Category: Uncategorized

In my family we used to have a tintype picture of my great, great, great grandmother on the wall. It’s been lost since my grandfather moved into his nursing home, but what I remember is a rather homely Native American woman in a shawl.

“She looks like Cochise, don’t she?” my grandfather, her great-grandson, used to say, meaning she was ugly and built like a man. She was ugly, but she was ours. According to our family lore, she was Cherokee, and she hid in the woods with white friends after the Cherokees in East Texas lost the battle at Tyler and were all marched into Oklahoma at gunpoint.

Of couse family stories get embroidered. Who knows what tribe she was for sure.

My family was lucky. We hadn’t suffered racial opression in at least 4 generations, and thanks to my dad, a ginger, I came out paler than most bed sheets.

But it always struck me that we technically weren’t /really/ white by the standards of the South. Even I, the youngest in our family, was still 1/32 whatever the hell our ancestor was, so under the old laws miscegenation laws of many states there could have been… issues.

I was privileged to look white, and as a child back in days of yore, I never paid any price but strange looks from neighbors if I mentioned my ancesty. But it struck me odd how casually racist my uncle was. Was it a form of self defense, or did he really not understand that during his own lifetime a state or two eastward he could have been tarred and feathered for marrying his wife, had they known his heritage? It took me a long time to realize that he didn’t understand that, under the laws he himself favored, he wasn’t white.

For me, my distant ancestry whatever it is, never hurt me. Many white people in the US claim native american blood now, whether or not they had a tintype photo on the wall. People don’t get strange looks from the neighbors for claiming it, either.

But for countless others in my country and my state, they are disadvantaged by their ancestry and the color of their skin. The playing field in my country isn’t even, and that isn’t moral.

For the last year, since I nearly died from a rare complication after a routine surgery, I have felt crushed down — a lesser version of the person I was before.

I still completed a novel. I still bent my brain to learning languages and Go and story structure and poetry and music composition and piano. But memory was slipping away from me. Only bits and pieces would stay. One day I would feel like I was the old me again, the next I would be a shattered mirror with the biggest and most important pieces lost in fog.

I wondered if this was it,if I had gone as far as I could go; if this wall in front of me was unclimbable for my every-day-older-and-weaker hands. I am not young anymore, in my body, but I am still young inside. Reaching. Striving. But my grasp was so short, so weak, I felt like every time I tried to climb up I slid back down farther.

But now I see the hope. I ate better, began exercising again, and began researching supplements. I researched anti-aging supplement and supplements to clear up mental fog and fight Alzheimer’s/Parkinson’s. I read all the scientific studies I could find on Google Scholar, made grids and tables, dug deep, or at as deep as I could for a brainfogged man.

Just three months ago, I began taking some supplements (50 mg pterostilbene, 100mg 7-keto-DHEA, and 120 mg Niagen, all once every day; 300 mg Citicoline and 10 mg Noopept a few days a week when I really need to be sharp). All of these are available over the counter.

My eating is still far from perfect and my exercise could use work too. But there’s a big gap between PERFECT and GOOD ENOUGH, and I seem to be at Good Enough.

The results? Great. Essentially, my brain and body are working again. Better than they have in a looooong time. The supplements, the exercise, and the eating all stack with each other and reinforce the results.

My body moves faster when I sword fight. I have more endurance, and I can do much more before I am injured, and my injuries heal faster. Not like wolverine or anything. But I’ve been fighting crazy hard every week for 6 weeks and I am am still going. In one battle, I defeated all 12 opponents on the other team after my own team had been destroyed. It has become common for me to steamroll 3-5 people of low skill with few problems.

I’m entertaining to talk to again; witty. Remembering random trivia is easy now instead of like slamming my head into a wall. My Go and languages are easier to learn (still difficult but easier). Even my writing is getting easier, faster, better. The clouds come less often and are almost always a result of simple sleep-deprivation. (Side note: when I hit exhaustion on this stack you are well and truly exhausted and will want to lay down and go to sleep no matter what time of day it is.)

I don’t know how long the stack will work, or if my body will eventually adapt to it so that the benefits disappear. But I am happy with it for now.

I am turning back into me again.

—

Note: I found this stack out of desperation, and I don’t recommend it for anyone except myself. Every brain and body are different, and everybody reacts differently to supplements. Please do not take a supplement stack without consulting your doctor and doing all the research for yourself; it can be very dangerous. Never take a stack with SSRIs or MAOIs or other strong medications. There are all sorts of possible complications from drug interactions, including fatal ones. In addition, I want to be clear on this: No one under the age of 25 should take Noopept. The brain is not done developing until 25, and there are no studies on what Nootropic substances might do to a developing brain.

It’s been a tough few years. My grandfather died, followed by my wife’s grandfather, and then my mom. Grieving while sorting through complex reams of estate paperwork, overwhelmed by my mom’s thousands of collectibles filling up every corner of the house.

Then the house burned down, and we lost everything of both ours and my mom’s, and we were living in an apartment again on month-to-month lease fighting with the builders who couldn’t seem to figure out to make a house even pass a code inspection.

This year I had a minor surgery followed by a major complication, and I was in serious danger of dying or having massive brain damage (none of which came to pass, knock on wood-grained polymer composite). To top that off, I fell down a flight of wooden stairs over Christmas, breaking a 1.5″ thick piece of pressure treated lumber with my spine.

Thankfully over the last month things have slowed down enough that I can write for an hour a day, and that’s awesome. My feet are back on the ground. Literally. Take it from me, this is a lot better than having them up in the air, past your head, as you plummet ten feet down.

But now I am obsessed with writing productivity. Part of me is absolutely sure that I have lost three years of prime creative time, and I have to catch up some how. So I’ve been researching. Testing out theories. And last month I reached 54k words and finished the rough draft of a new 100+k book I’ve been working on since last August.

This pretty awesome, but I have a long way to go. A lot of successful selfpubbers produce 30-45k per week, which is about 4x what I’m at. Maybe I don’t need to keep up with them, but I feel the pressure to try.

Still, I’m proud. This is a big first step in the right direction. I’ve got tons of ideas I want to write, and now I’m not scared to invest the time in some of the stranger ones.

Let the novels fall like dominos!