Sunday, May 22, 2005
Keep your fork. There's pie.
*
Yes yes yes. I had a sentimental moment of if not "aw" then at least "ahh" reading this, when it got towards this. You can only vaccinate yourself against so much glurge before some of it slips in and makes you sick in that enjoyable floaty way you used to get when you were little. I had the most amazing nightmare when I was ill once as a kid - it was just a metal ball travelling with excruciating slowness down a diagonal line in enveloping darkness. Some kind of surrealist sensibility developing. I woke up screaming and sweating. It was awesome, dude. In the sense that I can smile about it now, but at the time it was terrible.
I read the other day that Sammy Davis Jnr was buried wearing about $70,000 of bling, and when it transpired he had died broke his wife had him exhumed so she could pay off some of his debt with it. A fork sounds at least more humble.
It's disgraceful the things that make you fleetingly wish you weren't such a staunch atheist.
There's a ballsy wee sycamore growing out of a tiny crack by the back gate. It's spread itself almost all the way across to the wall, making it barely possible to get in and out. I'm going to have to hack it back tomorrow, along with the odd big-leaf'd unidentified thing that's sprouted up next to it in sympathy. I'm sure there's a metaphor to be had there, but frankly, who can be arsed. I applaud its pluck but given that I'm still avoiding cutting a path to my front gate, it has to go.
Adam & The Ants doesn't make relaxing Sunday night listening, but ah, it gladdens the heart. He's possibly the most incandescent example of what you can achieve, how far you can project yourself and how dynamic you can be when you're in a manic phase. Like having a brain full of champagne, buah hah haa, I am invincible and have no need of sleep, for anything up to five years at a time. I wonder if mania compensates at all, in some twisted way, for depression. If only because you can Get Stuff Done, put your mighty foot in the worldly butt. I'm sure it's just the inverse of depression and leaves you just as wasted and dessicated, too much energy being just as draining and isolating as too little. Just because what you are can give great pleasure to people who are looking on, prepared to pay to listen to you or read you or look at you, doesn't necessarily mean you are pleasing or even tolerable to yourself. If you're projecting something out then by definition you are getting rid of it. The best you might expect is some level of reflected glow, which probably just emphasises your distance from the rest of the world which is sitting on its collective arse being amused by you. Without any concept of what it's like to be stuck in there.
During a typically pleasant chat tonight I was reminded that being all messy in the head has its compensations, in that you can absolve yourself of a great deal of responsibility. It's that legitimate-time-off-school thing - you know you've got good cause to lie there and be acted upon, because you're sick and this has been confirmed, and you feel totally right with the world on some level even while you're puking into a potty. Once you know you're clinically heart/headsick and not just posturing or indulging in some treacly excess of melancholia, then you can either start to work towards not being ill anymore, or you can use it as a Get Out of Nasty Adult Duties Free card. There are probably more incentives to choose the latter, and the brain conspires in that because it's designed to establish routines and run to them and disregard efforts at re-routing.
Being - hesitate to say - better-adjusted has many, many perks, although you have to admit to yourself you might now just be boring in a different key. It's great to find that you don't suddenly become the Inland Revenue drone you have in your head as a reason to stay colourful. But you do have to take things on the chin. Some degree of comfort is lost. Something replaces it, just haven't figured out what yet.
I remember when I first started to get into some level of personal archaeology with my Little German Woman (they've got to be German, if only for your own mirthful sense of reassuring stereotype), starting to understand some stuff, and God I must have been dull because I suddenly developed this x-ray vision. I went from the usual assumption that I was the only mangled person in any given room to seeing that the vast majority had sustained some damage, and that most of them didn't even realise it. Some blustering dick in a pub, who would have cowed me previously, would be revealed as a frightened little wabbit. On crutches. Bleeding paws and glassy eyes. People struggling around oblivious to the fact that they had legs and arms and eyes missing, all dripping and fucked. Thankfully I don't recall pointing out people's figurative injuries to them, I might have sustained some actual ones of my own (and here I edit a very sick joke about self-harming Daleks) - still, I was overwhelmed for a while by this damn vision of the walking fubar'd. It was like that bit in Gone With The Wind with the field full of casualties.
Such are the diverting side-effects. Useful, though, good for developing empathy and keeping you from rectal disappearance.
Where did that come from? How I envy the succinct. Yes, responsibility, boring fucking pest. And stubborn equilibrium. It's a beautiful calm blue ocean of a state and I am grateful pretty much every day I manage to maintain it without feeling like a plate-spinning prat, but! I rather miss the abandonment to helpless blubberingness sometimes. Tonight, for instance, I'm keenly feeling the absence of people, of person, and would rather express that like a five-year-old than consider it from frigid position of chin-stroking safety.
I suppose you have to sacrifice something of yourself to get better, some expendable tissue, a portion of your spleen. It's just odd getting used to it.
Blast, I haven't washed up and I have nothing to blame it on. See? It's a waking immutable-rolling-ball-mare.
