I think I'm getting used to this microdosing stuff. It's kind of becoming my new baseline. Maybe I should just start taking 20 mcg every day.

I did have a good morning though. Woke up, had my morning coffee and did some work I needed to catch up on since doing absolutely nothing the day before. I was supposed to have lunch with @bullsvsbears who had randomly come to NYC. He and a friend have some automated trading bot and are casually managing hundreds of millions of dollars. Not bad for a few kids in their 20s.

I threw my sweatshirt on and jogged to the gym, got my workout on. Threw up a tiny bit more weight than usual, a good sign. I find that the LSD helps make me a little bit stronger consistently. I don't know if 20mcg would make me stronger than 10 mcg, but that would be an interesting experiment.

Balance between two extremes

I've been eating like shit since coming back form Tel Aviv. I don't know if I miss the beach, the vibrant social scene, the amazing girls, the delicious food, my temporary travel girlfriend who is one of the most kind and positive people I've ever met, and who also plays into my narcissistic fantasies by constantly telling me how attractive I am and how she's obsessed with me, the hot sun on my skin, friendly people...

I wonder what it could be.

I mean, when you bundle yourself up because it's freezing outside, it doesn't really matter if you've got a little fat on your belly. You're not taking your shirt off in front of hundreds of people like you do on the beach, in which case you definitely want to make sure you're not the fattest guy there. Nobody wants to be that guy.

So that lack of external pressure combined with maybe, possibly, a small amount of mopey behavior as I mourn the end of my Final Summer Month In Fantasy Land means that yeah, I've been eating like shit lately.

Oh, and the weed probably had something to do with it too. I've been smoking that a lot lately.

See, this is why I hate living in America. I always end up in this kind of environment. A simple room in an apartment with roommates, the same boring work routine, the same boring gym routine, and the same feeling that there's something better out there somewhere else that I'm missing while I get older and older and the years where I can fuck off and live in some hostel in a third world country and buy $0.20 bottles of ice cold water slowly become less and less of a possibility.

Funny how I see that as a sacrifice when there are probably millions of people all over the world who would kill to live here and take on my problems. But that's just not me.

Anyway... how the fuck did I get off on this tangent? Oh right, I said all this because I wanted to highlight the fact how today I also ate like shit.

Shake it up

I ended up meeting with @bullsvsbears at Shake Shack on Astoria Pl. It was weird seeing someone from Steemit as I think this is actually the first Steemit user I've met in person.

Still, it actually wasn't weird at all. We mostly talked about their project. I don't want to pitch it too hard, but like I wrote earlier, they've got an automated trading bot that somehow makes money trading crypto. I don't really understand how it works but apparently the guy who maintains the bot is some autistic math genius.

Sat there for maybe an hour shooting the shit before it was time to go. I had never been to Shake Shack before and had often heard it compared to In N Out, which is arguably the number one fast food burger joint in the world. People would say that the west coast has In N Out and the east coast has Shake Shack.

Well I can tell you right now that objectively speaking, 100% without bias that In N Out is 100x better than Shake Shack. And it's also half the price. Not even close.

But it was a pretty good burger.

@bullsvsbears and I made sure to take a proper pic so we'd have something to be nostalgic about in 20 years when we're both super millionaire ballers.

Then it was time to walk home. I still had more work to catch up on including sending a proposal to the Falafix dude. I still had no idea what I would even pitch them on since most of my clients don't really want anything from me other than basic management.

I went home, still hungry. I've actually been intermittent fasting since 2002, and one of the unexpected effects of eating one meal a day has been that my capacity to eat lots of food in one sitting has gone up quite a bit. I'll normally eat my big meal at night before going to bed as eating that much makes me tired.

But where I get in trouble is when I start eating earlier in the day. It's like my brain says to me, "okay, we started eating now. That means we can eat as much as we want until we go to bed. Yay!"

I just start eating and can't stop. It's kind of a problem.

When I got home, I immediately went to Trader Joe's and bought some food. Came home and ate some of it, worked a bit more, ate more, worked more, ate more, wrote my Falafix proposal and now just came back from Duane Reade with a pint of cookie dough ice cream.

A personal problem is a universal problem

The moral of the story? Unhealthy food makes you mentally weak.

I had this revelation as I was walking from the pizza shop to Duane Reade. I started to feel bad about myself and realized that I only feel this bad about myself when I a) binge on shitty food, b) smoke too much weed, and c) drink too much diet coke. All of these things kind of build on each other too. I get high, I want to snack. I snack, I want to drink diet coke.

Some tough first world problems there.

I've mentioned this before, but I feel like of the main benefits of microdosing LSD is that it makes you painfully aware of the bad shit you're doing in your life and ideally makes you feel super uncomfortable about not doing anything about it.

Funnily enough, after getting the pizza I was on my way home and I thought to myself, "Should I get those powdered donuts?" I think I may have even mumbled it out loud as I walked down the street.

My logic was pretty simple. I had pretty much already decided to fast the next day anyway. I normally do this when I go overboard and eat too much, disgusting myself with how much shit food I've eaten and rebounding with a 48 hour fast. But then I thought that if I were to CONTINUE eating even after being disgusted with myself, like REALLY making myself shit with an additional bag of Hostess brand powdered donuts, that I'd feel okay about doing a 72 hour fast.

Yes, eating a bunch of shit food in one day is bad. And eating the powdered donuts is also very bad, especially on top of already feeling like shit from eating too much. But the benefits of those extra 24 hours of fasting far outweigh the downsides of eating those donuts.

In the end I bitched out, but not because of the calories. Or anything health related actually.

I bitched out because I've gone to that Duane Reade so many times now because it's a block from my house, that I'm already on a first name basis with the guys working the cash register. Actually that's not true. Those people are like robots. But they know who I am because I wear the same pair of jeans and the same burgundy Amercrombie & Fitch hoodie every day. And I didn't want them to see that my Sunday night consisted of pounding powdered donuts and drinking diet coke by myself in my apartment.

Somehow, I reasoned that if they saw me buy a pint of cookie dough ice cream that that was somehow better.

Came home and pounded about 2/3 of the container before coming in here and writing this awesome little publication.

Use pain to guide you

But you know what? Tomorrow is another day, a day where I'm going to begin an intense purification process in my body. No food for72 hours, only powders and pills and a cup of coffee in the morning. Shit, I may even do a dry fast and not drink any water. I do claim to be hardcore after all.

Might be a little tricky because this LSD makes my mouth a little drier than usual. So maybe a dry fast isn't going to happen tomorrow. But definitely a water fast. 72 hours. Maybe I'll do before and after pictures just for fun.

One final thing before I wrap it up. I started this microdosing experiment secretly thinking in the back of my mind that maybe this was it. I've tried a lot of substances before, and I thought that maybe THIS one was the one that was going to make me feel good about my life.

And while some substances are definitely better than others (and LSD is definitely one of the better ones), nothing is going to make you feel good about your life except actually having a good life. No pill or powder is going to fix whatever issue is going on inside your head. The only way to fix that is to actually change how you live your life.

And yeah, a geographical change may have some effect. But you take yourself with you every where you go, including your problems. And if you don't fix the core issue, then you're never really going to feel like you're doing alright. If I find out how to do that any time soon I'll let you know. Now if you'll excuse me I'm gonna go eat the rest of that ice cream.

Previous microdosing entries

Microdosing Day 5: Raw, Uncut
Microdosing Day 4: That One Time
Microdosing Day 3: Don't Fuck With Lucy
Microdosing Day 2: Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back
Microdosing Day 1: Removing The Adhesion