What a Dreary Planet

Here's the thing about stimulants: the line between function and frenzy is drawn in the sand far out on the beach and, apparently, it's only a matter of time before the tide comes in. These chemicals have the uncanny characteristic of making everything just a bit more interesting. All objects become shinier, all people younger and better looking. And without them, suddenly- nothing holds the attention. One finds oneself suddenly, inexplicably, back in an ordinary world where everyone has to make their own fun. Worse than that, everybody has to devote large portions of their lives to the Profoundly Unfun and Drab.

Why would you ever consciously choose to live in the ordinary world?

The co-morbidity thread.

Anorexia is "worse" (better?) (superior, but with a darker prognosis) than bulimia. However, binging-purging anorexia has the highest mortality rate of all eating disorders. Er, of "both" eating disorders, neglected as compulsive over-eating is in the realm of research, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that COE is the deadliest of them all.

Bulimics of whatever weight, however, are more likely to present with/ acquire at taste for reality-adjustment. Is this taken into consideration when figuring morbidity/mortality rates of the messy binge/purgers vs. the pure ethereal restrictive anorexics? And what is the prognosis for those displaying symptoms of both eating disorders and substance abuse disorders?

Not too good, duh.

But doesn't one compulsion temper the other? Compulsion requires singular dedication to perfect. If one's attention is divided between spanking the monkey and gorging the gorilla, one can only slither so far down a particular rabbit hole before self-preservation ( of a sort) retrieves the self and sets it back down in the alternate whirlpool of self-destructive cerebral onanism.

Right?

Poll!

Please participate. I don't think I can make leaving feedback any easier than clicking a radio button. (Feel free to complicate it yourself, though, by clearing your cache to vote multiple times.)

. . . Something about how drugs that act on the dopamine receptors physiologically diminish willpower (as in the power to abstain when indulging is easier/more pleasurable)

Junkie Jews for Jesus

I've discovered an even stupider game than Race the Train. It's called something like Slamming Leftovers and has nothing to do with closing shift at the diner. I've done cottons a million times- that's something of a fact of life, of this life. It's low, but acceptable because everyone knows what it's like to be low with a lift in sight. Cottons are always in sight. But emptying out that big red box and checking to make sure you've squeezed every last drop of evil out of each barrel, collecting a murky orangey-brown pot of fools gold from the last 3 units of 6 or 8 pins, and tying off like it's just another taste--- that's just plain disgusting. It's one thing to bang a drop or so of fresh blood on your second or third try after missing. It's altogether another level of Purgatory (pardon the pun, if you catch it) to recook and inject a day and a half's worth of one's own elixir of life.

And on the title topic, I'm giving up for Lent. That's right. Just plain giving up. (I figure that as a heathen I have nowhere to be cast out of should I slip and catch hold of a ray of hope.)