what would be my conditions regarding accepting a prescription for anxiety?

well, it would have to become endemic, first. i'd have to convince myself it isn't environmental, first. right now, i think i'm having a negative reaction to the second-hand marijuana smoke, or something else, from upstairs, so i don't want to take a pill - i want to get away from the smoke.

second, i'd have to have tried a few other things first. fresh air. vitamin d therapy. fucking yoga, even; well, if i'm anxious, it might help. accepting drugs as a solution would have to be a last resort, after everything else fails.

but, in theory, what are my conditions?

well, the first thing you'd have to do is prove to me that you know what the cause of the anxiety is. i'm not into witch doctors that think they can prescribe based on reading your aura; if you think i have a chemical problem and this is the reason i'm anxious, i want you to tell me what chemical i'm producing too much or too little of, and i want you to tell me why. if you can't do that, i'm going to call you a quack and tell you to push your pills on somebody else. i'm also going to want a blood test that actually proves the hunch, and i'm going to want the medication level chosen in a way that is proportional to the results of the blood test. further, i'm going to want regular testing and adjustment.

this should be a basic and unstated requirement, really, but my understanding is that it is essentially never done, because the doctors get heavy kickbacks from the drug companies and don't really, actually give a fuck.

as mentioned: i don't have a history of anxiety in introversion, like this. i can only describe it via comparison to hormone therapy, which is a brutal and awful experience. i'm not enjoying this, and i want it to stop.

what about me and cursive?

well, they're a known entity, but i've actually never taken the time to explore the discography all that carefully. i've heard a number of their records a number of times, and keep putting it aside for later, but have never gotten around to it. it always seems like i might or might not like it, and i've just never been certain.

but, it seems like i'm not going anywhere tonight, and i'm pretty overcome with a feeling of overall shittiness right now, so i'm going to try to sleep it off and see if i can wake up clear-headed and sober-minded or not.

it's just incredibly frustrating to be unable to focus on something simple.

i might have to do some air quality testing...

i've been telling myself that i'm better off waiting either for subsidized housing - which is probably the only non-smoking housing in the entire city - or hoping i can win these lawsuits and buy some property.

but, this is becoming intolerable. i don't want to live like this.

if i have another day or two like this, i'm going to need to get another drug test and consider filing. given how secretive he's being about it, the drug test is probably the only way i'm going to prove anything...

i've been trying to listen to this record since yesterday and haven't been able to do it. i'm having difficulty focusing and i'm also having difficulty sleeping. i keep getting these feelings of really powerful anxiety washing over me, and the only way to stop it is to sit still for a few hours. i then get these powerful feelings of negativity wash over me: anger, sadness and a feeling like i want to start crying. i'm also extremely hungry, but i eat on a schedule, and i'm not going to break it due to some kind of adverse reaction to something that i don't fully understand. i will sit in hunger, instead.

i want this feeling to go away.

this is very unusual for me, and what's frustrating about it as that i don't have any experiences to compare to it, excluding the feeling of being through hormone therapy. i don't have any history of suffering through depression. i'm not bipolar. i'm not schizophrenic. i have no reason to think i have any kind of chemical abnormalities, although it sure feels like one is being introduced.

the only way i know how to describe what i'm feeling right now is to compare it to the feelings i had when i went through hormone therapy a second time about ten years ago.

i simply can't listen to music in an anxious state like this, it's not possible to focus on it or analyze it, and because music is an intellectual experience rather than an emotional one, it means it's not possible to enjoy it, either.

why is this happening?

frustratingly, it seems to be because my neighbour is smoking something. again. it smells like government pot. he doesn't go to work any more, either. they seem to have turned him into a zombie, and i'm downwind from it and getting affected by it, too.

so, i was maybe going to venture out to see this tonight, but instead i'm going to have to sit inside and deal with a sudden onset of unwanted anxiety. and, i just want all of these drugs i'm surrounded by to go away....

https://cursive.bandcamp.com/album/vitriola

when they turfed wilson-raybould a few months ago, my deduction was that she wouldn't do this, and they wanted somebody to do it.

and, now it's done.

a victory for her client, perhaps. but, the government would not have wanted this to carry forward into the fall, either.

