the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

guys tbh there is really no excuse for reading anything else if you could be reading catch-22 instead

heller is a baller

beckett too. i can't read him. makes me feel like a zombie. those longass novels. stein too. i really should give genet another shot. right? people love him. or they used to.

― scott seward, Monday, 8 July 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Mercier and Camier is v funny, and short - Beckett sorta disowned it didn't he? Its my favourite though.

Genet also wished he burnt one of his novels. I'll probably get round to reading them in sequence someday. Really dslike how he's seens as "transgressive", just sells him short.

check out good as gold, tree.

"TL: So I sit there, and maybe move to my sofa and maybe package things slowly, or clean my room. This lasts until 6 or 7 pm. Then at some point I’ll usually have thought either “fuck it” or “it’s worth it” and ingest a little Xanax, then like 10 minutes later, after I’ve left my room, and am on my way to Bobst library, some Adderall.

I eat the Xanax first, because it makes things taste better. Then I take the 6 train from Astor place and I go to 8th street organic avenue. There I usually buy a chocolate mousse, a coconut yogurt parfait, a green juice, which I usually immediately chug. Then I bring it into the park and sit there eating while reading, recently, White Out by Michael Clune off my iPhone.

At some point I go into Bobst Library. I usually ingest more Adderall, I complete some work, I leave around 10 pm maybe. On the way home I buy groceries like cilantro, coconut water, different kinds of fruit. At home I usually, by now, feel for the first time “awake.” It’s like 11 pm. I put my stuff away, I sometimes write a to-do list.

TL: So it’s around midnight, or 1 a.m., and I’ll ingest like a larger amount of Adderall, excited to do work all night. But Adderall takes 30 minutes to begin working and I guess I have developed a routine that includes masturbating during that 30 min. period. Then I’ll shower and begin working, usually answering emails and email questions.

That continues throughout the night, and then I’ll sometimes masturbate more, sometimes I’ll take more Adderall or Xanax. And I’ll be eating the fruit and usually 1 smoothie throughout the night. Then it’ll be like 10 am and I’ll feel kind of calm, and I’ll ingest Xanax usually and go to the post office and maybe the library. Then like around 6 pm return to my apartment.

TL: At this point, about half the time I’ll use more Adderall and stay up another night. I frequently order from Bareburger via Seamless. Lately I’ve been pretty healthy. I’ve eaten only raw organic vegan stuff for maybe 5 days. So if I stay up a third night, it’s the same, more Adderall, my work gets more incoherent, but I feel calm and fine, then in the morning I’ll relax a little, usually go outside for sunlight, and I don’t think I’ve stayed up for a third night more than 2 or 3 times. Then I sleep for around 12 hours and wake up surprisingly not feeling fucked up.

CD: Why did you start taking Adderall and Xanax? I read somewhere it was because you got this book deal for Taipei.

TL: At first out of curiosity. And because Adderall is a stimulant, and I like the effect tea and coffee has on me, so naturally I wanted to try a stronger version of that.

CD: How much Adderall do you take?

TL: I take like a grim amount now. I remember when one cup of green tea would make me feel like insanely good. Then when 10 mg of Adderall seemed “insane” to me. But probably the peak for me was like 160 mg Adderall over 8 hour periods. I don’t go overboard on Xanax. Maybe on average like 1.5 mg/day. Which in the past would seem insane to a degree to me. It just keeps getting worse."

http://sundayroutine.com/home/2013/7/7/tao-lin

he's eating raw organic vegan stuff so i'm sure he'll be fine

lol I immediately thought of KSR's Mars trilogy as soon as scott mentioned the thinkin bout rocks n lichen thing

I never got around to the third book myself. first is all-time awesome.

adderall and xanax are pernicious drugs.

they seem to fit so organically into your routine, and to enhance your life on a moment to moment basis, that it's hard to realize the extent to which they are fucking with you. weirdly though, despite mordy's sarcasm, i think things would be a lot worse for tao lin if he wasn't eating a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables.

