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Terrence Mckenna lecture on creativity
 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-02 19:33 [#02501180]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker



LAZY_TITLE


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-02 22:52 [#02501191]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



http://www.ricedoutyugo.com/view.php?post=3987

but, more topical, if i had to sloganize the man, it would
go as thus: terrence mckenna: i want to believe but
i'm not quite that daft. he had lots of lovely ideas that
were clever in brilliant mixed in with vastly more ideas
that were poorly-thought out bullshit. i figure we'd have
gotten along famously


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-02 22:53 [#02501192]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



i reversed the polarity on the power couplings.

carry this disarming dad joke to star systems more distan...


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-02 23:36 [#02501219]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02501191



he is so entertaining you can sort of forgive more of his
muddled ideas, he is great for provoking idea and thats
what is really great about him


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-03 00:30 [#02501242]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



charlatan


 

offline steve mcqueen from caerdydd (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-03 21:34 [#02501279]
Points: 6453 Status: Regular



i think he calls charlatans 'squirls' or squirelly or
something like it. There's one where he talks about doing a
gig at UFO conference and taking the piss out of the UFO
crowd : "you want reproducible proof, smoke DMT, you'll have
it up the kazoo!". The hermetic tradition ones and voynich
manuscript talk on youtube are wkd non-druggy ones. cud
listen to him talk all day. colossal dude.


 

offline steve mcqueen from caerdydd (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-03 21:41 [#02501281]
Points: 6453 Status: Regular



IIRC he reckons the Voynich manuscript is interesting
*because* its totally unparsable, its a book that is
impossible to understand. OOh yeah and his Finnegans Wake
talk too!!


 

offline steve mcqueen from caerdydd (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-03 22:20 [#02501285]
Points: 6453 Status: Regular



using computers as a metaphor for nervous system,never
useful IMO
like your English teacher in school seeing you reading
comics and saying, "you like computers, its Garbage In
Garbage Out, you must know that acronym"., and looking all
wise n shit. loldafuq. If all language is metaphor then you
might as well pick your mother tongue to explain things
instead of computer ones, which are 50ish years old at most.
Fuckin <3 riceoutyugo


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 06:50 [#02501305]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker | Followup to steve mcqueen: #02501279



colossal dude, could be a track name on snares' next
album.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 06:52 [#02501306]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker | Followup to steve mcqueen: #02501285



it's all a rippling feedback loop where metaphor and meaning
bounce off each other to create more of the same.


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-04 13:46 [#02501328]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker | Followup to steve mcqueen: #02501281



i find the Voynich manuscript but i must confess it does
look like it was written by someone without their full
compliment of marbles, but all the best stuff ls like that


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 18:11 [#02501332]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker | Followup to Hyperflake: #02501328



nostradamus more like notredumbass


 

offline fleetmouse from Horny for Truth on 2016-08-04 19:07 [#02501348]
Points: 18042 Status: Lurker



God help us that this guy is considered wise and deep. I
fast forwarded to where he started to get to a point and
learned that language is important, something something
drugs, and the patriarchy is why people don't know about
history. Which is horseshit. Adult Swim + weed is why people
don't know about history.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 19:40 [#02501363]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



i like adult swim + weed. my work has a similar autistic
fart vibe; i figure maybe once they've drained the relevant
demographics of deeper thought i could have some job
opportunities as one of the last men (under)standing

anyways, i think we're in agreement about terrence mckenna.
i prefer the written word, i should note. i've never had the
patience for his "lectures" either. i read things that he's
written or had transcribed, then apply a grain of salt the
size of new jersey. after the resulting chemical reaction, a
pile of things i regard as genuinely clever and insightful
are left, and it's actually a pretty sizable pile. i also
fully understand why anyone would skim his corpus and think
he's crap, and that there are plenty of times where he was
deliberately being crap to fuck with the heads etc


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 19:44 [#02501364]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



the idea that shrooms are interstellar travellers. in these
foul-tasting buggers is the blueprint for a hyperdrive, also
language and art. that shrooms are in a parasymbiotic
feedback loop with marginally intellegent civilizations.
planet X drops shroops, builds hyperdrive, carriers shrooms
to other star systems.

