I very rarely laugh at my own work, and I’m certainly not one to toot my own horn like this, but that voodoo witch line in yesterday’s post? That whole paragraph-long sentence, actually. You ask me, that’s about as good as it gets. Didn’t even have to think about it. It just came to me. The best ones always do. Pure literary gold. I’m just saying.
*toot*
Day, what is it, I guess, what, six today?
Day Six.
I’m feeling pretty okay now. I still get the headaches, mostly when I wake up in the morning, but they’re finally responding to medication, so that’s fine. I’m sleeping much better, and getting up in the morning isn’t as difficult as it was a couple days ago. I actually got up before my alarm went off today. That’s just hardcore right there.
What’s really surprising to me is how alert I feel. Like, I feel more alert now than when I was dropping a Dew first thing every morning. *adds that one to the list of pooping euphemisms* Sometimes, back in the Before Time, if I was caffeinated enough, I’d almost feel disembodied, like it would be as if I were controlling some dude named Ray through a computer monitor and a joystick on Phobos. It’s kind of like my senses would lag behind my mind by a quarter of a second, so I’d have uncanny reflexes, but it would take a split second for me to realized I’d just reflexed. It’s hard to put into words. Think drunk, only the exact opposite. I’m really not explaining this well.
A word of warning to anyone thinking of taking my example trying this little stunt: stay inside. Did you know the Earth revolves around a giant ball of fire? Seriously, it’s true. So, I suggest remaining indoors, instead of, say, going to Great Adventure in temperatures pushing 100°. Mind you, hitting up an amusement park is a good thing to do - it’s amusing, I won’t refute that - but when you’re in a state of mind that feels almost but not quite exactly like death, you’re probably better off doing something that doesn’t require so much physical strain, like shitting a five-hundred-year-old redwood.
Remember how I complained a few days ago of having the worst headache I had ever had in my life? Well, that was true at the time, but if I had suffered such a headache right now and dubbed it so, I would have been lying, because at Great Adventure on Saturday, I had a headache that slapped that other one in the face with its balls and made it cry.
Allow me to paint the picture for you: combine the normal caffeine withdrawal-type headache with loopy rides, lots of walking and standing, and six or seven hours being broiled by God, and suddenly this headache, which, in the grand scheme of things and all of that, is largely inconsequential, gains the ability to use its will to build and destroy entire civilizations, yet decides to focus this will solely on the task of making your head feel like some errant voodoo witch is concentrating on a photo of your forehead and excitedly screaming “BOOM!” over and over.
Learn from my mistakes.
Day three is here, and oddly enough, I’m already starting to feel like I might actually survive this ordeal with most of my organs still functioning.
I crashed and burned at around 9 o’clock last night, and didn’t wake up again until 9 o’clock this morning. Twelve hours of sleep in one night is already a monkeyload, but on a week night? That’s just crazy.
I typically wake up with a Herculean headache after getting too much sleep in one shot, and this time was no different. I could actually feel the Greek legend thrusting his manhood through my forehead. What really surprised me, however, was that the Advil I took when I got up actually helped. Usually, no amount of analgesic can get rid of my oversleep headaches, but this time, it really worked. I wonder if ditching the caff had anything to do with it, or if it was all just a big coincidence.
Got to work at 10:15. The rule at work when it comes to hours is, “Get forty of ‘em in every week whenever you can,” which is ungodly wonderful, because it means I can get most of my hours out of the way early on in the week and then just put in four (the minimum that they ask for per day) on Friday. This isn’t really relevant to the current story arc that pervades Watch Ray Purge; I just wanted to make people jealous.
Spending the day at Great Adventure tomorrow. Should be interesting. I already get headaches from being exposed to heat for too long. I can’t imagine how it’s gonna feel combining those with the headaches I’m getting from caffeine withdrawals, not to mention all of those roller coasters. Note to self: stay the holy hell away from Viper.
So it’s time for a progress report.
It has been about 27 hours since I cut off my caffeine habit - my last dose of the stuff was at around 6:30am yesterday. During this time, I have suffered what I can only assume must be some kind of vile, alien brain worm digging around in my head. This is easily the worst headache I have ever had in my life, and the many handfuls of Advil I’ve tossed down have only served to transmorph it from a screaming pain into a pain that is still screaming but sounds kind of muffled because it has a big sock in its mouth. It still hurts a lot, is what I’m saying.