anyway, i wish the dude the best because he is a great writer and i want to see what kinds of things he will be doing in his 30s, 40s, and 50s.

this passage about paul's relationship with his mother in high school -- his instinct to blame her for his unhappiness because he couldn't help but resent her unconditional love and support -- is probably easy to mock but i think it is a brilliant, harrowing, and relatable account of just how fucked up your thinking can become as an adolescent. bratty teenagers are pretty universally reviled, so i think it is important to be able to remember, from time to time, just how unbearable their lives actually are, and the kind of un-repressable confusion that leads them to "act out." this kind of empathy is necessary for me in my current job.

In Paul’s sophomore or junior year he began to believe the only solution to his anxiety, low self-esteem, view of himself as unattractive, etc. would be for his mother to begin disciplining him on her own volition, without his prompting, as an unpredictable—and, maybe, to counter the previous fourteen or fifteen years of “overprotectiveness,” unfair—entity, convincingly not unconditionally supportive. His mother would need to create rules and punishments exceeding Paul’s expectations, to a degree that Paul would no longer feel in control. To do this, Paul believed, his mother would need to anticipate and preempt anything he might have considered, factoring in that—because Paul was thinking about this almost every day, and between the two of them was the source of this belief—he probably already expected, or had imagined, any rule or punishment she would be willing to instate or inflict, therefore she would need to consider rules and punishments that she would not think of herself as willing to instate or inflict. Paul tried to convey this in crying, shouting fights with his mother lasting up to four hours, sometimes five days a week. There was an inherent desperation to these fights, in that each time Paul, in frustration, told his mother how she could have punished him, in whatever previous situation, to make him feel not in control—to, he believed, help solve his social and psychological problems—it became complicatedly more difficult, in Paul’s view, for his mother to successfully preempt his expectations the next time. Paul cried and shouted more than his mother, who only shouted maybe once or twice. Paul would scream if his mother was downstairs while he was upstairs, in his room, where some nights he would throw his electric pencil sharpener and textbooks—and, once, a six-inch cymbal—at his walls, creating holes, resulting in punishments, but never exceeding what, by imagining their possibilities, he’d already rendered unsurprising, predictable. The intensity of these fights maybe contributed to Paul’s lungs collapsing spontaneously three times his senior year, when he was absent forty-seven days and in hospitals for around four weeks.

One night, standing in the doorway of his parents’ bedroom, when his father was on a months-long business trip, crying while shouting at his mother, who was supine in bed, in the dark, Paul heard her softly and steadily crying, with her blanket up to her chin in a way that seemed child-like. Paul stopped shouting and stood sobbing quietly, dimly aware, as his face twitched and trembled, that he felt intensely embarrassed of himself from the perspective of any person, except his mother, he had ever met. He said he didn’t know what he was talking about, or what he should do, that he was sorry and didn’t want to complain or blame other people anymore, and felt an ambiguous relief, to have reached the end of a thing without resolution and, having tried hard, feeling allowed—and ready—to resign. He didn’t stop blaming his mother, after that, but gradually they fought less—and, after each fight, when he would revert to his belief about discipline, he would apologize and reiterate he didn’t want to blame anyone or complain—and, by the last month of senior year, had mostly stopped fighting.

i like bareburger a lot

me too. i like their different varieties of ketchup.

yeah i'm gonna try the bison burger and the crocodile burger and maybe the antelope burger too one day

i've had the bison burger before and, i think, the elk burger if that exists and i'm not imagining it. i wasn't a fan of alligator when i ate it once in college (someone was barbecuing it randomly) but crocodile might be different.

treeship i think your open-faced sincerity on these boards is a good match for tao lin's unapologetic candidness

thanks. we should meet for open faced antelope burgers at some point.

