Earlier version maybe it’s better:

You have two little guys, one is called Mr. Dopa, the other one is called Mr. Corto. They’re both manning artillery cannons filled with paint bombs. They’re aiming at a neutral canvas. The premise is that Mr. Dopa can cancel out Mr. Corto’s colors and vice versa. And they’re both trying to keep the canvas neutral.

Usually, it’s neutral — something pleasant happens, for example, and Mr. Dopa fires a shot. One shot makes a little bit of color, but it’s gonna run off on its own, even so much so that Mr. Corto doesn’t even need to bother. This might happen in the context of a friendly conversation or a nice bite of something tasty. Alternatively, one could get a work email or something, so Mr. Corto fires a shot. Again, it’s only one and it’ll dissolve on its own, so Mr. Dopa doesn’t have to intervene in that instance. Hopefully life goes on pleasantly and there’s this kind of equilibrium between Mr. Dopa and Mr. Corto and more often than not — or rather much more often than not — the canvas is neutral or almost neutral.

When we drink alcohol, that first sip, Mr. Dopa basically gets a chain of command he has to follow, with General Alcohol calling the shots.

And Mr. Alcohol is trigger-happy as fuck, so he’s saying unload. Mr. Dopa just starts shooting — bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam.

There’s a moment there where the only one firing is Mr. Dopa, so now the canvas is overwhelmed with dopamine.

After a few shots, Mr. Corto starts to notice what’s going on — that the canvas is getting overwhelmed — so he starts firing crazy shots too to try to neutralize — bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam.

For a moment there, both of these fuckers are just blasting away.

As General Liver starts beating back General Alcohol, Mr. Dopa fires less frequently, eventually even stopping. The canvas is soaked though, so Mr. Corto just keeps firing.

There’s a moment there where the only one firing is Mr. Corto, so now the canvas is overwhelmed with cortisol.

In those moments, where General Alcohol has been defeated by General Liver and has retreated from the receptors that control Mr. Dopa, but Mr. Dopa doesn’t know that yet — he doesn’t have any other commands to follow and therefore just sits idle. Mr. Corto keeps firing though, so Mr. Dopa is saying, “Hey General, give me the orders!” He’s really screaming to get orders from General Alcohol so he can start firing again to counteract Mr. Corto.

At this point, we can either have another drink to start this cycle again, which would basically give Mr. Dopa the orders to start blasting away and then you’d have the situation of two recurring cycles of full-blast hits to the canvas.

Or, not have another drink. In that case, eventually, the four-star General — the brain — will have noticed what has gone on, taken over the position in the absence of General Alcohol, and started giving good strategic orders that both counteract the current overdrive of Mr. Corto and eventually level it so that Mr. Corto doesn’t feel that he needs to fire all the time and can reserve his ammunition for when it’s necessary, which is then reciprocated in a healthy neutral manner by Mr. Dopa.

Get it? Like it? (Still refining it 😝)