Running Out of Dopamine

Rob Reiner & wife stabbed to death in their Brentwood mansion...

This one made me very sad.

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Rob Reiner was a mensch. The perfect representative for my particular cultural cohort. His movies had exactly the right blend of sentimentality & snark, his politics exactly the right blend of liberal bonhomie & a kind of Eisenhower presidency wholesomeness.

And he was Jewish. Which means he communicated in an unspoken language I know very intimately. Sigh...

Likely killer is one of their sons, which makes it all the sadder.

I've always had this theory about people who live what appear to be charmed lives, that their lives are kind of a trade-off, that their privelege comes with a karmic price tag. Of course, outcomes that seem obvious today were rarely obvious in the moment. Still. It always seems as though these lives contain at least one episode of catastrophic suffering so the Universe will maintain its implacable balance. As though the absolute value of all the positive things—the money, the fame—is refuted by the absolute value of the one horrifying thing—the pain, betrayal—so you die with a karma balance of zero.

I am picturing that office in Bardo where you sit in front of a blonde wood desk helmed by a reincarnation broker. So, says the broker. There's something opening up in the Orion-Cygnus sector. You'll make movies! You'll have all the freedom a $200 million fortune can buy! But in the last 12 hours of your life, a haploid DNA replicant will slit your throat—very painful—and loom over you, mocking, while you exsanguinate & strangle. Sound good? Should I sign you up?

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And, too, there was the Bondi Beach massacre. That took place at a Chanukah festival.

Chanukah has been given a lot of attention in recent years. Traditionally, it was a minor holiday, but it's been elevated in prominence so that Jews will have parity with Xtains when it comes to repurposed solstice celebrations. It's a holiday that ostensibly celebrates miracles. What was the miracle here? That a Holocaust survivor died protecting his Holocaust survivor wife?

This one happened in Australia. Where everyone walks around upside down. Horrifying though it was, it had less of a personal impact. But still. I've started wondering again: Which friends will hide me in their attic?

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I had lots of plans for the weekend, but in the end, I did very little. Motivation is just not there. Nothing seems to matter very much. I could just sit in a corner with my eyes unfocused for hours doing nothing. I wouldn't even get bored.

Is this depression? But I wasn't feeling particularly teary or sad till I read about Rob Reiner this morning.

I wonder if I'm still in some kind of refractory period from the Wellbutrin OD. Wellbutrin is a dopamine reuptake inhibitor; dopamine is the neurotransmitter that signals the brain when a task is worth doing. During the OD, my nervous system was awash and aslosh with excess dopamine! Maybe after something like that happens, you deplete all your dopamine and it takes those little cellular chemical factories a while to work the levels back up to normal.

Or maybe the world sucks, and I'm a Buddhist at last because finally, finally, I get that it's not worth doing anything except detaching.

Who knows?

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This just in. Trump's response to the Rob Reiner murder:



I can't even...