About Hallucinations
Posted on February 12, 2009 in Bipolar Disorder
About Hallucinations on 12seconds.tv
Dream
Posted on February 11, 2009 in Dreams
I’m driving my father around San Bernardino. We’re looking for a street called Sierra Way ((Sierra Way actually exists, but not like in my dream)) . Sierra Way, I explain to him, has an unusual problem because when it rains the drainage system has been engineered to shunt all the water through it. This makes it a bad place to buy property. Evidentally we have acquired some. To get to it, we have to maneuver through a series of streets fronted by square buildings decorated with Victorian geegaws and Baroque scrollwork. My mother greets us at the door of the house where we are due to live ((She is younger than I am — in her thirties or early forties at worst)) . I tell her about the problem and she explains that we have only leased the house until something opens up around the corner.
There’s been a murder on the street in front of our house. It’s my duty to solve it because the police are incompetent. So I start wandering the nearby streets, seeking clues. As I pass a very upscale grocery store, I notice a park where some men are playing basketball. I go there. The contests are curious: several different games are happening using the same hoops. I find a couple of men who were there when the crime was committed, but their accounts are vague and one of them seems afraid. I deduce that the son of an important person — a lanky blond with a full beard — is involved. When I go back to the scene of the crime, leading my witnesses, I must pass through a ornate lobby with crystal chandeliers and climb a set of crystal stairs to get back to the street where the grocery store stands. I call my wife and beg her to come back to me.
25 Movies Meme
Posted on February 9, 2009 in Film Memes
This meme begins here.
It works like this: choose twenty five movies and write a one-sentence description for each. If you want to approach Dickensian lengths as you do, that’s fine, but it has to be one sentence and no more. You can choose whatever movies you want. If you choose to do this meme, you must reprint the rules and name the person on whose blog you saw it first.
- A Beautiful Mind: Brilliant mathematician finds himself perplexed by the unsolveable equations of his own delusions.
- The Seven Faces of Doctor Lao: Tony Randall undergoes multiple makeup changes in charming caricature of multi-generationed Chinese sorceror.
- My Life as a Dog: Youngest son withstands mother’s death and obnoxious older brother, barking some of the way.
- Hiroshima Mon Amour: French actress explodes with nuclear passion over a Japanese architect in the dark streets of the glowing night city.
- The Shooting Party: English gentry enjoy some killing where the savory targets don’t shoot back the autumn before the First World War.
- The Day of the Triffids (1963): Humankind is blinded by a cosmic storm and eaten by an equally blind, but mobile plant.
- Emperor Jones: Low man on the railroad becomes the king of a Caribbean island, but the natives work their magic on him when he becomes a Papa Doc then tries to run away with the loot.
- The Pajama Game: Union fights management in this story of those who sew our bedclothes — with not a single nude scene or episode in bed.
- Hilary and Jackie: Genius at the cello loses her mind and then control of her muscles to multiple sclerosis while her flute-playing sister lives a rather plain life.
- The Trojan Women: Survivors of the war become its booty and argue about who is at fault, who must suffer what.
- Suspicion: “Monkeyface” knows he’s a wastrel, but marries him anyways, then wonders why he’s asking her mystery novel-writing friend about undetectable poisons.
- A Good Woman: Mrs. Windemere has a fan and another of a different sort that she doesn’t know about.
- Gone with the Wind: Rebel romance that rewrites the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction to suit lovers of seamy bodice rippers.
- Oyster Farmer: Robber puts his haul in the mail and waits on an Australian river but the loot floats away, leading him to pursue a fortune with a hard shell.
- Le Placard (The Closet): He’s a wimp, but when they start thinking he is gay, everyone thinks he is virile and even the office bully tries to win him.
- The Bridge: Someone is watching when they jump and tries to find answers to the Big Question.
- Picture Bride: He mailed away for her, but he cheated on his photograph — at 43 he’s an old man — and now she’s stuck cutting sugarcane in Hawaii.
- Le dîner de cons (The Dinner Game): Their little game is to bring the most idiotic people to their weekly soiree for some private laughs, but Francois’s toothpick castles pale in comparison to Pierre’s hidden lunacies.
- Winged Migration: Flap flap flap — Emperor penguins have nothing over these feathered aeronauts trained by the best Lorenzian imprinting techniques.