160 mg of adderall a day isn't overdoing it but if you're taking that much you've built up a good tolerance with xanax to take the edge off. but when you get to that point, it must have lost most of its magic.

how are they pernicious, tree?

where i come from the combo would be morphine+methylphenidate in nose or iv

dylannn is one of my favorite ilxors

xp i took about 100mg or more of dexedrine or adderall (i would change my mind about which i liked better) per day in college and i think it was a negative thing to be doing. it made it more difficult to sleep and caused me to be stressed out without realizing it and that led to an overall deterioration of my physical and mental health. i started taking it for normal reasons -- to concentrate, because i had been diagnosed with "ADD" -- but eventually i just always wanted to be on it all the time or else i felt foggy and unintelligent. among its other negative effects, it made me less creative and also more rigid in the way i would evaluate things, like judgmental of myself and others, which is the opposite of how i generally am... so the accumulated effect of that habit just made me feel like a really different person. i also think it was a contributing factor in having a severe depressive episode at the end of college, but i had had those before -- though less severe -- so i don't know to what extent i can blame adderall/dexedrine.

i've seen people become really dependent on xanax. personally, i like it but i can see how if i had access to it it would be another thing i would want to take all the time and i feel that would be bad.

treeship do you like cocaine

i've never done it. there have been addicts in my family so i have always been wary of it. probably i would like it at first as i did like adderall/dexedrine (which i was prescribed) each time i would take it and just didn't like the accumulated effect of having it be a part of my life.

also i drink an insane amount of coffee, especially since i don't take dexedrine anymore.

last question promise have you ever taken lsd or eaten mushrooms?

no. those are the drugs i have declined most often at college. i stayed away from them because i have had really strong, horrible hallucinogenic experiences on strong strains of marijuana. or this happened twice, with one time being particularly nightmarish. that was in copenhagen so i'm not sure if maybe i had some weird stuff. so i guess i am afraid of that happening.

also, now that i am thinking of it 100mg might have been an exaggeration. i think with dexedrine you take less than adderall but i don't remember what the dosage of those pills were. it doesn't matter, i guess.

do you like hallucinogens dylannn? what is your favorite class of drugs?

also, another treeship drug fact: i think my lack of enthusiasm for drugs might have contributed to the dissolution of my last relationship but i don't know.

better than the opposite

maybe. there were other things going on though so i can't really say. shouldn't have brought that up because i don't want to talk about it.

Other messages have been posted since you last looked... Please review and if you want to change your message, do so before posting.
maybe. there were other things going on though so i can't really say. shouldn't have brought that up because i don't want to talk about it.

― Treeship, Thursday, July 11, 2013 5:08 AM (19 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i want to hear that story, tree

sorry

sorry dylann. you should answer my question.

you want a brief snapshot or more indepth

whatever you want. in-depth if its' not too much trouble.

treeship have you ever seen valiums

"seen"?

actually, i don't think so. i googled them and they have a V in the middle, which doesn't look familiar.

this thread isn't about me though, it's about tao lin. and also about dylannn sharing his drug preferences because he still hasn't done that.

i dont think ive seen actual 'valium' since i was in high school idk, i was wondering if they even make it anymore

xp - i think talking about whether or not people still take valium is fine for this thread

i think people still take it but xanax might have usurped its popularity.

highlights of drug use

* first drug i ever got high on-- and i mentioned it on ilx recently-- was dextromethorphan-containing robitussin cough syrup. dissociative in the same family as ketamine or pcp or mxe. they all have their own distinct flavour but similar, similar, and i think dxm might be the chillest variation. took a bit of work to master drinking robitussin extra strength. turned off lights in my room and listened to art bell on am radio out of the rockies, all the way from colorado. started seeing things, sensation of floating out of my body.

* found a qp at least of typical late 90s homegrown big bud, red hairs not very crystally, in my dad's closet along with naked polaroids of my parents dated to the mid 80s, an ammunition box of sex toys, and tons of vhs porn. i borrowed some papers off the dresser while i was in there, rolled a joint, watched letterman, smoked, could see my thoughts moving as if on an urban traffic grid with stoplights directing etc.