when i first read that, i thought: wow. that is a
hell of an idea. seductive. i really wish i were dumb enough
to take it seriously, because that would be a lot of fun.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 19:50 [#02501366]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



mckenna is also pretty much responsible for the 2012 crap. i
think he'd developed brain tumors at that point... or was it
a troll? hard to say. if 2012 was actually something other
than hype, i'd say it was a moment of transition. the end of
one phase and the start of the next. perhaps mckenna thought
it was the end because that was where the mathematics of his
trip collapsed and his inner sight ended. i could dig up any
number of quotes from the matrix for this but i'll spare you


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-04 22:31 [#02501397]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker



i like the idea that shrooms are the key to hyperspace, cos
dune is one of my fave books and that a pretty similar idea,
it certainly fucks with your perception and that is to a
large degree your own construction of reality.




 

offline larn from PLANET E (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-05 01:53 [#02501409]
Points: 5473 Status: Regular | Show recordbag



i heard that he had never done psychedelics before and he
was just very educated and cashing in, he had only smoked
afghan hash on a train journey once and was sick


 

offline wavephace from off the chain on 2016-08-05 01:57 [#02501410]
Points: 3098 Status: Lurker



hes kool 2 listen but also a crazy guy. u shouldnt take him
seriously cuz drugs are messed up and if u take them u are
also messed. his "deepness" appeal is 2 joe rogan level
thinkers.....not true high intellect thinkers such as my
self


 

offline wavephace from off the chain on 2016-08-05 01:58 [#02501411]
Points: 3098 Status: Lurker



his album with spacetime continuum album is the best


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-05 03:22 [#02501417]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker | Followup to Hyperflake: #02501397



shrooms are the key to hyperspace

now there's a bumper sticker sure to get you pulled over by
the cops.


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-05 06:08 [#02501423]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker



^ loooool



 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-05 06:15 [#02501424]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker



if im wearing my normal rational mode of thinking mantle
there is no way i can take this guy seriously in 90% of what
he says , if i was younger i would immediately write him off
as a fruitcake and take no further heed. Since ive
lightened up a bit now; i cant really articulate what it is
that appeals to me about what he is saying, i think its
probably because it is a mode of thinking that is
traditionally far removed from how i approach things.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-05 08:30 [#02501425]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day; no
illusions there. things would be a lot less crap in the US
if the left and the right took a moment to consider each
others' ideas. they would still argue about almost
everything, but a few bits of common sense would reveal
themselves as such, and actually stand a chance of getting
implemented. improve things, you know? no, they don't. it's
like asking guys on wrestlemania to talk it out.

there are all sorts of things i've found, like magick, that
seem somewhere between crap and useful. i'm skeptical, but
it's good enough that i can't immediately bin it. if you go
back to medieval medicine and galen's four humors, you have
ground zero for what doctors call "differential diagnosis."
it's essentially a lookup table based on crusty old nonsense
like black juice and how full your bladder is. it
immediately seems like crap; real doctors think it's crap.
but that galen guy was really trying... even though the
underlying rationale is complete bullshit, the chart of bile
and cholera would land you on the right answer enough that
it was a useful tool. modern medicine has made it irrelevant
and i never felt it made sense to try diagnosing myself with
galen's table.

but i did try magick for a year or two, and i'm glad i did.
it's the same shit: there is a bit of science based on
thought and experimentation, then it loses the plot and
wanders off to have lunch with galen; astral spheres are
disrupting your bile chakra; burn some incense, draw
abstract symbols on paper, then eat them. chew them
thoroughly. this aligns your chi

i patiently followed along with the bullshit for a while
because i wasn't sure which parts were bullshit and which
weren't. gradually i sorted out the contents of magick into
bullshit and not-bullshit columns, then i grabbed the
not-bullshit list and left. this is how you do with mckenna
as well, i figure.