motives are funny things. you never really know what they are.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/in-an-inspired-performance-henein-did-incalculable-damage-to-the-trudeau-brand

if anything, the ndp should be acknowledging the reality and volunteering to pull their candidates from these areas, where they have no serious chance of winning.

listen.

if you look at these white rural northern and eastern ridings, where people are really not going to vote for a practicing sikh, then a green presence in the riding is actually giving people a way to avoid voting conservative, or not voting at all.

this is specific to the type of riding where the liberals are never competitive, and the ndp don't have a serious chance in this cycle. the harsh truth is that ndp made a ridiculous tactical mistake; the greens should not be criticized for trying to correct it, if that's what they end up doing - and they should.

in the long run, a green-indigenous alliance makes more sense than an ndp-indigenous alliance.

well, the ndp have the noose of oil princess rachel notley around their neck, while the liberals have to deal with trudeau, who's never seen a pipeline he doesn't like.

there's fertile ground for the greens, there, in indigenous communities, who must be feeling abandoned by both of them.

a major coup for may would be romeo saganash.

so, he must have been assigned a task. but, this isn't how you approach this problem.

the numbers he's using (where he tries to determine where the support would come from) are empirically derived, but there's no reason to think they'd be reflective of what a green swing would actually look like. i mean, it's what people are saying now, or said in the past, not what people would say in six months. if a green swing actually happened, it would be a mass movement away from the ndp, which is what you saw in bc the other day - the ndp sank from first to third, and the green win was the consequence of a big swing across those two parties. you might see some ridings where the swing is from the liberals to the greens, too. but, this isn't an incremental, proportional thing - this is a conscious, dramatic, purposeful shift in voting intentions.

you would consequently want to look at ridings that have a long history of leaning generally to the left, not necessarily to the ndp but probably mostly, and not try to find the right proportional swing in the mass of random ridings. the ridings he pulled out are pretty ridiculous suggestions, which is reflective of him not doing this right.

but, you also need to factor in the local economy. guelph is an interesting example, because he won on a large split in an off election for the liberals. don't be surprised if mike schreiner is the first casualty of a liberal resurgence in ontario. he's actually kind of a weird counter-example in that he's a sort of an environmental conservative, and not reflective of the party's future in any way; for the greens to breakthrough, they're going to need to push people like schreiner out and away. there's no future in this besides vote splitting.

and, on that note, you need to look at the local economies in play, too. the ndp seats in southern ontario are probably pretty safe because the economy is so centered on the automotive industry. things may change down the road, but seats like windsor and hamilton are unlikely to swing.

it's rather the rural and kind of mixed "small city with a rural mentality" ndp seats, seats with majority white populations, seats with people that would love bernie sanders, that are likely to be most vulnerable to this kind of a swing. this would include not just large swaths of bc, but the entirety of eastern canada and a lot of northern ontario. the conservatives are trying to run against the carbon tax in these regions, but rural people are also both stewards of the environment and the people that are experiencing the effects of climate change the most. are you going to tell people suffering major flooding right now that climate change isn't happening, then expect them to vote for you? they don't care about profit margins for oil firms in calgary.

i don't like jody wilson-raybould; i think she's a conniving opportunist, and may would be foolish to recruit her, as she'd stab her in the back in no time. philpot, on the other hand,  may have been a victim of her own naivete, but she may have also badly miscalculated; i'm not sure either option reflects on her well. regardless, the greens would be wise to target indigenous voters in rural ontario and pretty much all of manitoba on a sustainability platform.

the other potentially up for grabs ridings would be ultra liberal urban ridings like ottawa centre, some of the ridings in the heart of montreal (including papineau) or some of the ridings in downtown toronto. it would be a strong message to have the greens unseat catherine mckenna, and i'd love to see them turf chrystia freeland. it would be the ultimate victory to unseat trudeau himself.

canada has a history of big swings, from the prairie populist movements in the west to the periodic regime changes that happen in quebec. they're hard to predict, too - and it can't be done using the methods grenier is pulling out, here.

you won't know it's happening until a week before it does. but, i think this is more of a 2023 thing. for now, they should be looking at carefully taking advantage of jagmeet singh's unpopularity in the ndp voting base.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/grenier-green-breakthrough-1.5128063