Channeling the Recalibration
The system repairs took a slight change in direction over the last 24 hours. My sleep was peppered with ridiculously vivid dreams featuring people I haven’t seen since school and—of all people—Johnny Ball. This meant only one thing: I was in an active, intensive repair window. It left me deeply anxious for most of yesterday, caught in constant worry loops, or as we prefer to call it in the shed: Recalibration Anxiety.
The Browser Bug
The day started on a high, though, as I figured out why the thread page-count hack I mentioned in yesterday’s Daily Dispatch had stopped working. Ironically, it was my own doing. I had downloaded a browser extension called Auto Scroll to aid me while reading articles for the new podcast channels.
This feature had several issues. One was that it was almost impossible to get it moving at a steady, comfortable speed; the other was that to activate it, you pressed [Shift + S]. Can anyone see the problem here? That’s right—anytime I wanted to type anything requiring a capital S... need I say more?
I uninstalled it and, hey presto, when I did one more check to make double sure the page-count hack was still broken, there they were: my beloved page numbers. It’s the little things that please me most these days.
The Jarre Protocol
To counteract the “Recalibration Anxiety,” I immersed myself in the project—specifically recording an audio version of the article “The Widow’s Howl,” which I wrote two days before my cannabis cessation began. I discovered a neat little trick in the process.
To be fair, I didn’t actually discover it. It was the same trick the teacher on Educating Yorkshire applied with the young chap who got anxious and stammered while speaking in public. I put on my headphones with a little Jean-Michel Jarre playing very quietly in the background, and it worked like a charm.
Incidentally, the “Jarre Protocol,” as we call it in the project, was a lifesaver when the next-door neighbour’s antics were at full pelt in the early days of acute withdrawal; it was an essential tool when my nerves were still jangling from CNS hyperexcitability. It is now logged as an aid in the article “Managing Acoustic Heat” in the Tools tab (Web-based Substack only; the app is an absolute free-for-all).
The Scaffold in Action
The day’s Recalibration Anxiety was not fought; it was channeled into completing a major creative pillar. This is the scaffold in action. Between fixing a bug in the browser and fixing a bug in the process, the systems got quieter—and the output got louder.
The march to wall continues unabated.
#cannabiswithdrawaltimeline #PAWS #neuroplasticity #REMrebound #recovery #TheDAMProject