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too much Vyvanse
Thursday, April 14 2016
Because Gretchen was still a little ill (though not too bad), I took the dogs for a short loop through the forest. I basically walked down to the south end of the Farm Road and then headed back north just east of the swamp to the Farm Road's immediate east, getting back on the Farm Road at its intersection with the Chamomile Headwaters Trail. I lost Ramona and Neville early in this walk, and only Eleanor stuck with me for the whole thing.
Eleanor's reward was getting to come with me as I ran some errands out on 9W in Kingston. I'd taken a 40 milligram dose of Vyvanse to see what it would do to my day, and on top of that I added a Stewart's brand energy drink and a largish cup of Stewart's brand coffee (pro tip: your best bet is usually "richer roast," though taste all the options before deciding on one). My first destination was the Home Depot, where I needed more hydronic antfreeze and LED light bulbs, as well as some equipment for the pottery class: a box to hold the tools, a rag, and an apron. It turns out that you cannot buy an apron in a brick & mortar Home Depot, but you can buy one on their website. Evidently its self-image is too manly to offer such things (though they'd be helpful for chores such as concrete mixing, painting, and anything related to tile. My next destination was to a store catering to more womanly doers: Michæls, the crafts store. They actually had an apparel section for some reason, but I didn't find the aprons until I asked an employee, and she directed me to a section of the store where blank clothing items were sold with the intention that they be decorated. I could, for example, decorate the plain white apron I bought with the words "This is without a codpiece." I also got a number of tiny canvases, a couple paint brushes, and four larger 16 by 20 inch canvases that were being sold in two-packs for $6 each. That's a good deal.
Up at the cashier, the cashiers were asking for emails with the promise of a $5 discount if we filled out a survey. It was intrusive, but maybe that $5 discount was worth going through the trouble of getting. So I gave my disposable email address, which is bigfun at the name of the horrible telecommunication corporation that supplies my household's landline and DSL service (sorry, robots, you're not there yet!). The cashier soliciting this information chuckled at the address and, catching herself, smiled and said "...Don't do it!" Evidently she was concerned her boss might hear her say "suicide," the controversial word at the beginning of the title of a fictitious song by the fictitious band Big Fun in the classic movie Heathers. I'm aware of that use of the term "Big Fun," but I'm making a different reference in that email address, one that has now been bumped to the top of the second page of Google search results for that phrase.
At the Hannaford, I used a goofy grocery list app to help me fill my cart, but the ability to check off items as I put them in my cart failed before the app's advertisement engine, so it's unlikely that app will remain for long on my phone. A better use for the phone in the grocery store was that I could check my email and see a couple items Gretchen had thought of after I'd left (lemons, cooking wine, and cooking sherry).
When I went over to the refrigerated section to get soy milk and pulpy orange juice, I saw a woman had climbed up inside one of the refrigerated shelving units to reach a top shelf. Others might've been appalled, but not me. I had to respect that kind of gumption. When she climbed down and out and looked around to see who might be scowling at her, there I was, smiling conspiratorially. This evidently ate at the woman after she left, because she returned a couple minutes later just to tell me that I have a nice smile. She was almost certainly making a pass at me, which was flattering but also odd in one respect: the woman was clearly middle-age, with a thick head of shoulder-length silver hair. I've never had a woman that age show any of that sort of interest in me before. Perhaps I've started to look like a distinguished middle-age gentleman. I also suspect that the Vyvanse had done something to my attitude to make me seem more confident but also more open and socially engaged. People with those attributes probably get hit on a lot more than people with my set-point (non-Vyvanse) demeanor. Indeed, Vyvanse likely played a role in my brief conversation with the cashier at Michæls and even the one I'm about to describe.
As I was checking out of Hannaford, I used an automated cashier, which is rarely a good idea. Inevitably something happened related to the tiny UPC code on the lemons or my failure to put an item in the bagging area within the correct time window, so lights started flashing and an employee came over to help. She was a woman in her 60s, and she immediately started grumbling about how useless the automatic check-out system is. She then impressed me by knowing the UPC code for ginger (which lacked any labeling) by heart. "You just know that?" I asked. "It comes from 20 years of doing this," she sighed. When the machine inevitably choked on a subsequent item, I chuckled, "They're trying to replace us with robots, but it's not really working." This was the first time the woman gave me lingering eye contact, exclaiming, "I know!"
