HE’S JUST LIKE ME FR

While moving forward in your indoctrination, the uninitiated will lean heavily into the ‘he’s just like me fr’ canon: Patrick Bateman, Tyler Durden, John Wick. The archangels of the sigma grindset gospel.

The choir chants ‘based’ and we all sing in harmony.

Today, I’ve come to preach the gospel of Eddie Morra – the patron saint of useless writers that do enough drugs to make themselves geniuses. Morra, the protagonist of 2011’s ‘Limitless’ is a writer without a book, a guy whose girlfriend is leaving him. A loser. No ambition, no motivation. ‘He’s just like me fr.’ Happy enough to just say that he’s a writer in New York despite not being happy at all. A story as old as time itself.

He has a drink in a bar. A drug-dealer friend gives him a pill. Eddie takes it. Who says no to drugs? All of this makes sense to me.

The drug, NZT, is designed to unlock 100% of your brain power. Everything you’ve ever glanced at becomes organized and accessible; you are now insanely smart about everything. For some reason you can speak every language and are excellent at gambling. It is now easy to get pussy and money. Yeah, textbook sigma shit.

Anyways, Eddie gets hooked on this pill (how could you not?) and finishes his book. He gets rich, murders someone (I think), and gets the girl. All of this because he just needed to finish his novel.

Thinking of real-life sigma authors like Pynchon and Delillo, I can understand the desire for endless quiet to just ‘finish the task.’ It’s hard enough to battle your own brain while trying to find your words. It’s never easy to explain to your girlfriend what, exactly, you’re working on before you’ve figured it out yourself.

You shouldn’t go to wine bar with GF to enjoy tasteful banter; you have to write down the details of what’s in the room your main character is going to kill himself in.

Several to-go coffee cups surround the bed like prayer candles. Clean clothes lay in one corner, dirty in another. There is no furniture but a small writing table and a black folding chair. The simple room resembles a monastic cell more than the home of a successful writer.

Me? I’m writing this while taking a break from writing something else, sitting in a single room in a Tangier apartment complex with sheets over the windows. Peace, quiet. Anonymity, exile - all keys to good work.

Back to the film: you take the pill, it makes you smart. I want the pill. I need the help. A quick google search confirms my theory that the film spiked interest in ‘smart drugs’ to all those who viewed it. ‘Is this real, will this work, I need these drugs.’ The classification of ‘nootropics’ can be easily defined as substances that improve mental performance, going from caffeine and nicotine to Ritalin. Obviously, there is no ‘100% of the brain’ pill available. Considering the number of products marketed as ‘nootropics’ at Wal-Mart, I will assume that most are just repackaged No-Doz.

Every man must go through a period of either alcohol or drug abuse in order to kick it, returning with virtue and piety. This builds character, they tell me. I figured I had no choice but to call a guy.

Mark works in the financial district. Sold coke until he had a daughter, suddenly realizing the potential jail time isn’t worth it - now his focus is on simple pharmaceuticals. My guy has a guy who works for one of big pharma companies doing something I don’t understand. Anything I need, as many as I need: not a problem. I do a little research before placing my order. Most threads seem to think that [redacted] is the best for overall cognitive improvement, while [redacted] is the closest to the theoretical NZT-48, increasing focus and motivation.

I pick them up in a bar, no different than what happens in the movies.

The trial period was unremarkable at best. I could say that [redacted] made me laser focused for about 12 hours but came with the most miserable mornings imaginable. It’s the amphetamine component, for sure. My GABA is depleted. I didn’t think to bring any 5HTP either. I’ve been out of the game for too long; I should have remembered that the highs come with inevitable lows. The second test, [redacted], made me feel like a genius wizard on the verge of a heart attack. I accidentally fell into a Youtube hole and watched some guy play synth covers for two hours. I could read but couldn’t write, nothing was in my head. When it was time for bed, I laid on my stomach and convinced myself I was dying. I vowed to quit smoking (as I usually do in moments of stress) and to not take any more stimulants.

I had forgotten my deathbed repentance come the morning; my routine of two Advil, two cigarettes, and a Coca-Cola continued unabated. I’m reminded that Hunter S. Thompson was the contemporary architect, weaving apocryphal tales of heroic drug consumption while managing to write with a unique voice. Using his sigma identity of Raoul Duke, he could focus on ‘the work’ while seeking messages from a chemical beyond. Different than someone like Burroughs, as there was very little poetry to be found in Hunter’s work. It was, more often than not, focused weaving of why he would need the drugs to write in the first place. Without the drugs, he was just Hunter; a simple sportswriter. He would later remark that he didn’t know who people would expect to meet, Hunter or the Duke. The secondary identity had slipped into first, a tear in the fabric of reality that he couldn’t recover from. There was no Hunter beyond the brand.

Eddie Morra, Bradley Cooper. I’m supposed to be talking about the guy from Limitless. Yeah, I mean – he’s a great cinema sigma. He turns his life around, gets his shit together. Sure, he only got there with some chemical aid, but lots of great people in history had some assistance to push them there - Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong, Liver King; all of them required a little pep in their step to push them to the top. Doesn’t matter how you get there, right?

I’ll be honest, I took another [redacted] and my mind has started to wander. I think the test was a failure, I don’t think these pills are making me any smarter. What about Atreyu from The Neverending Story? Is he a sigma? Must be. Maybe I should see if I can get PEDs again. Maybe I need to up my dose of [redacted] to help me through the other book project. What about Spuds Mackenzie, the Budweiser bull terrier? Sigma. Maybe I’ll write something about him next. He’s just like me fr.