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-06 10:15 [#02501491]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker



^ ah paragraphs!

i think accepting the irrational aspects of life is really
good for creative endeavors, if nothing else


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-06 19:11 [#02501508]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



i should really cough it up and admit that i owe a huge
amount to the late Robert Anton Wilson. he's most known for
the Illuminatus! trilogy, but he also wrote a bunch of... i
dunno. quirky acidhead self-help books? prometheus rising
was the best of 'em, quantum psychology was also great. he
goes into all this heavily. magick, brain (re)programming.
the layers of conditioning you have to peel back before you
can really get anywhere.

pretty much, he spends a good bit of time in one of those
books arguing that aleister crowley was actually reasonably
scientific about what he did. i won't even try to recap that
because i don't remember it well enough, but it seemed more
or less spot on. so i got a guided tour of the origins of
magick from a man who's spent his whole life playing with
peoples' minds. the phrase he preferred was "guerrilla
ontologist." pops out of the woods, lobs off something that
blows up your worldview, then creeps back into the bushes
and has a giggle about it.

then there's the bruce lee quotes, "use only that which
works, and take it from whereever you can find it," "do not
deny the old ways simply because they are old, because you
will just create another pattern to trap yourself in" and of
course "do not obey a command unless it also comes from
within." do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

all of this spoke right to the core of my personality. i was
pretty young when i first noticed many of the things i was
told didn't completely jive with other things i was told, or
the way people acted. being kept in during recess and
deciding i was going to throw out how school had taught me
to write letters; devise a style that was my own. that was
what i did instead of throwing rocks or lighting things on
fire -- tear down mental structures i felt were controlling
or wrong and replace them with something of my own design.


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-06 19:15 [#02501509]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker



^ KLF reference the illuminatus trilogy quite a bit, is it
worth reading?


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 10:09 [#02501537]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



legend has it that wilson and hubbard made a bet: which one
of them could create the most popular religion. boom,
discordianism and scientology. i would say hubbard won. the
illuminatus trilogy is fantastic. yes, read it.

i thought of something that's a pretty good example of all
this: state-dependant memory. the wikipedia article launches right
into babble about psychoactive substances; typical internet.
when i first heard of it, it was casually described thus:
"whatever you learn is most accessable when you're in the
state you're in when you learned it." i heard this line
before college, but when a psych class covered it, the same
line came up. then, pandering to his audience, the professor
went internet and tangented into psychoactive substances:
"you shouldn't study drunk, but if you study while drunk,
you would actually do better on the exam if you showed up
drunk as well." then another three disclaimers to cover his
ass.

i'd already thought about this and started finding it all
over years before that class, after the first time i heard
it somewhere long ago. it's pretty much the same thing as a
smell bringing back an old memory. a song on the radio
reminds you of someone you broke up with and alters your
mood. an album you listened to tripping occasionally gives
you a few micrograms for free, listening to it years later.
especially if you're stoned.

tack over to magick. all those rituals. burning incense...
and i said: hey, i bet that's about using triggers to
deliberately enter a particular state of mind. it seems like
magic -- no k -- until you realize it's not much different
from a song on the radio triggering memories and immediately
flipping your emotional state around.

crowley was before this concept was floating about, but he
was definitely circling around it.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 10:19 [#02501538]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



so how does one program the brain to recognize the tuple
(incense, dim lights, mumbled faux latin) as "magick time"
and promptly enter some sort of transhuman metaconscious...
thing? i will leave this as an exercise to the reader.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 11:07 [#02501539]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



did you know? aleister crowley also invented the world's
first wifi hotspot. but no one bought it. he wasn't with the
christians, so they concluded it was a radio to the devil
and refused to buy it. concurrently, his fans were offended
that it could be rationally explained, and refused to buy
it.


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 11:09 [#02501540]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker



"'d already thought about this and started finding it all
over years before that class, after the first time i heard
it somewhere long ago. it's pretty much the same thing as a

smell bringing back an old memory. a song on the radio
reminds you of someone you broke up with and alters your
mood. an album you listened to tripping occasionally gives
you a few micrograms for free, listening to it years later.

especially if you're stoned."

yeah i think this is how it probably works as well,
sometimes remembering something is close to a psychedelic
experience but really attenuated



 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 11:11 [#02501541]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker



also when i slip into that hypnagogic state i can generate
really intricate fractal patterns in my minds eye, yet i
cant do it when awake, must be to do with chemicals being
released as i sleep