- Open Your Eyes: He’s horribly maimed in an automobile accident engineered by the ex who doesn’t want him to love the sweet little, doe-eyed thing he stole from his best friend, but then experiences an unbelieveable recovery through the wonders of medicine — really unbelieveable.
- Amadeus: When Mozart was my age, he’d been dead for 18 years — I stole this joke from Tom Lehrer — and this is how a jealous rival engineers the haunting that killed him.
- Eyes Wide Shut: Guy has no luck in this one — when everyone is trying to get him to be bad he’s too decent and when he decides to throw chivalry out the window, he either finds potential lovers unavailable or gets into trouble with the naked power elite.
- Fargo: Just how far will the desperate manager of the auto dealership go and just how long will it take for the pregnant cop from Paul Bunyanland to catch him and his cronies in this examination of the banality and sheer patheticness of Evil.
- Memento: Brain-damaged investigator gets his clues from notes, polaroids, and tattoos, but he can’t remember how this got started and neither can you until the end.
- Rashoman: Sitting out a rainstorm beneath a rashoman gate, a monk discusses a trial with one of its witnesses and ponders the immutability of the Truth beyond the mutability of eyewitness testimony.
The Slow Moving River of Crude
Posted on February 7, 2009 in Depression
Depression ((I’m not in one right now, just writing about it as part of an exercise from a book I am reading)) is a slow-moving river of crude oil. Contrary to what you have heard, it is not cold to the touch, but possesses the warmth known to the deepest mineshafts of the Earth. It covers you entirely and affixiates you. When you set it on fire, it turns into a mixed state and you can burn yourself to death.
Dream
Posted on February 4, 2009 in Dreams
I’m painting the grass with spar varnish using a broad brush. My mother is helping me. We move along a brush-width at a time. I check my work and find that while I have made every row, there are leaves and pieces of garbage up ahead. A crowd of people arrive. Someone brings a bear. I climb a high wooden fence in response to a neighbor’s call. His bear jumps over the fence and embraces me. I think I am going to die, but the bear proves to be declawed. It goes to wrestle with the first bear. I yell at the oaf who released it on me, but he just laughs. As I climb down the ladder, more neighbors arrive. One of them leads a whole pack of Boston Terriers, not in the usual colors, but in the orange, brown, black, and white hues common to cats.
Book Review: Soaring and Crashing (Mostly Crashing)
Posted on February 2, 2009 in Mania Reading
[amazonify]1934248762::text::::Soaring & Crashing: My Bipolar Adventures[/amazonify] by Holly Hollan
My review
rating: 2 of 5 stars
My personal experience of people in mania (including myself) clumsily parcels out those who revel in their manias and those who fight them with every ounce of their spirit through self-examination and re-examination. The ones who kept ending up in the hospital and getting into trouble were of the first order. They may have been sharp at math, possessing of stupendous vocabularies, or cleverness, but when it came to having insight into their disorder, they kept making the same mistakes over and over again. Their thinking tended towards the magical. When they took part in support groups, they were the smartest, the ones who had nothing to learn from anyone else. They were forever second-guessing their doctors and stopping their meds. It was imperative for them to be optimistic to the fault of refusing to see bipolar disorder as anything more than a “different” or “highly-sensitized” way of seeing things in a universe where there was no truth. When they fell, it was spectacular.
Meet Holly Hollan who fits these criteria to a T. Hollan is by her own self-description “brilliant”, able to pass any test, master any machine, forsee earthquakes, and understand psychology as well as any professional. Every bad decision she makes, every catastrophe turns out to have a silver lining. She is Candide awash in religiosity, grandiosity, and Neil Diamond.
Her story enthralls mostly by frightening. Hollan’s mother was the Mistress of Unjust Punishments, denying her daughter a whole school year without makeup and nylon stockings because of a practical joke Holly played on her little sister. Her parents became acolytes of Nathaniel Branden, the one-time heir apparent of Ayn Rand. Her earliest therapists were of that movements. In one particularly memorable episode, she left her job at the Morton Salt Company in Michigan to stalk Neil Diamond in Hollywood as part of a quest to realize the Second Coming. The obsession became so ingrained in her life and her delusions that one therapist screamed at her “You are not going to marry Neil Diamond!” Near book’s end, she suggests that a meeting with Diamond over the phone was the realization of that vision as proved by the capture of Saddam Hussein two days later. She says that afterwards she let go, but that declaration implies that the delusion still informs her self-history.
