The Bloggess

It’s been a week of cutting down my daily Xanax dose and the brain fog feels like it’s clearing and I’m wide awake in the morning rather than feeling sedated.  And that would be awesome if the time I was spending aware and awake was not also time that I was spending feeling like I was vibrating out of my skin and grinding my teeth into powder.  Everyone is different and everyone metabolizes drugs in different ways so I’m hoping that this intermittent frenzied panic that I’m battling is just a side-effect from coming off the medication and that it will pass, but I worry that it’s just how I am…that it’s the person I was underneath that made me start taking xanax in the first place.

And that sucks because then I’ll have to make a choice between being too terrified to live comfortably in my own skin or to being too zonked to be aware of being too terrified to live comfortably in my own skin.

I have hope that this will pass.

I have hope that I will get better.  Or that I will adjust.  It’s not faith…it’s hope.  And there is a difference.

This weekend I left my house and Victor and Hailey and I went to the park and I ran out all of the excess energy burning up inside of me.  It’s the first time I’ve voluntarily run in years and I felt both relieved that I had the energy to do it and also embarrassed about what I was running from.   That I was running to make myself too exhausted to fight myself.  That I was running from me.  That I was running toward a normal that I don’t know exists for me.

Hailey and I ran through the dry creek bed and at one point I found myself on one side and she was on the other.  The bridge had washed away long ago.  The path was gone but I could see the other side.

I can still see the other side.

I’m just looking for the path.

So this is a weird thing to post but I’m going to post it because I think it might help me and it might help you and if it doesn’t you can skip it and read about how I got stabbed making a fortune-telling chipmunk.  (Related: Lots of great name suggestions but personally I’m leaning toward Ground-Squirrely McLaine.)

Anyway, I’ve been having some issues with brain fog and memory lately and it’s possible that it’s just the depression but my doctor thinks it might be a side-effect of the xanax, so I’m trying to wean myself off the daily dose I take and instead just take it as needed during panic attacks.  I take a fairly small dose so the withdrawal effects aren’t terrible but they aren’t fun.  It’s hard to sleep.  I feel my skin too much.  I’m jittery and nervous and I really need a margarita but I can’t have one right now because of the other medications I’m on and basically I feel like I’m trapped into making healthy decisions, which I guess is a good trap to be in.  That said, it’s easier to stick to good decisions if you do them publicly and when you aren’t alone so if you’d like to make a terrible healthy decision with me then feel free to share it here and we can commiserate about how much we hate it.

PS.  I LOVE xanax and it saves me during terrible panic attacks.  I’m not judging you if you take it every day.  It’s super helpful and if I wasn’t having memory issues I’d still take the nightly dose.  Also, as soon as my liver recovers from the TB drugs I will quit quitting booze, which will probably be the easiest thing I’ve had to quit all year.

So you know how I put together tiny wooden models when my anxiety is really high so basically I’m surrounded by tiny houses?  I’ve pretty much run out of kits but then I found some in Europe and it was awesome except that everything is metric and I obviously don’t understand metric because I thought I bought two tiny fortune-teller wagons but I put them together and turns out one of them is tiny and adorable:

And the other one is fucking enormous.

Like, it’s so big that I tried to tie it to Dorothy Barker so she could pull it around the kitchen like that Chuckwagon dog food commercial from the 80’s but she super wasn’t into it so instead I decided to put an old taxidermied chipmunk in it but the chipmunk was nailed to an old board so I had to use a knife to pry it loose and then I cut myself and Victor got mad because I was using the good knife on a dead animal but technically I’m using the good knife on a dead animal every time I cut up meat so frankly I think this just proves that I need my own private box of knives.

But I did manage to destroy several pieces of clothing in order to cover the blood stains to make the perfect fortune-telling chipmunk.

I don’t have an ending to this story but I have this, which is even better:

 

You know how Amazon recommends stuff to you based on stuff you’ve bought or liked?  Well, here are a few things Amazon thought I’d like this month:

A pillow with the words “HORSE PENIS” on it.

It comes in eight different  colors and on the bottom of the pillow it says: “The words ‘horse penis’ upon a pillow.  Ten letters.”  Even more confusingly, the amazon description says “Dog Penis on a pillow, it makes a great gift” and “Defined as ‘it’s a dog penis'”.  So am I getting a dog penis on a pillow or a horse penis on a pillow?

Answer:  Neither.  Although now that I think about it it would be pretty fun to be like, “Hand me that horse penis.  I need to get comfortable.”

I am my own worse enemy.

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Spider doll who also has nipples for some reason.

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Ridiculously enormous sock monkey.  From the description: Now you can say “My sock monkey is bigger than your sock monkey.”

I mean, finally.

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Sun-dried Googley eyed porcupine blowfish.  “ONLY 7 LEFT IN STOCK.  ORDER SOON.”

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So this is what $300 worth of flesh-eating larvae looks like.

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Liver in a pickle jar.  Description: “This plastic specimen jar contains a Biolike2 model of a cirrhotic liver floating beside a pickle”

Customers who viewed the pickled liver also viewed the cat butthole purse, lactating incense burner (That’s not how smoke works?) and this thing that is supposedly a soft plush pillow but is clearly a crudely drawn penis frosted like a birthday cake.

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Sexy Princess Leia costume, which I appreciate just for this review alone.  (Strong nipple theme emerging here.)

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Octopus specimen.  With “Octopus” written on it in case you don’t know what an octopus is?

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Creamed Possum.

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12 foot beach ball.  “It’s just like a classic beach ball, only gianter.”

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Slow Farts.  “More than 25 farting sloth coloring pages.”

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Pet ponytail.

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Pants that make you look like you shit yourself.  “ONLY ONE LEFT IN STOCK.”

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Fake human skin for practicing face tattoos.  Or for making a Silence of the Lambs style skin jacket.  No judgement.

Okay, some judgement.

PS. As always, I’m using affiliate links that help fund the annual James Garfield Miracle so if you do end up buying a bunch of shit pants or human skin or horse penises you’re totally buying them for children.

That came out wrong but you know what I mean.