Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
A hundred and one Welbutrins. That's how many I have today. And here is why:
I get my depression meds from Canada. I order them as I need them. When one batch of 90 pills is three weeks from running out, which is three month's worth of pills, I order another batch. Sometimes I order the generics made in India. You get a hundred of those, whereas with the Canadian ones you only get 90. The problem with the Indian ones is that they come in foil blister packs, which is wasteful. But I forget that they come that way. If I remembered I wouldn't order the Indian generics. I don't like wasteful packaging.
Last time I placed my order, some events conspired to delay the delivery of my pills. The Canadian pharmacy called me to say that they no longer accepted payment by Visa card. The problem was, I'd missed the voicemail they'd sent me, and only stumbled upon it two days after they'd left it. Then it took a few days for me to figure out how to pay them by voided check sent by email, because the only card I have is a Visa debit card. The first person I talked to about it actually gave me the wrong information, and it sounded so wrong to me that I spent a couple days fretting over it in my mentally-ill fashion before calling back and straightening it out.
What I had attempted to do when I first ordered was give them plenty of time to send the pills before I left for Chicago for a week. Because I would need the pills in Chicago. I was going to be performing, and it was essential that I be in as fit a mental state as psychopharmacologically possible. What I had to do two weeks before leaving for Chicago, because of this delay created by their no longer taking payment by Visa and my missing the message and then my neurotic stalling over the situation, was to only take a pill every other day. The way older people cut their pills in half to save money, except instead halving the number of pills I took each day, I doubled the number of days per which I took each pill. I said "per which," yes. It's a grammatical figure I've just invented.
What happens when I stop taking Welbutrin is, first, I feel a weird sensation of squishiness when turning my head, as if my head were passing through a squishy volume of spacetime. As if spacetime were pudding, sandy pudding made of broadcast static, and the movie I'm in is missing a few frames that have been eaten by this static. It's a disturbing feeling.
If I go off Welbutrin completely, I have severe depression, panics, and meltdowns. I stop eating. I can barely hold it together.
So I doubled the number of days per which I took each pill prior to the Chicago trip, so that, during the Chicago trip, I would have enough to take one every day. I prepped like that for two weeks. But, maybe because weeks have 7 days and 7 is an odd number, or maybe because I unconsciously hoarded more pills than I would need, or maybe I just can't count, or didn't bother to count, at any rate, I returned to LA from Chicago with one pill left over.
And when I got home, there waiting for me were one hundred Indian generic Welbutrins. Added to the one extra of those I'd hoarded for the trip, and you have a hundred and one Welbutrins.
And so, all was well, or so I thought.
You see, for some reason, Cruella DeVille wanted to make a coat out of my Welbutrins. It was an impractical idea, but she was obsessed. Really weird. So my Welbutrins and I had to run away from her. She chased us in a Rolls Royce that matched her hair. And there were hijinx.
There is something pure and good about Welbutrin, or bupropion hydrochloride. Something that keeps me perceiving the world and processing information in a way that prevents me from losing my place in society. I suffered for this place in society. It's not a spectacular place, but it is an advantageous place, considering where some people end up. The story of Cruella DeVille and the hundred and one Welbutrins is heartbreaking. How can someone be so greedy and selfish and obsessed as to recklessly seek to take from me what I need to make my life go relatively smoothly? Eh?
And yet it's the age-old story. Some obsessive, self-centered turd of person just wants what they want and damn the rest. Damn the rest of society, damn the future. If only she knew what my Welbutrins meant to me, she'd see the error of her ways, it's tempting to think. But that's not how people like that operate. They don't have empathy. People without empathy are a big problem. People like Jack the Ripper and Ayn Rand and Donald Dump.
Strange, these empathy-less people are clearly insane, yet I'm the one taking the meds, desperately clinging to my place in society, while their insanity has somehow secured them their overblown position in the social matrix, a position from which they seek to impose their intrusive, awful will on others at every opportunity. What makes their will and desires more effective than mine? Are they better than my will and desires? They're more ambitious than mine, that's for sure. I had no idea how important asserting my will was going to be, back when I was a child. Now that I've learned, it's probably too late to put this knowledge to use.
Civilization is making the world unfit for civilization and other living things. But as civilization destroys itself, I will have hope, for at least one hundred and one more days.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!