Her response to her symptoms are passionate, if sometimes wrong-headed. I have to admit like her being pulled through hard times by listening to songs such as “I am, I said”. Getting through times, I have found however, is not the same as living them well. Speaking as one actively fought his manias every step of the way, I must say that those who are inclined towards mania need less of the optimism so lost upon depressives and more of an honest skepticism, the ability to say “Uh oh. I’m might be indulging in magical thinking here.” Then when a relative prays for us and declares us healed so we won’t need our meds anymore (as Hollan’s little sister declared to her at one point) we avoid applauding the miracle and plunging into a fresh calamity.
The difference between me and Hollans is that I never trusted the miracle workers.
I would not hesitate to recommend Hollan’s book to family members, clinicians, or stable sufferers who want to broaden their understanding of the disease. But into the hands of the newly diagnosed or those with a history of defying treatment I would not place it. Hollan’s book has too many factual errors — for example, she says that Tegretal is contra-indicated for people with seizures! It’s not clear what medications she is on: on one page she claims that she takes only the lowest dose of Abilify. Within a chapter or so, she is saying that she has eliminated all medications except Xanax which she uses to slow her upturns. At points she blurs the distinction between what she believed while in her worst episodes and what she feels now. She is always, nevertheless, sure of herself. And that is why I recommend her narrowly with abundant warnings.
[amazonify]1934248762::text::::Order this book here[/amazonify]
For the record, this is not a paid advertisement.
Drake Goes on a Spree
Posted on February 2, 2009 in Dogs
Cats don’t do this!
Two nights away at the Lawrence Welk Resort didn’t seem like much — we knew the cats would recognize us when we came back — but Drake agonized over our absence despite the twice-daily visits of a guardian. He greeted us enthusiastically at the door until we noticed the detritus of a bender he’d had. The door to the bedroom had been barred to him by our design, so he explored the space under the bathroom sink, dragging out toothbrushes, toothpaste, a bottle of Grecian Formula that I’d forgotten I had, razors, and other plastic accoutrements peculiar to our bathroom. He chewed these into lumps and seedlike fragments, tore open a box of bandages, and squeezed the toothpaste out of a sample-sized tube.
Oh! The second I stopped the celebration of our return by noticing these, his SPU went into operation and he stalked over to the bed. I had mixed feelings about scolding him so soon after our return. For the rest of the day, he favored Lynn over me except when I had a biscuit to present.
Book Review: Glyph
Posted on January 29, 2009 in Reading
My review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
I feel strange after reading this book. The story, itself, is inconsequential, simple. But layered on top of it is a mischievous exploration of academia and the intelligensia, particularly the French. If Wittgenstein had cowritten comedy with Max Senett, he might have published it in a notebook whose elements were divided up like this are.
The book is rare and out of print at this writing. The strictures of Inter-Library Loan have limited the time to which I can give it. To get all the jokes, I need to go back to college and take the full course of philosophy.
The Unofficial Ministry of Control
Posted on January 25, 2009 in Censorship Scoundrels
You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.
-Barack Obama
I don’t forsee any effort by the Obama administration to shut down the freedom of speech that racist gits like Rush Limbaugh have been using to the hilt lately ((I invite them to keep on doing it. It wins us elections!)) . The imagination of the wRong is rife with efforts to wire their jaws shut and cut their fingertips off so they can’t communicate their odious ideas. But that’s not their real fear. They are most afraid that people will not listen to them.
I have the view that nothing in the Constitution requires me, Private Citizen Joel, from having my ears stuffed full of radioactive cauliflower. So I freely set rules for this blog, set /ignore on chatters in IRC, and out of the goodness of my heart block especially rabid dorks from listening in on my Twitter remarks.
Last night one of these called me a censor and I laughed at this. Excuse me, the Bill of Rights has this clause about freedom of association. If you’re going to be a virulent ass and address me in terms such as “jackass” or “whiner” for my views, I don’t want to associate with you. There’s also this little problem with the definition of censorship which says that it is a thing that a government does to its citizens. I’m not a government nor am I keeping anyone from saying crude falsehoods about our president: I’m just exercising my right to ignore them.
