I love a blizzard

Not the Dairy Queen kind. But the snow kind, the kind where traffic slows down (preferably stops), roads aren't plowed, and nobody dares to make a sound. It's completely silent outside, and outside is white velvet.

I love the blizzard, the storm, the fog emergency, etc. because it reflects what's going on in my brain -- a cavalcade of fog.

I'm off Cymbalta now. Doctor Tiny put me on that to help with my purported, probable and undiagnosed fibromyalgia, but it didn't do anything other than drain my wallet of $160 a month. So now I'm back on fluoxetine. I'm taking gabapentin (trade name Neurontin) for nerve pain. Apparently this is a low dose, and my new doctor, a pain specialist, says it should be doubled.

I must say, I've been operating at a functional level the last two days -- cranking out stories, thinking relatively clearly, structuring the stories ahead of time in my head in a fairly functional way. Have been taking half a tablet of generic Adderall three times a day instead of the prescribed dose, which is twice that. Maybe that's the difference.Today, for example, I spent 11 hours on a story I hadn't planned on writing. The editor just appealed to me out of desperation and I capitulated. Anyway, I'm only making $150 on the story, so the 11 hours comes out to less than $10 an hour.

Oh well, it's been lower. I wish I could crank out a story in two hours. I did when I worked for a newspaper. Then again, those stories were not of the length and depth that I'm writing now. I'm doubling and even tripling the typical word count for a newspaper story.

Still, I nay be working at top speed, but I am still too slow for my reckoning. I  wish and hope and want and aim and INTEND to be capable of writing faster. 

Over the weekend, when I was withdrawing from Cymbalta, I was a space case -- an empty hollow head on a post.