I’m sicker than I thought
“In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.” – J.G. Ballard
What would I do without The Guardian?
Here’s me thinking I’m doing OK considering my history of bipolar one and Asperger’s syndrome when some journalist pops up to tell me I’m manifesting symptoms of yet another mental illness.
A month ago it was Joshua Glidden informing me that my tendency to listen to Joy Division‘s Unknown Pleasures on repeat is a sign of schizophrenia. Now I learn from the delightfully monikered Mariella Frostrup that my propensity to curl up in a corner with Kafka indicates I’m a sociopath (This from a woman who once worked with Glen Matlock and Iggy Pop! “No fun, my babe, no fun.”). Doubtless even now there’s a Grauniad scribe working up a piece to tell me my enjoyment of Jodorowsky‘s films shows I suffer from borderline personality disorder. I sure hope none of them take it upon themselves to explain what my fondness for the writing of J.G. Ballard says about me.
I thought I was cultured. Turns out I’m just twisted. Maybe I should be on regular doses of Adele, Game of Thrones and Fifty Shades of Grey to keep my neuro-cultural transmitters in balance.
Come to think of it, how come the music industry hasn’t jumped on the neuro-pseudo-science marketing bandwagon yet? At the very least they could commission Susan Greenfield to write that listening to pirated albums will permanently damage your child’s brain.
But nobody takes media driven mind science seriously. Do they?
Neurodrooling 
DHHS
LikeLike
… and virtually everyone else.
Especially mental health professionals.
LikeLike
How are you going with that trial thingie? Going to blog about it
sometime?
LikeLike
After a couple of delays I start on Wednesday.
I’ll probably only blog on it if something interesting happens. Of course from my perspective ‘something interesting’ will probably be ‘something bad’.
Mind you, I’m entering it with the right frame of mind. One of my rabbits died suddenly and unexpectedly ten days ago and I followed it up last week with an acrimonious bust up with a valued friend. So if the pills make me depressed I probably won’t even notice.
LikeLike
Truly sorry to hear about your rabbit and the turbulence
with your friend. It becomes curious when the old
fall aways at the threshold of starting something new..
Vale, beloved giver of kisslings!
LikeLike
Starting something new? You mean the pills?
Doesn’t seem much compensation for the loss of a beloved pet and a friend.
Heck the pills are even going to take away my most loyal and long term companions – the billions of them circulating around my bloodstream.
LikeLike
I did not mention ‘pills’ or ‘compensation’. You did.
Your mind is framing you.
LikeLike
I was being ironic with the ‘compensation’ crack.
But if you didn’t mean the pills, what new start are you talking about?
LikeLike
I think, I could have been referring to when you wrote about
being offered a place in this treatment and how you examined
your values, re your worthiness vs that of a higher needs
person in an impoverished culture.
I think, that was the ‘new start’. Well, it looks like a new
start from my perspective but I haven’t walked in your thongs.
I’m just a little troll living in the Nanny State.
Irony tends to get lost in translation via this medium…and
I’m anaemic. Do you think there’s a connection? I
LikeLike
Nah, that’s not a new start. I’ve been finding reasons I’m worthless ever since my parents taught me how.
Hey, I’m anaemic too. There’s a connection.
Actually I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. I’m not anaemic yet but the doctors promise me the medication will do to my red blood cells what US drones do to Afghan weddings. Apart from the fatigue and breathlessness apparently the erythrocytic slaughter could free enough bilirubin to turn my eyes the colour of piss and my piss the colour of Toohey’s Old (or Hunter Black as we call it around here – probably because it looks and tastes like the Hunter River at Nobby’s). What’s more my ALT and ALP levels are set to go ballistic under the gentle urgings of the pills.
So it seems that for me the escape route from chronic hepatitis is through something that looks a lot like acute hepatitis. Sounds a bit like homeopathy to me.
LikeLike
the escape route from chronic hepatitis is through something that looks a lot like acute hepatitis. Sounds a bit like homeopathy to me.
Goodness gracious me! There’s another connection. I’m a homeopath. Graduated in the 90s from the best antipodean homestudy college in homeopathy.
I’ve been finding reasons I’m worthless ever since my parents taught me to do it.
Tell me, chemo sabe, is there an untaught for that?
Terribly kind and oxygen-thieving people insist that I embark on a cancer journey They don’t believe me when I politely decline, informing them that I still have a few more ports of call to make on the guilt-trip my parents left me. One even suggested that I am a cancer sufferer. I said, Non, non, non, ma cherie… I suffer from poverty and fuckwits. There’s a difference.
Heavens to Murgatroyd!!
I shall take the advice of my fifth cousin, nine times removed, Cookie Monster
today me will live in the moment unless it’s unpleasant;
in which case, me will eat a cookie
LikeLike
A cancer journey. How nice of them to appropriate the Native American tradition of a healing journey, run it through a New Age bullshit generator then try to force feed the resultant slurry of shallow aphorisms to non-Americans who already have enough toxic crap in their systems to deal with.
Still, it could be worse. You could have some Marlo Morgan fan telling you to go on a cancer walkabout.
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_blockquote.asp
LikeLike
Close, but no cigar. The controlling metaphor of cancer is still
‘battle’ and that is the language that is still being used – cancer
fighter. Very Steve McQueen (he started the trend for going
to Mexico for faith healers and cheaper drugs)
Employing the weasel-word of journey simply lends a passive
warm non-threatening illusion that a more enlightened wholistic
mind-body-soul paradigm is facilitating the rigours of treatment.
Know your whitefella history? Crusades. All that spam-a-lot in
a can riding off into the broling middle east to take back the Holy Land
and catch exotic forms of the yeuk.
