I can't sleep mate. I can't even bear the thought of eating right now. Last sleep I got was for a couple of hours monday morning. By then I knew sovia was dead, but I didn't know she killed herself. Since finding that out, and even more so since finding out that seems as though she loved me as well as I, her, I just haven't been able to sleep. Doesn't matter what the fuck I take (out of nitrazepam, got a repeat rx for 10mg/d, chlormethiazole, got 192mg 3x/d, tizanidine 4mg, got loads, clonidine 25ug again loads, oxy IR and morphine XR. Or at least its meant to be morphine XR, in two different strengths, typically doesn't STAY morphine mind you, cimetidine, more gabapentin than I even know what to do with, and cyclizine for potentiation. Right now, if I didn't have an ondansetron script I'd probably be throwing up.)
Just lying on the fuckin sofa, with a progressively larger pile of emptied out oxy caps mounting up on the table. Might try a dose of pramipexole, see if it can help lift my mood a bit (its a dopamine agonist) enough to get me up and on my feet and into the lab. I think she'd like to be remembered that way. Being a psychedelic chemist, phenethylamines, psychedelic amphetamines mainly. But this, it'll likely take years, and not come cheap either in terms of resources poured in. Still, if a stabilized, productive ergot strain can be coaxed out from the wildtypes available, it'll get named after her.
I'm armed with these, plus some more, really, really fresh (mere hour or so after the ears of wild ryegrasses were cut from their stalks) sclerotia. Somewhere, some time, after gods below only know how many subcultures, mutagens, mitotic inhibitors (E.g colchicine), media changes (one needs a high-phosphate medium to get a starter culture going, and for production of lysergic acid derived ergopeptide alkaloids that can bee hydrolyzed to lysergic acid the production medium needs to be separate, and of different composition from the nurture medium used to first start the cultures, allowing the fungus to grow in the first, and in the production media, force it to rely on its accumulated intracellular phosphate stores, and then these begin to be depleted, before anything is likely to show up on a Van Urk/Keller's screening.
Armed with that load of sclerotia (Claviceps purpurea, rye ergot) and what is probably to be considered both the best all round primer, and at the time some state of the art, as well as the whole history of submerged fermentation culture for Claviceps species, plus an awful lot of reading and research already done, and whilst I certainly do not mean it in a boastful way, least of all when it is to serve as a dedication to a loved one lost, I am determined to coax a productive, preferably one that also produces ascospores (difficult to get producer strains to do so but not impossible) strain that does not degenerate with subculture. Or find a way to reverse senescence in cultures that become so if I can, and employ every last sneaky, underhand tech-trick, by hook or by crook, or by sheer autie bloody-well-mindedness and persistence (or perseverance as curebie cocksuckers would call it) in the book, and for that matter in the entire damn published literature on Clavicipitalean ascomycete fungi to get a stable productive strain out of it.
So that some day, there can be some proper blotter art, laid with one of the more novel lysergamides, in tribute to Sov, since I think she deserves no less than that effort to be put in, and that special, dedicated touch, as personal as I can bring forth. Something born essentially Ex Nihilo,To serve as a counterweight for the tragic destruction of such a special, sweet, kind, effervescent and talented, creative woman's life, hopes and dreams. For this, it can, and should be nothing more than a labor of love. Because she was, and is.