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 11:21 [#02501543]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



i have immense trouble sleeping because my brain won't shut
up. i'll code for eight or twelve hours, and i can tell it's
over. i'm losing my place in the sentence and making all
sorts of mistakes i don't make unless it's over. but i am
dug in. i don't. want. to. stop. if i immediately go and lie
down, i will not sleep, even if i've been up for two days...
because my brain is still repeatedly darting back into what
i was working on. even without a compiler to yell at me, i
can tell i'm not exactly going to solve much of anything
like this. but i keep going back to it, like an irish drunk
chained to streetlamp. i've learned the thing to do at this
point is listen to music for an hour or so, and it's like
using a plunger on a clogged toilet. music hits me deep
enough to fend off the compulsive picking, and after a
sufficient period of time it drifts off and i can go to
sleep.

or not, as i start thinking about forum posts or next week's
schedule or whatever. at this point, it's less an irish
drunk and more a child that cannot sit still. this becomes
far less of a problem after i've been awake around 24 hours,
unlike coding or writing, which will hound me until i clear
it out, once i get sufficiently deep into it.


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 11:24 [#02501544]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker



do you have flux on your computer screen, it helps me remind
me naturally when i should start getting ready to go to
sleep

also a glass of wine or two a couple of hours before bedtime
can be a great help, not that i advocate relying on booze


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 11:25 [#02501545]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker



every night i have an hours period when im lying in bed in
the pitch black willing myself to sleep without success, its
so bloody boring


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 11:26 [#02501546]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker



truth be told im not exhausting myself enough physically,
there was a period when i was a building a massive 60 foot
long garden wall and it was so tiring when i came in i had
trouble from keeping myself awake


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 11:32 [#02501547]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



when it actually comes to sleep, well, i rarely remember my
dreams. i've never had a fully lucid dream. two or three
times i've realized i was dreaming, and i promptly woke up.
i fret about this a bit after all aphex has said, SAW II,
and so on. the few times i've dreamed a bit of melody,
remembered it, and managed to program it into the machines,
it was intense. but that's where i step off fretting: i'll
maybe remember a handful of dreams every month, and those
ones are the crazy weird intense ones that are important for
me to figure out. the way i see it, i've been rooting around
in my subconscious like a church lady at a tag sale for my
whole life while awake; by the time i get to dreaming
there's not much left for it to confuse me with.

hypnogogia is a bit more familiar. any sort of night-time
cold/flu combo med like nyquil that has pseudoephedrine will
promptly lead me into that, and the picking at code or
whatever often will too without any chemical aid. so many
weird things have happened, there. the one most relevant to
xlt is the time where i felt like i was using cubase. i had
three audio tracks and i was slicing, copying, pasting,
rearranging. sensation of being able to click play and hear
it, edit a bit, play again, just like on the computer. then
i sort of woke up and it was gone... except for a final
screenshot. an image of my three audio tracks and all the
cut-up segments that i could see clearly. but i absolutely
couldn't remember what they sounded like. drat.


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 11:40 [#02501548]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker



most nights i never remember dreaming at all, i only ever
had one or two lucid dreams and it was very strange, it was
very much like being awake i remember holding my hands in
front of my face telling myself i was dreaming, walking down
a gravel drive way, very strange. Most of the time i dont
remember anything unless im awoken up mid dream


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 11:41 [#02501549]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker | Followup to Hyperflake: #02501544



also a glass of wine or two a couple of hours before
bedtime
can be a great help, not that i advocate relying on
booze


this is quite literally what eventually led to me having a
problem with alcohol. i discovered booze, and i liked it.
that wasn't a problem. then i discovered there was none of
this lying in bed for three and a half hours, noticing every
forty-five minutes that i'd spent another forty-five minutes
talking to myself; getting cross. stop this immediately.
sleep. i'd clear my mind. five seconds later, i'm at it
again. five shots of vodka and i was out like a kitten in
the sunlight. when you're up against 3.5 hours of hating
yourself, you like drinking, and drinking really does get
you to sleep at a reasonable time, it gets super tempting to
drink every night. this worked for five or seven years.
towards the end of that, i was in a relationship with
someone who drank loads -- more than i did before, anyways
-- and then it's the dr. drew shit, a co-dependant
relationship and it seems normal because we see each other
drinking our asses off. at first i knew it was too far and
didn't care, then i began fucking shit up, and i cared. i'd
taken long breaks from booze before and decided it was time
for another and for the first time i had trouble with it.
after a lot of bad noise i began to exercise 2-4 hours a day
and that largely has filled the hole. after a year i could
drink casually again; i have a wee bit of quality scotch
right now. but the old troubles with sleep are still there,
and i can no longer drown them with booze. again, drat. at
least the excercise helps with that a little.