But it grows deeper and darker than that. The one thing I could say about the barrage of propaganda that characterized the last eight years ((A fact that I will keep harping on because Bush is responsible for the mess we are in.)) is that I retained my right to not watch television, not to read the news, not to submit myself to listening to it. It’s the same right that the wRong has and I would not take it from them. If they want to listen, they can. If they don’t, they don’t have to.
What is insidious about their demand that I not block them, that I listen to their garbage is that it leads to an Orwellian world. Imagine having to listen to Bush or Obama as you got up, as you went through the day, and at bedtime. At no time could you say “But I don’t want to hear this. I want to have quiet or listen to Celine Dion.” No, the voice of the State says. Your undivided attention is required.
And there’s the danger: they want to strip from us the decision what we get to listen to, who gets to hear what we say. It’s a world of loudspeakers and wiretapping against which they want us to be helpless.
If you’re proud of being a citizen, insist on this right where it is appropriate and defend it for others. Expose these Svengalis for what they are.
The SPU and Other Built-In Features of Dogs
Posted on January 23, 2009 in Dogs
Biologists who insist that there are biological bases for behavior have nearly made a convert of me. Since adopting Drake, our Boston Terrier, last May, I’ve observed that there are things which make him distinctly doggy as opposed to our catty felines.
Superficially there are the diet issues: Drake eats just about everything including things that are bad for him. Cats, on the other hand, eat very little outside of their narrow fare. If I am eating chocolate, for example, Fiona and Boadicea very willingly accept my declaration that it is cat poison ((Which is true.)) . Drake, on the other hand, persists even when I explain to him that I am undertaking this eating so that he won’t have to. He plops his butt on the floor and gives me a soulful look, his ears perked up so he doesn’t miss a single sensory clue that might betray a falling morsel.
He pogos for biscuits. When I give him larger treats, he chomps them down in seconds. He treats his food as a gas and inhales it. On walks, I sometimes have to drag him away from mystery spots and odd bits.
There are other peculiarities. Of course no self-respecting cat allows herself to be placed on a leash. Drake rejoices and dances on his hind legs whenever I reach for his lead and harness. We have arrived at an accord on how fast we go — Drake is an enthusiastic runner and I can keep up for short bursts. Lawns suffer mightily when he stops: he scatches and kicks until I have to warn him off tearing up clods of turf.
Then there is the Enemy, a border collie named Oreo. Oreo’s owner and I are on good terms. Our dogs have it in for one another. When Drake sees Oreo, he assumes the Stance. The backend goes down. The front ones click straight. He begins barking maniacally. Oreo turns into The Hound of the Baskervilles except he doesn’t glow. We owners yank at their leads and shout at them to hush. With a great deal of coaxing, we pull them out of sight of each other ((In a similar vein, we have discovered that he just loves making love with comely she-terriers and beagles. One out of three emasculated dogs continues to hold a torch for the opposite sex. Admonitions such as “You’re fixed!” never seem to curb his appetites.)) .
You must never show weakness in the face of the Enemy, Drake tells me. I tell him to get a life.
The most interesting feature he possesses is what I call the Self-Punishing Unit or SPU. Every few days, Drake does a naughty. He poops on the floor. He finds a plastic pen or pill bottle, then proceeds to chew on it. Or he pulls a coat off the back of a chair and sleeps on it.
“Drrr-rake!” I’ll say in a loud, insidious voice. And the SPU goes into operation. First, the ears go back and lock into place. Second, the eyes, bulge slightly and assume a worried look. The head hangs down. His little stub of a tail would droop, too, if it were not paralyzed. Then, carrying his body as low as it will go and still allow him to move, he slinks off to his dog bed where he remains, trembling, for the next hour or so ((Classic video of the behavior here.)) .
Everyone who owns a cat knows how they respond. “Excuse me?” “I didn’t do that. I don’t know who did.” “Yadda yadda yadda.” “Go fuck yourself.” And “OK, if you’re going to lose it, I’m LEAVING! (And I may not come back.)” But they always do.
As I write this, Drake sits at my feet, hoping that the bag of potato chips I have just finished isn’t empty. A few minutes ago, Fiona insisted on standing in my lap, purring loud enough to be picked up by my webcam mic. It’s an odd community that forms when sentient and semi-sentient beings cohabitate. Drake has taught me much about the ways of dogs. I just wish I had been handed an instruction manual. Just how do I deal with his chewing the pens?
