... A week into my Chantix usage, I started to feel as if the city landscape had imperceptibly shifted around me. Mundane details began to strike me as having deep, hidden significance. The neon arch above McDonald’s: The lights blinked on and off in some sort of pattern, and I needed to crack the code. One of my co-workers was messing with some papers: What is he trying to imply with all that damned crinkling? Sitting in the subway: A man hurries to get inside. His hand, holding a cup of coffee, gets stuck in the closing door. I watch the hand wriggle. The lid bursts open and steaming brown liquid hits the floor. Fingers twitch and splay. Coffee splashes in crisscrossing slats through the subway car. It was a sign—something bad was going to happen.
It felt as if the essential barrier between reality and my imagination had eroded. Was it because I wasn’t getting enough R.E.M. sleep, so my dream life was rebelling, pouring into daylight, insisting to be attended to, one way or another?
Meanwhile, smoking cigarettes had become an exercise in futility. At work, I’d put on my coat, head out, and light up—but there was no pleasure to be found, just a truly nasty taste.
One afternoon, I was typing away at advertising copy, and as I did so, I began to wonder how I had succeeded in fooling myself that my life had any sort of value at all. Writing? Sure, it was what I’d wanted to do since I was 6—but at the end of the day, who cared? Maybe I should just go downstairs and leap in front of a tour bus. Or launch my head through the computer screen. All this seemed logical, but also weirdly funny, even at the time: I could see how crazy these impulses were, I could recognize them as suicidal clichés. But I couldn’t make them go away.
1 comment:
Hope he's not on the Chantix!
This Is My Brain on Chantix
Derek de Koff - New York Magazine
...
A week into my Chantix usage, I started to feel as if the city landscape had imperceptibly shifted around me. Mundane details began to strike me as having deep, hidden significance. The neon arch above McDonald’s: The lights blinked on and off in some sort of pattern, and I needed to crack the code. One of my co-workers was messing with some papers: What is he trying to imply with all that damned crinkling? Sitting in the subway: A man hurries to get inside. His hand, holding a cup of coffee, gets stuck in the closing door. I watch the hand wriggle. The lid bursts open and steaming brown liquid hits the floor. Fingers twitch and splay. Coffee splashes in crisscrossing slats through the subway car. It was a sign—something bad was going to happen.
It felt as if the essential barrier between reality and my imagination had eroded. Was it because I wasn’t getting enough R.E.M. sleep, so my dream life was rebelling, pouring into daylight, insisting to be attended to, one way or another?
Meanwhile, smoking cigarettes had become an exercise in futility. At work, I’d put on my coat, head out, and light up—but there was no pleasure to be found, just a truly nasty taste.
One afternoon, I was typing away at advertising copy, and as I did so, I began to wonder how I had succeeded in fooling myself that my life had any sort of value at all. Writing? Sure, it was what I’d wanted to do since I was 6—but at the end of the day, who cared? Maybe I should just go downstairs and leap in front of a tour bus. Or launch my head through the computer screen. All this seemed logical, but also weirdly funny, even at the time: I could see how crazy these impulses were, I could recognize them as suicidal clichés. But I couldn’t make them go away.
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