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 11:53 [#02501550]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker



yes my dad was a functioning alcoholic, he literally drank
half a bottle of whisky a night, i never asked him but i
assume he must have had problems sleeping. Im pretty much
tee total, but i do recognise the times i have drank in
moderation in the past ive had the best nights sleep


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 11:54 [#02501551]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker



the tiredest ive ever been is when i come in after doing
manual labour, making cement in cement mixers all day or
stacking bricks, absolutely knackering you snore so heavily
but you wake up next day in the blink of an eye its great,
no creeping anxiety in the dark of the night


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 12:20 [#02501552]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



yes, excercise is king. i hit a stretch where i was sick of
coding, sober enough to persue an agenda, and beginning to
get super into exercise. so i found a job for an A/V
company; essentially one step above construction. knocking
holes in walls and lugging ladders through mud in the rain.
the rainy days were shit, but even those i didn't mind too
much.

what did me in was everyone else working for the company.
the guy i spent all day with was a heroin addict prone to
yelling FUCK! SHIT! if he so much as dropped a nail he was
trying to hammer in. the owner of the company was a former
cocaine addict and complete asshole who had run his body
into the ground; slowly dying. i suspect he was also on
opiates, but pills. i never got confirmation there like i
did with my workmate in the field; a few months after they
canned me, they canned him because he nodded off behind the
wheel and crashed the work van. then hired him back. i
figure the owner had a moment of grim admission that his
company was fucking fucked up and consequently he needed to
employ fuck-ups.

everything was like middle school, there. day one: where do
i park my whip, guys? over there. ok. days four: you can't
park there, park over there. ok. day five: no, you can't
park there either. ok. day six: heroin man yells at me to
park somewhere asshole boss told me never to park. i try to
explain that the owner of the company said to not do that.
unsurprisingly, he screams at me. this finally pisses me
off, and i park where the boss told me to park. he's all "I
SHOULD SEND YOU HOME FOR THAT SHIT" but he doesn't. the next
day i show up early and pin the owner down (i had to; he was
slippery) and chat: this guy is screaming at me to park
where you told me never to park. please, for the love of
god, tell me where to park, and tell him about it. never in
my life have i been through that level of bullshit for
parking arrangements. the pay was also shit. but i slept
like a rock every night.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 12:23 [#02501553]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



tldr version of #02501552 -- i could go on a vigorous
eight-hour hike every day and i would sleep just fine, but
it's sort of tough to arrange your life around that.


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 12:30 [#02501554]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker



yes its not practical to do that, especially if you have
other interests, i sort of envy you living in the US the
amazing expansive hiking you can do, you could probably go
somewhere and not see someone for a couple of weeks


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 12:43 [#02501555]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



i see a prime opportunity to vaguely wander back into the
topic this thread has derailed into: when i had trouble not
drinking for the first time in my life, i had to figure out
how to handle this. then it's just like magick: there is so
much out there on alcoholism. some of it is bullshit and
some of it is truth. most of it is in between. i told myself
that if i couldn't stop, i would have to go to AA, and my
contempt for AA was enough to get me to stop drinking. my
addiction is outside on those twelve-steps doing push-ups,
man.
oh, fuck off. then dr. drew is all this is a
disease
. again, i say: fuck off. this is a bad habit
that's gone too far. i stopped picking my nose when i was
fourteen, and i can stop this. it is not a hardware problem
slash disease, it is a software problem. meanwhile, both AA
and dr. drew have successfully cleaned people up, so clearly
something in there is working, even AA smells like christian
soccer moms and dr. drew smells like the fossil ward of a
community college. i went through and combed it for data.
some of it was obviously bullshit and i blammed it. some of
it seemed valid and i kept it. some of it i couldn't tell,
so i took it seriously for a bit until i could. eventually i
felt like i knew pretty clearly why which bits worked and
which didn't. then i picked up the not-bullshit list and
left.


