it kicks in too fast it’ll drop you like a bar of soap so swallow don’t chew). You say screw that, you’ve been dropped before and it’s cool, when there’s a pileup just in front of you there’s no time to coast or be subtle, you need to slam on those breaks and deal with the whiplash. So you chew it, you chew it and you remember the taste and how you always argued it tasted like grapefruit, you remember early in college when this was recreation between your nostrils, but now you chew it not because you want it but because you need it. And the grapefruit pellets disintegrate like sand and you imagine each individual pellet sliding down into you like a child at a water park, you see it lunging toward your belly where soon your guts will sort through it and send its soothing agents to tranquilize your bloodstream.

Now you’re calming down, your slowing down, you’re calming down, your thinking thank you. All you hope for now is sleep, to fall asleep and not be nervous, to wait until tomorrow when you’ll pretend again, you’ll take another stab at being wise & worldly. Slowing, calming, thankful, calming, slowing, thinking thank you, thank you. Just get slow enough so rest is possible.

But embedded inside these moments of swift transition, of shifting mindsets from overactive to lethargic, you feel fleetingly stable, poised, and refreshingly secure. And you forget resting, now you feel ready, finally, ready. This is it! Your brain is steady and ready, finally, the afternoon is late but better late than never, right? And now that your sedatives have cancelled out just the right amount of Adderall you feel as if nothing can topple you, you are equalized, like a perfectly balanced algebra equation. And inside these fleeting moments there is no doubt inside you that you & your brain can change the world, and you want to do everything, you want to learn Latin & quantum physics & you want to read the qur’an and find out if its anywhere near as fucked up as the bible and you want to, well, you want to…

… but before you can decide what to Google, which of your new itches you most need to scratch, your mind bails on you, sputtering and then dying like an engine out of gas. And even though you’re right where you wanted to be ten minutes ago (ready to sleep) you’re main thought now is to get back to that balancing act, that moment where you saw the cure for cancer, your mind had drawn outlines for time machines but it turned Jell-O before your hands could transfer the images to paper. In that safety window you were perfect, alert but not hyper, focused but not fixated, unruffled yet not droopy, flaccid.

Now you are Jell-O—flabby lazy listless tasteless Jell-O. And so you think, maybe I’ll take one more crack at accomplishing something/anything today. How can you sleep when Gerber daisies are dying in that poor lady’s garden? You can’t, you have to push through. Which means more stimulants—both to turn off the benzos and because, for whatever reason, your body needs a higher than usual dose of Adderall on this most unproductive of days. Swallow & wait… 25, 35 minutes nothing. 45, 55 still nothing, fuck you life! Should I take more? Maybe, yeah. Gotta cure things, fix things, find that wonderful lady’s email address and promise you’ll save her garden. I’m still too calm, something kicks in, I’m nervous now I need to calm down; I need to get to work. I feel absolutely nothing except the jittery paranoia feelings creeping and crawling all over me like nasty bugs on a dead body.

And I feel as if I may as well have been a dead body today; in fact, corpses were more productive today than I, because they did not waste 70-80 mgs of Adderall, and they are not going to be more fucked tomorrow than they were today. But I, simply by living and breathing and wasting pill after pill after pill on a day when they’ve flat out refused to work, will start tomorrow exactly where I began today—except armed with fewer pills to get me through it.

And those are always my thoughts as I toss and I turn and I turn and I toss and turn. Sleep is a dream, yet all my dreams are sleeping. I could take more benzos, hope they coax me into slumber… But I know where that goes. This is where I stop; this is where I promise nature I’ll be a strung out zombie until she lets me off the hook.

Maybe this is where the addicts keep going. Maybe this was the feeling Chris Farley and Ken Caminiti had & hated & needed to bypass in whatever way they could. Not me. Not this time anyway. The people who do this shit for fun are the ones with problems. Not me. I AM PRESCRIBED THESE DRUGS!! (My heart is a drum roll.)

Knowing the pills can’t save me today I simply lay here staring through the ceiling and confronting the sad & shitty reality that the absolute best and most useful and most productive thing I possibly could have done today would have been, literally, to do nothing at all.