On the way out to US 209, I stopped again at the old IBM facility on Boices Lane, this time finding a proper place to park so that Eleanor and I could walk right up to the mountain of debris from one or more of the ruined buildings that used to assemble computers for fighting the Cold War. It was full of gleaming stainless steel, some of it twisted and destroyed, though there were some nice pieces of pipe that looked to be in good condition. The ground was littered with bits and pieces of coax cable, most of it ending in BNC connectors. I found a whole masonite panel of such connectors with dozens of stumps of cable still attached, and I took it with me. I could see someday having a project that involves a lot of BNC cables. Short of that, having so many identical stainless steel parts could be useful for fleshing out something sculptural.
Eleanor with two mountains of trash at the old IBM facility.
(Click to enlarge.)
Eleanor is hard to see against this mountain of Cold-War-era techno-detritus.
(Click to enlarge.)
Back home, Gretchen reported that Ramona and Neville had never returned from their morning walk. They'd been gone something like three hours. So I climbed on my bike and headed south down the Farm Road. I soon found them, standing there in the middle of the road near the intersection with the Chamomile Headwaters Trail. What could they have been doing all that time? They hadn't moved more than a couple hundred feet from where I'd lost them hours before. In any case, they decided to follow me home, though Ramona was almost distracted into another adventure (one that Neville would have surely joined her on).
I climbed up on the roof and added some of the antifreeze I'd just bought to the top-most add valve using my huge custom funnel (which I'd made from the brass base of an old floor lamp). The system didn't require more than about a cup of fluid; it seems I'd actually managed to fix it yesterday. It was running nicely, rapidly raising the household hot water supply over 140 degrees Fahrenheit. I need it to be working like that while I'm in Los Angeles.
I was liking the 40 milligrams of Vyvanse, but I could already feel that it was post-peak and I wanted to keep the feeling going. So I swallowed a second 40 milligram capsule. Remember, Vyvanse is a form of amphetamine that has been chemically bonded to a lysine amino acid, and it has no effect in the body until an enzyme in red blood cells snips off the lysine. Evidently this is a slow process, making Vyvanse a hard-to-hack time-release medication for attention deficit disorder. But by sending another surge of it into my body, I hoped to maintain the best phase of the high (or see what would happen). This seemed to work, though it wasn't quite the same as the initial onset had been on my drive into Kingston earlier.
The chimney system for the woodstove has been drawing poorly of late, suggesting it had become clogged with creosote. Normally I only clean it once each year, and it hasn't been a year. But I've burned a lot of wood, and it seemed to be trying to tell me something. So I removed the plug on the side of the pipe and proceeded to scrape the inside all the way up to the top using my system of screwed-together fibreglass rods topped with a loop of metal windshield-wiper ribbing. I don't know how much creosote I scratched free, but it was probably on the order of a gallon. I paid special attention to the top of the pipe, where a rain cap and mesh tend to accumulate a lot of creosote, on one occasion closing the chimney in almost completely.
At some point, I decided I should paint a painting and thereby buy myself the ability to drink alcohol (a means of coming down from the chemical stimulation). And what better to paint than a picture of the new dog Neville? I proceeded to spend several hours painting a tiny four by five inch painting, suggesting that this was yet another of my crackhead projects. The problem with doing some things under the effects of powerful stimulants is that one tends to have a heightened standard of perfection couple with obsessive determination. Painting an image is an inherently imperfect process, and the idea is to marshall compromise between chaos and intention to fool the eye into seeing something that really isn't there. But if you're suddenly obsessed with perfection and are willing to spend hours achieving it, there's a tendency to destroy as much as you create in the elusive pursuit of the impossible. For the bulk of the time I spent on this painting, I was convinced it was a horrible embarrassment. It was only after I put a transparent yellow glaze over the background that it really popped for me and became something worthy of posting on Facebook. By then it was midnight. I'd begun work on it at something like 6:00pm (though there had been a few distractions). Here is the result:
At around this time, I began drinking my cheap single malt scotch. Suddenly I felt an unexpected wave of malaise coupled with the onset of panic. I had to lie down on the laboratory floor and wait for the moment to pass. I don't have to look far for theories as to what was going on. I'm guessing it's a bad idea to put 80 milligrams of Vyvanse in your system within a four hour period, particularly if alcohol is to be consumed.
As I recovered from that moment (and a few similar, though weaker, ones that followed), I was able to power through the vexing challenge of getting alternative P2 physics working in the Phaser game framework. Yes, I'm still doing my mentee's work for him.
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