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 12:51 [#02501556]
Points: 30991 Status: Lurker



from what i understand if you are an alcoholic and you stop
drinking you go cold turkey and generally feel horrible and
anxious, so thats what makes it intolerable i understand why
some people drink themselves in to a stupor, its how they
make it through the day.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 13:11 [#02501557]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



i guess it's important to note that i am a compulsive
control freak and the moment i felt like alcohol had some
leverage i flipped a shit. pretty much, if it goes far
enough, dr. drew starts to be more correct with the
it's-a-disease shit. i never drank enough for the DTs, cold
sweats, shakes, whatever. i almost never felt hungover, but
that was probably because i'd been at it so long i knew how
to take care of myself (always have a glass of water next to
your glass of booze if you're aiming to drink too much).
nothing dramatic happened. i didn't crash my car, i didn't
get arrested. i worked at home and i could have drank on the
clock; i didn't even do that. what i did do was clock out
early so i could start drinking. eight hours later a liter
or two of wine was gone. i fucked up in lots of small ways
during those eight hours; mostly making an ass of myself or
eating lots of junk food. alright, time for a short break.
that lasted a few days before i bought another pod of wine;
back to square one. i didn't start to worry until this
happened another three times. it was not a physical,
get-withdrawal addiction, and i hadn't fucked my life up so
far that i had nothing to come back to. quite the opposite.
i was furious with myself for wasting so much time.

from there, the gist of it is that i discovered i could play
FTL endlessly, and when i was having trouble, that's what i
did. once i was clearer i knew i needed something other than
FTL to replace booze; that's where exercise came in. i was
able to hold off after that... but, if i start drinking past
a point, those old bad patterns begin to come back. like
water that has carved deep channels in a mountainside.
analogy is that booze has become a black hole for me. i can
sip expensive whiskey without getting sucked in; it's too
nice to guzzle. the event horizin is box wine, and i don't
buy that any more.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 14:20 [#02501558]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



anyways, if you're looking to quit booze and not having an
easy time, please don't use my carefully metered stalemate
as an excuse to go out and buy a bottle of expensive
whiskey.

that was one of those things AA/Dr-Drew had dead on -- a
mention of alcohol triggers the idea to buy alcohol. like
picking your nose, it's a matter of catching yourself in the
act a million or so times, and lowering your index finger
away from your nostril. hard at first, easier at times,
eventually an automatic habit.

a closely related but separate habit is coming up with an
excuse to buy booze. like, hey, this dude on the internet
does that, so it'll probably be ok if i do as well. it's a
step removed and a bit harder to catch, but same deal.

when i said my contempt for AA got me to quit, i meant i
used that as a threat to myself: if i can't do this soon, i
have to go to AA. it was a good motivator. i was also not
kidding. i really would have dragged myself there if it went
that far, and that's part of why it didn't.

the rest was science. whare are the mechanisms at work?
habits, triggers. what are the solutions? discipline,
addiction swap for video games/exercise. after i began to
have a handle on it, i tried buying box wine. it disappeared
quickly, so i avoided it for a few weeks. tried it again;
same deal. a month later, i try again, and it sucks me back
in. three boxes of wine later, i hole up and play FTL.
haven't bought any since. i knew there would be a line in
there somewhere. life-long abstinence seemed too harsh; i
was right. i had to fuck up a few times to know where "too
far" was. neither dr. drew nor AA would ever accept this as
a valid approach, and for many people, it would be.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 14:21 [#02501559]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



er, wouldn't be.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 14:28 [#02501560]
Points: 25218 Status: Lurker



i finished my two fingers of scotch three hours ago and then
made a coffee. that will do nicely, yes sir. now i'm
contemplating my addiction to writing long trains of blather
that only hyperflake and mohamed will read. then mohamed
will only under 40/60% of what i'm saying; the rest is too
technical


 


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