For the last month, I’ve been quietly observing the status quo in a
influential forum specific to CRC. On a bluebird day, the kingdom of
sheeple mildly scares the bejebus, jerusalem and jam out of me. On
a raven day……..there’s all those shites in whining armour!
Ta for the link.
LikeLike
So have you asked which battle is meant to be going on in your bowels?
Cannae? Waterloo? The Somme?
Surely they can find out with a stethoscope.
If you start shitting snow and burning panzers it’s probably Stalingrad.
I hope you’ve pointed out that using chemicals and radiation contravenes the Geneva Convention.
And why didn’t McQueen just jump on a Triumph TR6 and escape his cancer?
LikeLike
the escape route from chronic hepatitis is through something that looks a lot like acute hepatitis. Sounds a bit like homeopathy to me.
Hmm…..trying to remember the HTML for this doohickey.
LikeLike
Correct me if’n I’m wrong, but I think one might need a BSA Gold Star DBD34 for that.
Well, being a contrarian, I’m not likely to have such an important decision made for me by a pack of onco-flying monkeys. Taking a leaf from an ancestor, my strategy is that of the Upper Clyde
Shipbuilders union; no hooliganism, no vandalism and no bevvying
That and my Star Trek communicator badge will get me in hot heavy water.
I think I will jump the shark to Tasmania. I hear there have been sightings of
bunyips.
LikeLike
You’re wrong.
My dad was an old Triumph Bodgie who never tired of asking what a classic 1950s British bike was doing in Germany in 1944.
It’d take more than bunyips to get me to Tasmania in winter.
LikeLike
And my old man was an RAF LAC into BSAs who sez Triumphs are useless for escaping
cancer.
LikeLike
A fine examplar of a sun-in-cancer Lowlands male. Must check out his natal chart – that will
keep me amused and out of your comment box for a day or two.
LikeLike
So that’s your rellie is it?
I think I once said something like that. Only longer. I had to fill out a blogpost with something.
So you’ve got his time and place of birth then?
Or do you mean you’re going to read his horoscope?
LikeLike
Got his place of birth (Govan, Glasgow). Don’t need the time of birth
as I use a classic method that is not bound to the Bull Shit Astrology of
the 20th century.
For dudes who impact on the identity of a group, the cook-book methodologies
are too small.
Jimmy Reid is an Ancestor….I didnae say he was my relative. The de’il is
in the details you know.
OK then….how many chickens do you want?.
LikeLike
pssst….you read Zapffe’s essay The Last Messiah? Kinda up your
mountain pass…
Why don’t we hear more about these crazy Scandinavians? Why is it always about
the ‘effing Greeks!
LikeLike
The Last Messiah, eh? I’d always wondered what that Hawkwind track was about.
Yeah, Zapffe must have been a great thinker alright. He agrees with me. As I’ve blogged previously (here and here) I’m with Russell Morris when it comes to meaning. I’m also on board with Zapffe’s antinatalism.
I’m currently reading Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright, so right now I’m kinda attuned to how pathological the need for meaning can be.
I think he over-eggs his defence mechanisms as remedies to hypertrophied consciousness though. Seems to me that there are pragmatic socio-cultural reasons for much of what he describes that have little to do with consciousness or the mirage of meaning. In fact I think most of them are better understood as self-reinforcing cultural memes than as something intrinsic to the human condition.
As to why we pay more attention to Greek (, British, German, American and French) philosophers than to Scandinavian ones – who the fuck can read Norwegian?
LikeLike
I’ll take a wilde guess at that for $10,000, Eddie. Norwegians.
Reminds me of the line from the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair
when Catherine Banning asks to interrogate one of the art thiefs (who was
set up to be noise over there, while the theft when down over yonder).
God, who would ever bother with Romanian!
Hmm…seems like I’ve six degrees of separation circled back to Steve
McQueen.
I’m browsing through Hand to Mouth: The Truth About Being Poor in a
Wealthy World by Linda Tirado, which belabours the trope of working
at Walmart and other minimum-wage employment as undesirable for any
person with like 4-H dreams of rolling in clover.
During the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, many Polish intellectuals were saved because
they agreed to be feeders of lice for a virology institute, which created
the vaccine for typhus, removing one natural process that culled human over-populations.
The Meaning of Lice, eh?
LikeLike
I’m not antinatal just because of overpopulation you know. Even setting aside the wisdom of Philip Larkin I’ve always been mystified as to why people insist on inflicting simulacra of their own fucked existences upon yet another generation. Then claim to love the little souls they’ve damned.
LikeLike
http://www.iceman.it/en/tattoos
LikeLike
Judging from the tatts around here there must be a lot of people in a lot of pain hereabouts.
About the only boom industry in Newcastle is tattoo removal.
LikeLike
If you’re a Golem and you know it, clap your hands!
LikeLike
I’m pretty sure there’s no scroll in my head.
Or did you mean ‘Gollum’?
LikeLike
I think I meant the golem of Jewish myth that is made from goop;
the simulacra. Or maybe I meant to say the gingerbread man.
I dunno. I think I’m trapped in your comments box! I’ll try and
get the letters HELP to welt up on my abdomen and
while I’m trying to do that, do you have any socks that need
darning?
LikeLike
Yeah, the golem is traditionally a humanoid made of stone or clay animated with kabbalist magic that performs manual jobs for its master. Its instructions are contained on a scroll that’s placed inside its mouth or hollow head.
All my socks need darning.
LikeLike
Darn, I can’t make sock bunnies out of holey socks.
My latest find on the innanet:~
We will waste our lives seducing our despair.
LikeLike
So stick a carrot in the hole.
And I sure don’t waste my time seducing my despair. I know my love for it is completely unrequited.
LikeLike