written <2014-03-17 Mon>
I’m a delicate man, a chronically ill man, maybe even a dying man. It’s hard to say whether things are getting more difficult over time, and harder to say they aren’t. I can thank Accutane, genetic predisposition, and Chinese pollution for that. I’m not complaining; more like recognizing unalterable facts.
Because I haven’t, really. Sure I may win some battles; I’ve always assumed that I will. But everyone loses this war.
I can work pretty hard, 5 days a week, when my survival depends on it, and crash the other two. It’s hard to do much more than that. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. One can always do a little more, which makes it easy to focus on the willpower side of things. But every extra is wrung joule at the price of endocrine stress, which must be paid back in weekend catatonia. And the lizard brain doesn’t want to release those hormones easily.
I’ve pushed my lifestyle, psychological, and organizational systems as far as they can go, given present limitations. There’s pretty much nothing left to do until the health cyclicality gets dealt with.
The health experiments are slow and tricky, like threading the eye of a needle. A bit of Circadian disruption spoils a trial, but was it cause or effect? Each trial takes from a week to a month right now. I’ve eliminated all the causes of rapid reactions. Testing long-term cyclicality takes longer.
I must find a stable baseline so I can cleanly test supplements – which is a whole ‘nother threading of the needle, since there are so few pills I can handle. If that fails, pharmaceuticals are the last resort, for various good reasons. The primary one being, I’ll have to assume a 7 year limit on functional lifespan once I start down that road.
Back to the present problem: Abstracting away the Circadian disruptions from overwork and miscellaneous lessons on Chinese food and water safety, a larger pattern emerges. Shrimp, rice chicken is an incomplete diet. Fatigue and body breakdown gradually proceed, becoming prominent around the 1-2 month mark.
At this point I add in a small dose of Blue Ice fermented cod liver oil / butter oil blend. This rapidly restores energy and mood. But a few days later, I’m sapped back into the failure cycle, with the usual gut, fatigue, insomnia etc symptoms. I can’t handle the Blue Ice unaided, which means I can’t handle a full nutritional complement – there is no baseline. That’s what I was afraid of, and I took my sweet time confirming it.
I’ll give myself one last shot to find a non-cyclical baseline. Resume the UDCA, cut the Blue Ice dosage 90% and dilute it in meals, cut food intake by 1/3, and be perfect on Circadian discipline. There are no other disruptive factors. I know I can achieve 1-3 week gut stability with my current logistics. So if I don’t, it’s the Blue Ice.
If the above fails, my next option is to move to Kunming this summer and start making Rick Simpson oil. Hell, I should probably do that either way. If my body rejects the MJ too, then it’s on to Big Pharma.
I’ve come a long way from being helplessly horizontal. But it was a long way down in the first place. I’m probably feeling overly pessimistic due to just coming off a (relatively) high-dose Blue Ice cycle. But I’m damn tired of a body and mind that won’t cooperate. Hope this works.
If it does, all smiles and roses, no hard feelings. I never would’ve pushed my other systems to such perfection had I not been limited by what the Fremen would call climatic aridity.
At least my head’s screwed on straight now. I can probably limp along a good long while, if I have to. I have the personality robustness not to need false hope anymore.
UPDATE:
Who’m I kidding? Worst case, I’m looking at a few years or decades of Earthly suffering and humiliation. I’m immortal. More than likely, the vicissitudes of angelic service will involve periods of torment that dwarf the sum of Earthly woes. It’s not like angels always win. If I can’t stick this out, I’m simply not fit for duty. In the grand scheme, present suffering is irrelevant, much as I’d like to be combat effective in the here and now.
In fact, it’s probably a huge gain. What’s the point of the big bio-soul evolutionary petri-dish if you’re not going to keep the resulting diversity? From what I’ve learned about soul design, I can’t imagine everything getting ripped out post resurrection, leaving just a naked consciousness singularity.
Earth sucks for lots of things, but it’s not bad as a superwarrior breeding program. Fine, saint breeding program if you care about civil society and don’t have unreasonable bloodlust.
Parable of the talents – means you keep what you kill, in Riddick parlance. I can’t imagine angelic character is anywhere as malleable as human. Like the difference between adolescent and adult braces. So Earth’s the time to square yourself away, BEFORE you meet the Reaper. I’ll probably wind up in Heaven with the same headfull of contradictions I had on Earth. Good thing I puzzled through it already.
Ergo, the more suffering, the stronger the heavenly result – as long as you can stomach it instead of breaking. And I don’t see myself breaking anymore, except at the purely biological to low-emotional level that every meat sack is susceptible to. That shit’ll get swapped out anyway. It was the higher level contradictions I needed to get handled, and that’s done.
Anyhow, maybe it’s the UDCA kicking in, but I feel passable, which is an improvement. It seems like my theory of koan structure is falling into place. The higher levels – active confidence, active identity, protagonistic awareness – can’t exist until the lower, passive processing are fixed. Foundation, then roof.
I threw in “lion” along with “protag”, a play on my name. It added a nice boost. Funny thing is, that’s the sort of basic shit I started out with. Didn’t work at all, because the underlying processing wasn’t there, so it backsplattered dissonance all over me. Now the foundation’s in place, and it completes the structure.
Not that I’m the man. Far from it. But sometimes an old, sick lion can still win a fight.