* bought 5 grams of mushrooms. 10th grade? ate them in the dark. had a sudden feeling of flying out the window into some fire-lit tribal drum circle, completely lost touch with reality, slowly came to and realized no difference in visuals with eyes open or closed, had no idea where i was. slowly came down and grooved on the hairs on my legs flowing like waves. kept eating mushrooms, lower doses. during this time went to first year of university and took ecstasy alone in my room, friends online hooked me up with doses of amt and 2cb and a few other things. had fun. during this time, getting high became an important hobby. smoked quite a bit of weed.

* bought a tab of lsd. watched some movie on my laptop. felt nothing. five hours in hit with wave of buzzing paranoia, a feeling like mentally looking in the mirror impossible to describe, like i was contemplating myself in the third person accompanied by horrible rush of anxiety. this feeling lasted for several weeks and was only tamed with paxil and clonazepam. during this time i also took prescription painkillers pretty frequently and tried morphine and did my first skinny rail of powder. if you dig back to ten years ago, read some of my ilx posts, i was kinda fucked up, definitely on some untreated mental illness shit. had panic attacks. hallucinated. self-destructive. once got robbed after i got set up by this broad that was taking me to buy pills, first time i ever had a gun pulled on me.

* while in china for the first time so... 2005? i went to a club and the table was covered in white powder, thought it was coke. someone scraped me up a fat line and i snorted it. wasn't coke. it was ketamine. best experience i ever had. stopped taking paxil + clonazepam combo and had limited withdrawal effects. took ketamine regularly. dancing on k is pure euphoria like driving a supersmooth giant robot from a floating twenty feet above the earth pov. felt mentally healthier.

* despite fears about my fragile mental health, still had the urge to get high. when i moved back to van, i started smoking weed again, very carefully, and found out it was probably safe. smoked good weed everyday. got put in touch with a delivery service. made a decent amount of coin resaling the weed i got and finding drugs for people i knew. did cocaine once or twice a week with work people, usually in a booth at boston pizza while watching the canucks or in a casino bathroom while my friends were playing baccarat. once got arrested shoplifting a ritter sport marzipan from a sobey's in richmond while i had a couple grams in my pocket i was holding onto for someone. police came. no problem. also had several fratboy friends at ubc who i did shrooms with a few times, very low doses. while catering a shitty luau party at that boat house or whatever in stanley park, after carving up the whole roast pig, some bros in hawaiian shirts offered me "molly," knew what it was, enjoyed it.

* slightly dark period. broke up with my girlfriend. got fucked up on purpose everyday. never went to sleep by natural means. dropped out of school. took lsd again successfully. first short story i ever published i wrote the day after, but no real connection because i was fairly sober for most of the editing and rewriting. went to china again, smoked hash fairly often but it was weak and perfect for my mental state. got happier. tried methamphetamine for the first time, hoping it was real north korean product. came back to canada. smoke weed fairly often. use as creative tool and lifestyle accessory and to chill out.

xpost i think lorazepam for lesser issues and clorazepam for greater issues have quietly replaced valium (diazepam) but i'm not a pharmacist

usually in a booth at boston pizza while watching the canucks or in a casino bathroom while my friends were playing baccarat

huh

i have a rx for clorazepam but i usually sell it because i dont need it as much as i need money

i'm going to pick up taipei based on treeship's account, but damn this thing sounds so utterly depressing. i hope the protagonist kills himself in the end as an act of mercy for the human race.

one weird overlap between tao lin fans and tedious drug talk fans

does the narrator think about student loans when he's on drugs?

He doesn't have student loan debt i don't think.

from what I remember reading his parents paid for his degree at NYU and bought him an apartment in the city

if i had lots of money i would probably do tons of drugs. i love drugs. but i never have money for drugs AND records. one of them had to go. plus, i gotta get up in the morning...