doc sorrow

I’m reading Elizabeth Pisani’s awesome book The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS. My pitch: And The Band Played On, but Elizabeth Pisani was dancing to the band, and the band got distracted because her dancing was really quite good and then, regrouping, decided to actually start playing a song that didn’t fucking kill people. Better people with more time than me describe it as “a gale of fresh air” or “rollicking, eye-opening, hilarious account of the underbelly of international AIDS research” or just ”required reading.”

Watch her TED talk and realize, “Hey, this is that AIDS lady from that Vice interview. The researcher with the leather boots. Who explained that it may be safer to have unprotected sex with an HIV+ dude on meds than a dude who hasn’t been tested. And that oral sex doesn’t really transmit AIDS, not really.¹ And she had those great boots.”² Then, peep this mood booster!³ From a passage in a chapter about her work with the Waria, a group of sex workers in Indonesia:

Let’s all agree that this game happens every Tuesday at like 6pm, even if it doesn’t, so that when that time rolls around we can all take a slow moment to reflect about how wonderful it is that right now (Tues, 6pm) somewhere in the world (Indonesia) there is a team of commercial sex workers almost certainly kicking police ass in volleyball and really how bad can this world be if such wonderful things can happen in it, weekly even.

I have noticed a pattern in my limited (but enthusiastic) experience wasting my early 20s studying the most boring drugs imaginable. Here it is. The oldest drugs tend to have duller side effects–headache, heart palpitations, you puke, whatever. Newer drugs tend to replace these “comfortable old sweater” side effects with less serious but straight-up crazier ones. Prednisone, a steroid, can cause “inappropriate happiness.” Chantix, a pill to aid smoking cessation, makes a lot of people want to flat out put themselves in the ground–the Awl highlights in a “listicle without commentary” the 32 possible side effects: “32. Hostility, 31. Aggression, 30. Mania…” Parkinson’s drugs like Mirapex work by increasing levels of dopamine, the “goal-oriented” “reward-seeking” or “mean happy” neurotransmitter. This made enough people gamble compulsively that the FDA put a warning on the bottle about it. That cultural trope about our national granny blowing it all at Mohegan Sun? Runs deeper than you think. Oh, and we kind of knew that it did this 20 years ago anyway.

The motherlode of this strange new side effect world is none other than Ambien. Ambien!

Ambien, the nation’s best-selling prescription sleeping pill, is showing up with regularity as a factor in traffic arrests, sometimes involving drivers who later say they were sleep-driving and have no memory of taking the wheel after taking the drug.

….The traffic cases around the country include that of Dwayne Cribb, a longtime probation and parole officer in Rock Hill, S.C. Mr. Cribb says he remembers nothing after taking Ambien before bed last Halloween — until he awoke in jail to learn he had left his bed and gone for a drive, smashed into a parked van and driven away before crashing into a tree. Mr. Cribb is still facing charges of leaving the scene of an accident.

A registered nurse who lives outside Denver took Ambien before going to sleep one night in January 2003. Sometime later — she says she remembers none of the episode — she got into her car wearing only a thin nightshirt in 20-degree weather, had a fender bender, urinated in the middle of an intersection, then became violent with police officers, according to her lawyer. [nyt]

There’s also a lot of documented sleep-eating, although apparently none intense enough that anyone would register a domain about it, which someone did for http://www.sleepdriving.com (probably in their sleep.) If anyone wants to go halfsies on starting a blog called ~Ambien Narratives~ I’m in. Here, I’ll start:

Things People I Know or People That I Know Know Have Done on Ambien
1. written a lot of checks
2. taken the pill, put themselves in bed, and woken up just sufficiently enough to realize they were walking around their house slamming their face into walls like a mouse in a maze but not then enough to stop doing it
3. given their husband a full-on, lotiony foot massage of one half hour’s length after previously flat-out denying his request for it with disgust an hour prior
4. woken up to find themselves at their computer having just bought 1,000 off-brand beanie babies from ebay. this particular friend made good from bad in two ways. first, he indiscriminately tossed them into the crowd during shows at the all-ages venue he worked at. second, each and every night for a month, he would clandestinely drive by the house of his friend who had just become a dad, throw one on the lawn, and speed away.

Please enjoy this brief recording from one of my lectures about the usage of leeches to heal surgical wounds. This is the face of a leech:

“I love helping!”

For instance, did you know that after they’re done eating, the leeches fall off and squirm away like little rascals, and you have to go on the hunt using their blood trails to track them down?

“Come find me!”

(Yeah, I’m the one calling everyone babies.)

Hello my favorites,

As I may have already discussed with some of you, I am compiling a
list of mind-unfoldingly shitty things that have been said in romantic
contexts to people I love. Example of form: that time I got dumped by
Zander M. not by him saying “we need to talk” or “I met someone else”
or “Let’s see other people” but “I just met the most beautiful girl in
the world.” WHAT?!

Lines that when you heard them, you didn’t know whether to feel like
someone punched you in the gut or to laugh really really hard.
Completely out of touch, disrespectful, misogynist, or just plain
weird. Or mean. Mind benders. I can think of a friend who got told by
her ex boyfriend that even though she was perfect, he couldn’t be with
her, because he needed to just “follow his dick right now.” Anything
that could reasonably be answered after a recounting with: “THAT IS
INSANE! HOW DO YOU EVEN SAY THAT TO ANOTHER PERSON!?”

I’ll take: anything from the line itself, to line + enough context to
make it understandable, to I don’t know, if you want to write
something a couple pages long, it would probably be awesome and I’d
love to read it. If you can’t think of anything, or aren’t sure what
you think would fit, or don’t want to write it down straight, I’d be
happy to interview you in the meatworld or on gchat. I promise to yell
“what the fuck!” in all the right places.

You have complete control over the form–if you don’t want to be
identified, don’t want others identified, no problem. If you want to
name names, well, you know me. It will either be a zine or on the
internet. Maybe both. Suggestions, once again, welcome.

If you’ve been lucky enough to escape getting smacked with a line of
this foul nature, please pass this on to yr friends. Hell, pass it on
anyway. Sisterhood is powerful. I love every last one of y’all. Stay
gold and come write me sometime.

L.

(docsorrow@googular male)