I have discipline though, I live with the burden of having days like this one & knowing that there’ll be more. I live. And I have a good relationship with the drugs I take, which even Andrew Weil said is possible & permissible & often necessary. I pull back when others jump. I live with unproductive & humbling days like this one. I live because I know when to stop. I slow down. I look at ceilings, and I pass the point of still being awake, the threshold where sleep still could have counted toward tomorrow, salvaged it. Now tomorrow will be a wash. I’ll have to cancel shit, or go through the motions like an android. But I lay in the bed sweating into my pillow chasing away dehydration with too much water and I lay here and I think. This is where others can’t hang. They need more because they can’t stop because the comedown is so indescribably unbearable—but I take it like a man, lost here in my sheets but happy & proud to be good at something, to embrace the art of not overdosing, the one thing I’m really fucking good at, even on days when I’m good at nothing else. I do it better than most who borrow as much from this drug family as I do. I slow down and I watch the bright green lights in my clock change, I watch the night pass through it’s final moments of feeling late and into that dreadful hour where words like “late” and “early” don’t seem to apply, and where you know if you’re awake you’re not normal.

And in that dreadful hour, if your brain is too tired to function yet too drugged to acknowledge sleep, you astonish yourself with the stupid things that come to mind, like you stop worrying about futures and you start worrying about whether or not the foreign kid who moved back to India in third grade died (or knew people who died) in the 2004 tsunami, and you watch the green lights some more and they go from being frightening to being beautiful and you remember your old clock and how annoying it went click-click-click and how you never noticed it when you were in a normal mood but how (on nights like this when you’d overdone it) it sounded like some asshole was clipping his toe nails right next to your head and letting his clippings drop into your ear canal and ricochet off your eardrum and into your brain, and how THAT made everything so much worse but how, now, now you have a new clock and how THAT makes everything better. And then you decide that, thanks to your new clock (which actually is an old clock) there’s no superfluous noise inside this dreadful hour and you decide that THAT must mean that EVERYTHING is gonna be really fuckin cool now… you’ve discovered, finally, the best way to wait out a drug overdose, and you think only of Chris Farley and Ken Caminiti and those kids in Canada who O.D.’ed on Adderall and caused an entire nation to believe (not altogether inaccurately) that Adderall was exactly like cocaine, and you mourn for them in your head, not just because they’re dead and probably suffered but because YOU weren’t there to share your perfect clock with green lights that doesn’t make a sound, and doesn’t make things worse, and doesn’t remind you each time another minute arrives that another minute of your life is gone and never will return. And you don’t even think about how stupid it is to think about a clock with green lights as your savior because, right now, you need that savior, you need a savior, you need to believe in something, anything, and so you make it your placebo, your jesus, your allah, your buddha, your (who the fuck’s the hindus’ go-to-guy?). And for maybe the first time in your ENTIRE enlightened life you get it… why it makes sense to believe in something-anything, and you don’t listen to the rational voice in your head that says “THIS IS ABSOLUTELY CRAZY THAT MAKES NO SENSE THAT IS SO FUCKING IRRATIONAL THAT CLOCK WITH GREEN LIGHTS CANNOT SAVE YOU…”—NO—you tell that voice to go fuck itself because all that’s necessary for it to be so is for you to BELIEVE that it is so. And so you do, and so it is. And when you go to pray to your clock to get you outta this, you realize it’s not even necessary anymore, you’re slowing down. You’re heart is slow enough now that you no longer feel it palpitating you no longer feel like you just ran a marathon and sprinted for the last 25.5 miles. Now you just feel like you’re chubby, and wish you’d taken the elevator instead of hurrying up those two flights of stairs. And even though it’s WAY too early to be awake, you’re glad it’s not too late to feel alive, and so you decide you can take yourself out of the speed of it all, you can slow down… you, I mean, “I”—DO slow down. Say it again and mean it again (and be bold this time).

I slow down.

And I wait for my heartbeat to do the same. First I hope it can and then I think it can and then I think it does but then I think I’m wrong but still I hope it will and then I think it will and now—I think—I know. Now I know I totally know.

It will.

This time.