When I arrived at work this morning, I took my 12-pack of Dew out of my cubicle and moved it into the refrigerator in the printer room, thus placing it up for grabs. I found the act surprisingly depressing, probably because Mountain Dew is in a way a part of my character, much the same way that shit is a part of a septic truck driver’s character. Okay, now, see, that analogy just didn’t work at all. You can see the effect these withdrawals are having on me pretty well for yourself.
So in lieu of Dew (whee, rhymes), I’ve been drinking just unholy amounts of water, trying to detox myself a little bit, and to give me more opportunities to go take a break in the bathroom with my Gameboy. Been playing Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, in case you’re wondering. Great game. I wish we’d gotten these games in America sooner.
I chose yesterday to kick this addiction once and for all because I knew that I was going to be finishing off one of my projects that day, so I’d be able to get away with a little loafing over the course of the next few days. The entirety of my life as a programmer has been lived under the influence, so I wanted to pick a time when I’d be able to ease myself into the ponderous task of coding while not completely wired.
Even non-programming stuff is taking a bit of a hit. I’m extremely sleepy. It’s not so much that I feel like I’m going to die, more that I feel like I already have. I’ve been forgetting names since yesterday, but I think that’s probably just because I’m so tired. My left leg has been acting up a bit, too, but I’ve been having occasional trouble (like every couple months) with that side of my body ever since I had a seizure a couple years ago, anyway. That’s nothing new. It’s only minor tingling, I barely even notice it. It’ll go away. *falls over in a heap*
On the bright side, I did sleep like a baby last night. I went to bed around 8 and dropped off the moment my head touched the pillow, and I slept straight on until my alarm went off at 6. I felt like I could still squeeze out another two or three weeks of sleep after that.
I did a very dumb thing today.
Upon conclusion of a bout with an unexpected wave of introspection, I was left convinced that my caffeine “problem”, as the sensational leftist media might refer to it, was getting out of hand. Taking a quick tally, I found that I have been consuming, on average, six cans of Mountain Dew daily. At 170 calories per can, that’s, like, a buncha. I never much cared for bunchas. They itch.
It’s no small wonder that all of that sugar hasn’t reduced my teeth to a crumbling mess of blackened detritus. I guess I can attribute my oral resilience to the fact that having a dentist for a father has resulted in my possession of a mouth full of bullet-proof überteeth that can even cut through this metal pipe!!
Ow…
So, the dumb thing that I done gone and did is, I’ve decided I gotta get off the trimethylxanthine. There are a lot of good reasons for this:
1) I’d be cutting 1020 calories and 276 grams of sugar from my daily intake, which will put one hell of a quick stop to the weight gain that’s been concerning me lately.
2) I’ll probably sleep better at night, though there’s a certain degree of default there, considering that anything is better than the four hours a night I’ve been getting the last few weeks.
3) Caffeine makes me sweat more, and according to what I’ve read, caffeine also increases your body’s production of the stinky kind of sweat, i.e., the kind that contains trace amounts of fat, which is what attracts the bacteria that cause body odor. By living on just water, I’ll probably still sweat, but it won’t be the kind that makes me all bee ohhy.
4) I find that I have a overhightened sense of awareness when I’m heavily caffeinated. As in, I’ll look at a penny on the ground, and instead of thinking “penny”, I’ll unravel the mysteries of the Universe. This is fun, make no mistake, but it gets old after a while, and once the chemical has worked its way out of my system and I emerge back into normalspace, I find that I’m no longer able to function at the tippy top of my game. I don’t feel like relying on dopamine uptake inhibition in order to live my life, and I figure, if I’m absolutely going to need a recreational drug to operate at a decent level of efficiency, it may as well be one of the more expensive, exotic ones, like, I don’t know, Midol.
So I’m dropping it, cold turkey. I’ve thought about doing this for months upon months, but the time has come to just make with it already. No more Mountain Dew. I’m saying it here so I won’t be able to pussy out of it without depublishing, which is an ethically poopy thing to do.
The loyal reader will be kept posted on my progress. Stay tuned. *jitter* *thud*