Year: 2007
Parodying Luke 15:8-10
Posted on July 25, 2007 in Psychotropics Satire
What poor bipolar sufferer, having three days left in a thirty day supply of Risperdal, if he loses one of them, does not pull out a flashlight, sweep the kitchen, and search carefully until he finds it? When he finds it, he wakes his wife up and says “Rejoice with me for I have found the tablet I have lost.” Just so, I tell you that his wife will blink her eyes, grumble, roll over, and go back to sleep.
A SubManic Scheme
Posted on July 25, 2007 in Bipolar Disorder Podcasting
What if we had a podcast that did take us seriously as we described our experiences having our illness?
Rain
Posted on July 22, 2007 in Weather
On my way home, the slightest of storms. Raindrops hit the windshield and break into [[Pleiades_(star_cluster)|Pleiades]].
Creatively, water is easiest for me to present because it is always bubbling into the most lucid abstractions.
[tags]Southern California,weather,rain,storm[/tags]
Laguna Niguel
Posted on July 22, 2007 in Hikes and Trails Nature Photos
We went down to Laguna Niguel Regional Park for a walk around the lake and a few moments herding geese.
I’ve also posted a hike report.
Does anyone know what species/breed of goose these are?
[tags]birds, nature, photos, goose, geese, ornithology, avians[/tags]
Click on more to see important notes.
A Thought or Two on Sound Editing
Posted on July 21, 2007 in Podcasting Self Publishing
My recent foray into podcasting has put me in a spot of confusion. When I open Audacity and view a file, I behold a landscape of ridges and sharp gulches which I am told is language or music, which the computer reads as language or music, but remains beyond my enunciating by means of the signs.
The diagrams make me shy of working with sounds. This kind of cut and paste job includes more than words and I have not learned a method by which I can discern one word from another or recite/hum what is before me. The visual cues deceive, blind.
Work on photos using my paint shop program can be undertaken silently and quickly. This podcasting work requires an empty room because I must speak aloud and play sounds. I don’t want to be pestered with “what was that?” and “Who are you talking to?” The explanations only distract me. I don’t want to force myself to provide them while I work.
Wanting to work on a snippet of scratches puts me in a mood where I resent the tapping of my wife’s fingers on her keys. This requires a closed door, a pair of headphones, and no questions.
So good it is to be able to wipe away the traces of a quavering voice.
[tags]podcasting,sound editing,self-publishing,web broadcasting[/tags]
Going Going Gone….
Posted on July 21, 2007 in Bipolar Disorder
Bipolar disorder shrinks the brain. That explains the rattle.
Friday Xenartha Blogging – Echidna Survival
Posted on July 20, 2007 in Xenartha
Technically, the echidna isn’t a true anteater — that is not a member of the Xenartha — but it is worth our while to state that one variety of echidna — the long-beaked echidna of New Guinea — has been recently discovered to be ~not extinct~:
The long-beaked echidna named after well-known broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, Zaglossus Attenboroughi, was previously only known to science through a 1961 museum specimen.
Now a Zoological Society of London (ZSL) expedition to the Cyclops mountains on Papua island has identified the animals’ burrows and their ‘nose pokes’ – the holes in the ground made by the echidnas as they use their long noses to search for worms.
“We hope that Sir David Attenborough will be delighted to hear that his namesake species is still surviving in the wilds of the Papuan jungle,” Dr Jonathan Baillie of the ZSL said.
Hoorah-hoorah!
‘Shrooms and Effexor
Posted on July 19, 2007 in Psychotropics
Now and then, I read something in an advice column which makes me wonder why evolution hasn’t done a better job of weeding out the less mentally fit among us. I am not, of course, speaking of those of us who suffer from mood disorders or schizophrenia but of members of the druggie subculture who are looking for new and interesting experiences even if it means that your head explodes and turns your walls into a [[Jackson Pollock|Pollockesque]] mix of reds and pinkish grays:
Q: I am taking Effexor 150 mgs daily. In the long past I very much enjoyed an experience on magic mushrooms, ‘gold tops’. I would like to repeat this experience with a repeat of a very small amount of the fungi. What do you think of this?
Please do not say you must not do this, bad bad person. I really want to know what to expect as a result. I hope you can help me.
No, I wouldn’t call you a bad person. I’d call you an especially stupid one.
The advice columnist goes on to explain why this is a patently bad idea from a psychopharmaceutical standpoint. (Summary: Effexor and ‘shrooms both increase Serotonin levels. Too much Serotonin and you turn into a neurological textbook case. It’s no honor to be featured in the textbooks on this one, chummy.)
It has always struck me as the ultimate folly for people to want to acquire bizarre pharmaceuticals for the purpose of becoming — maybe temporarilly — mentally ill. You’d think that someone who’d been battered about by chemical shifts in the brain wouldn’t want to mess with that, but I suppose not having gold tops is like not getting to [[trepanation|trepan]] yourself.
Podcast 01: Hallucinations
Posted on July 18, 2007 in Bipolar Disorder Podcasts
[display_podcast]
My first podcast explores hallucinations as experienced by this bipolar. Various types of false experience are described and contrasted to those portrayed in A Beautiful Mind.
What I am at
Posted on July 17, 2007 in Site News
Currently familiarizing myself with the fundamentals of podcasting. While you wait for my first production, you can stick a pin in my new guest map.
Close up in Upper Newport Bay
Posted on July 15, 2007 in Photos Plants Travels - So Cal
I think my eye is coming back. And with my eye, my ear follows.
This photo and others come from the other side of Upper Newport Bay. The name of the plant is bladderpod. I love using my closeup lens.
[tags]marsh, estuary, bladderpod, native plants, Southern California, nature, Newport Beach, Upper Newport Bay, travels, photos, photography[/tags]
A Good Ear and Cortez, Colorado
Posted on July 15, 2007 in Disappointment Vacations
I’m at the computer late, my good habit of turning myself to bed at ten or so long abandoned. Playing solitaire, a game called Red and Black. And while I click on the cards against a red sunset, I think of a time when we found the one “California Cuisine” restaurant in Cortez, Colorado, not far from Mesa Verde National Park. I took a lot of pictures — now they are gone or lost in some box — and I remembered that I ordered red snapper, which surprised me to be on the menu of a bistro located nearly a thousand miles from the ocean where it found itself dragged up from the depths, its eyes bulging from the loss of pressure.
And tonight I think about what it takes to be a good ear, nonjudgemental ear. You don’t try to solve problems unless you are truly in key with the soul you give your time to. When I am at my best I am like that. And, as the scarlet clouds of Cortez, as the lights fade on that boulevard that stretches out into Route 666, I doubt that I have ever known a friend who has tolerated me as long as I have tolerated others, except Lynn. A few think that the listening can be reciprocal — you getting what you put in — but it never is. I’ve been a giver and when I look around for my own place, I find myself gasping like a sea bass or a blue-green rock cod, choking on an atmosphere which is not my own.
The last time I trusted someone I got burnt. And now others seem to be angry with me because I am watchful, because I don’t tell stories about what is really happening in my life right now and because I don’t open my heart for comment.
