Day 316
On this day of the Cowden Support Protocol:
Before breakfast, usually when I wake up from a deathlike slumber, for the third or fourth time, with tea. Time to mix the tinctures into water, glub glub glub. Cut away to Alice-in-Wonderland or Harry-Potter potion drinking scenes.
[12 noon] Potion #1: 30 drops stevia, 20 drops samento, 30 drops mora (this is the day I run out, I always run out of mora), 10 drops parsley, 2 capsules magnesium malate, 1 capsule serrapeptase.
Mood lifts around 3pm or so. When optimally spaced out, I find that in 3 hours I can expect an end to the herxheimer reaction, the telltale head-throbbing, nausea, dizziness that is supposed to indicate die-off of bacteria and an overloading of your body’s ability to dispose of it. That gives me one hour to do some useful work, then take the next potion.
Repeat every four hours. I pre-mix the next one and take it with me to the co-working space.
Respond to a date from yesterday on Hinge. Consider whether I myself would date someone with lyme disease, or where I would meet them, or if I could even tell when face-to-face. Consider now also dating apps for sapiosexuals looking for neuroatypicals.
[4pm] Potion #2: 10 drops sparga, 20 drops burbur-pinella (in general, good for relieving herxheimer reaction), 30 drops cumanda.
It’s harder to maintain focus or keep things in short-term memory, so I make more use of an open notebook+pen next to me, and a tiling window manager (chunkwm on Mac OS) that displays at the top of my screen whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing, visible at all times. With coffee, or if I’m on a roll, or distracted or stimulated, I can power through for multiple hours, until I get hungry.
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I’m thinking of applying for tech jobs again soon, presumably where I show up to beautifully-designed offices somewhere and occasionally talk to people and turn computers off and on (or automate their offings and onnings). That will be a nice chance to draw up a schedule and daily routines. I’m already watering plants for my housemate. So graduate from there to a dog. And then, and then, and then.
[8pm] Potion #3: same as potion #1.
Back home, eating dinner, these days pre-made meals from Territory that are ketogenic, which is said to help with chronic inflammation as well as help with weight loss and improve brain function. Some laying down in bed until three hours have past, some playing Words With Friends to help improve memory and cognition, some reading of The Witcher short stories. In the fourth hour, writing some code.
[12midnight] Potion #4: same as potion #2, plus 40 drops sealantro. (Btw, that is totally what I would call cilantro grown in Seattle, wokka wokka).
I end up watching a lot of movies or TV shows, not because I think that’s a good thing to do, but because it simulates socializing with people without taking up a lot of brainpower monitoring the appropriateness of what I’m saying, the amount of eye contact, the level of humor, the number of dad jokes, etc. I can appreciate the writer / director / actor’s skill in eliciting a certain feeling in me. Tonight it’s Ad Astra, as if I didn’t already like the Matt-Damon / lost-in-space / astronaut genre already. I’ve read that being autistic and distanced from your feelings is considered hyper-masculine, and Brad Pitt is really selling the advantages of this for going into deep space or exploring Antarctica. He does not even care that Liv Tyler is leaving her house keys behind before walking out the front door forever.
Everyone knows when you go into space, you record video journal entries with perfunctory, pithy observations and data from your experiments. These you can send to your family, future self, or at least, they are recovered by your rescuers when they try to solve for your disappearance and abandoned spaceship.
I also use this time to work on my Ohm-Sweet-Ohm cross-stitch from Adafruit, adding in a splash of Red 666 because I’m tired of just looking at the Dark Grey 317. Hand-eye coordination, repetition, structured goal: all the checkmarks.
Around 2:30am, feeling pretty great, went for my second run using this Runkeeper app. Just 25 minutes, six intervals of running 1 minute each, and walking quickly otherwise. Winds are howling outside, and I guess it is winter here in NYC and freezing. But fuck that, when the haze lifts from your brain, you go for it. Which is actually the whole point of this entry. You’ll only hear from me when I feel great. Take heart, lymies, it happens before Day 316. Whether it happens more frequently going forward, that’s science.