Yes yes yes. I had a sentimental moment of if not "aw" then at least "ahh" reading this, when it got towards this. You can only vaccinate yourself against so much glurge before some of it slips in and makes you sick in that enjoyable floaty way you used to get when you were little. I had the most amazing nightmare when I was ill once as a kid - it was just a metal ball travelling with excruciating slowness down a diagonal line in enveloping darkness. Some kind of surrealist sensibility developing. I woke up screaming and sweating. It was awesome, dude. In the sense that I can smile about it now, but at the time it was terrible.
I read the other day that Sammy Davis Jnr was buried wearing about $70,000 of bling, and when it transpired he had died broke his wife had him exhumed so she could pay off some of his debt with it. A fork sounds at least more humble.
It's disgraceful the things that make you fleetingly wish you weren't such a staunch atheist.
There's a ballsy wee sycamore growing out of a tiny crack by the back gate. It's spread itself almost all the way across to the wall, making it barely possible to get in and out. I'm going to have to hack it back tomorrow, along with the odd big-leaf'd unidentified thing that's sprouted up next to it in sympathy. I'm sure there's a metaphor to be had there, but frankly, who can be arsed. I applaud its pluck but given that I'm still avoiding cutting a path to my front gate, it has to go.
Adam & The Ants doesn't make relaxing Sunday night listening, but ah, it gladdens the heart. He's possibly the most incandescent example of what you can achieve, how far you can project yourself and how dynamic you can be when you're in a manic phase. Like having a brain full of champagne, buah hah haa, I am invincible and have no need of sleep, for anything up to five years at a time. I wonder if mania compensates at all, in some twisted way, for depression. If only because you can Get Stuff Done, put your mighty foot in the worldly butt. I'm sure it's just the inverse of depression and leaves you just as wasted and dessicated, too much energy being just as draining and isolating as too little. Just because what you are can give great pleasure to people who are looking on, prepared to pay to listen to you or read you or look at you, doesn't necessarily mean you are pleasing or even tolerable to yourself. If you're projecting something out then by definition you are getting rid of it. The best you might expect is some level of reflected glow, which probably just emphasises your distance from the rest of the world which is sitting on its collective arse being amused by you. Without any concept of what it's like to be stuck in there.
During a typically pleasant chat tonight I was reminded that being all messy in the head has its compensations, in that you can absolve yourself of a great deal of responsibility. It's that legitimate-time-off-school thing - you know you've got good cause to lie there and be acted upon, because you're sick and this has been confirmed, and you feel totally right with the world on some level even while you're puking into a potty. Once you know you're clinically heart/headsick and not just posturing or indulging in some treacly excess of melancholia, then you can either start to work towards not being ill anymore, or you can use it as a Get Out of Nasty Adult Duties Free card. There are probably more incentives to choose the latter, and the brain conspires in that because it's designed to establish routines and run to them and disregard efforts at re-routing.
Being - hesitate to say - better-adjusted has many, many perks, although you have to admit to yourself you might now just be boring in a different key. It's great to find that you don't suddenly become the Inland Revenue drone you have in your head as a reason to stay colourful. But you do have to take things on the chin. Some degree of comfort is lost. Something replaces it, just haven't figured out what yet.
I remember when I first started to get into some level of personal archaeology with my Little German Woman (they've got to be German, if only for your own mirthful sense of reassuring stereotype), starting to understand some stuff, and God I must have been dull because I suddenly developed this x-ray vision. I went from the usual assumption that I was the only mangled person in any given room to seeing that the vast majority had sustained some damage, and that most of them didn't even realise it. Some blustering dick in a pub, who would have cowed me previously, would be revealed as a frightened little wabbit. On crutches. Bleeding paws and glassy eyes. People struggling around oblivious to the fact that they had legs and arms and eyes missing, all dripping and fucked. Thankfully I don't recall pointing out people's figurative injuries to them, I might have sustained some actual ones of my own (and here I edit a very sick joke about self-harming Daleks) - still, I was overwhelmed for a while by this damn vision of the walking fubar'd. It was like that bit in Gone With The Wind with the field full of casualties.
Such are the diverting side-effects. Useful, though, good for developing empathy and keeping you from rectal disappearance.
Where did that come from? How I envy the succinct. Yes, responsibility, boring fucking pest. And stubborn equilibrium. It's a beautiful calm blue ocean of a state and I am grateful pretty much every day I manage to maintain it without feeling like a plate-spinning prat, but! I rather miss the abandonment to helpless blubberingness sometimes. Tonight, for instance, I'm keenly feeling the absence of people, of person, and would rather express that like a five-year-old than consider it from frigid position of chin-stroking safety.
I suppose you have to sacrifice something of yourself to get better, some expendable tissue, a portion of your spleen. It's just odd getting used to it.
Blast, I haven't washed up and I have nothing to blame it on. See? It's a waking immutable-rolling-ball-mare.
