The Hurt
(30 August - 8 September 2002)
8 September 2002
-A hard day with a bad back & day number four of my latest migraine. But
so many good things about finally being in a place we can call home.
7 September 2002
[from Clovis, California]
-We have signed our souls away to AT&T cable, the worst monopolistic piece of
crud in the Bay Area. I mean, I like them, heh heh. I probably shouldn't
blast them till they set an installation date...
-Due to many factors: general lethargy, the need to wrap things up 'round
here, & timing among them, the official move date is not today. It
will be tomorrow instead.
-From the current book I'm reading, Tender is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald),
some lines I've been paraphrasing on this page & elsewhere for years, but
quite crisply put almost 70 years ago: "One writes of scars healed,
a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in
the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to
the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more
comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may
not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing
to be done about it." The book could be, despite some setbacks of
its era, the best I've read this year, but I still have a ways to go in it.
It's full of quotes like that.
6 September 2002
[from Clovis,
California]
-DSL was out round here almost the whole day, but the guy who came to
fix it got lots of overtime pay for working long into the night. Meantime, I was babysitting some more for the
resident niece, Meggy-Liz. She's working on the attention-span thing. I think.
5 September 2002
[from Clovis,
California]
-The horror, the horror.
-My dreams. Oh, my dreams. 9
(or maybe 4) is going to haunt me for a while. Among many other things.
-I never said science was the borg...
& I know I've been very anti-science & anti-psych sometimes... my point here is that the big enemy is people's
popular perceptions. The media DOES matter, when it's helping propogate the belief that bipolarity is the same as
cancer of the mind... when that idea gets popularly entrenched, then much is lost. Some psych things do good things.
Sometimes drugs "work" for people, though I personally think those people would be better off doing other
things. But if popular perceptions want to edit extreme feeling of emotion out of the human code, before or 2 years
after birth, I get scared. & I must protest. I also think fire-breathing's in the eye of the beholder...
the urge to make lots of money is just as detrimental to the self & others as bad bipolarity, but that is encouraged
by our society, while feeling extreme emotions is not. The values America gave us are not cut & dried as the
best, or in my opinion, even particularly tolerable.
4 September 2002
-Strike everything I ever said about this place
being small... it's HUGE! Once you put stuff in a place, it never fails that the place enlarges
dramatically.
-Moving can really bring out the worst in people. Myself included.
-Just a couple more
days.
3 September 2002
[from Clovis,
California]
-On the threshhold of a whole new era.
-I actually made a lot of
progress at RMI today, which makes me quite contented about working there.
-A couple things, since Kate & Jenny had
some interesting things to
say about mental health. & they may know what the average reader may not... that my extreme feelings on this
topic extend well beyond objections to medicating bipolarity... in fact, they extend into every realm of mental health.
But I don't want to go there just yet... except to say that I believe that THOUGHT is the way out of one's problems,
or more importantly, into controlling one's problems sufficiently. Just as I see drugs as a cop-out for dealing with
life &/or making it better, so mental meds are a cop-out for other forms of dealing. But not to put too fine a
point on that... I'm obviously not trying to make negative judgments about my friends... & the usual disclaimers.
Two main issues, with that outta the way: voluntary choice & happiness. On choice: my concern
is that depression or bipolarity or any other type of perspective (mis)labeled as a disorder is considered by the
mainstream community more & more like cancer or AIDS: in other words, universally undesirable. This scares
me, because I like being "bipolar", feeling the real ups & downs of life. The manic moments are some
of the best in my life, giving me the energy to actually feel inspiration in a way I doubt many people ever feel.
But in a world I see around the corner, kids & eventually pre-kids (genetic engineering) will not get to be who
they are... their personality will be altered out of them in a way that a fatal disease would be. This not only
diminishes potential for art among society, but for personality in people... isn't the most fundamental violation of rights
to deny somone their personal perspective?! Kids don't have the choice, & that's what this article was about.
More importantly, happiness: who decided that the proper state of being was happiness? I think you're
pretty messed up in this world if you're happy all the time, or even a massive amount of it. It indicates a blindness
& lack of compassion toward the horrors that are most experiences on this planet for most people. Even if your
own life is great (as mine now is), you still ought to be sad for all the people who are suffering, or you're not fully
human. I don't think happiness should be the ultimate goal, let well alone the expected norm. Maybe when this
world improves a good deal, but that will start with not assuming that difficult feelings mean it's time to run
away, covering our eyes & ears.
2 September 2002
[from Clovis,
California]
-An article from the 19 August Time Magazine has really made me angry.
I knew it would... I read it to see just how angry I'd get, & how far from reality the "mental health"
professional world has gotten. It's really freaky. The article was their cover story about manic-depression, now
titled "bipoloar disorder". That phrase is the beginning of what I think is wrong about perceptions of
manic-depression... shouldn't people have 2 poles? Isn't that what it means to have poles? Anyway, the article
offers a 40-point checklist for bipolarity (I'll use the term for simplicity's sake)... I got 29 (20+ is supposed to be the
red flag for bipolarity). & the way they talk about it, it's certainly the way I live, the way my mind works, in
many many ways. Regardless, I've always felt that it's a good way to live, a realistic, fully emotionally healthy way
to live, a logical way, & a better way than "normal life". The article has failed to change my mind at
all, but has revealed some interesting things. Apparently, you're not normal unless alcohol & drugs can be a
regular part of your life... because the only adult examples they have of really negative things happening to bipolars are
after they drink a lot, or sometimes take other drugs. The child examples display slightly exaggerated difficult
child behavior that requires some control... the same way any child needs to learn more self-control as they grow up.
But the really disturbing thing is the display of creative geniuses, ranging from Hemingway to Poe to Woolf to Van
Gogh, on the side of one of the article's pages... geniuses who, according to the article's values, would be medicated at age five
so they stopped feeling & thinking by age twenty & never could create works beyond the normal quality. That's
what's thought of as best: be happy & have flattened emotions at the expense of creative/interesting thought.
Finally, a girl about my age wrote a book about overcoming bipolarity, to which the concluding statement (from what I
could tell) was essentially "I love Big Brother". & you wonder why I worry about genetic engineering
& medical/mental "science".
1 September 2002
[from Clovis,
California]
-September. That's just ridiculous.
-I hate gender, as a
concept. So frustrating living in a world where gender is imprinted on so much of daily life, yet I feel no
attachment to it whatsoever. How can I declare myself as ungendered? Certainly less vital than being without
national citizenship, but still important.
-Why?!
31 August 2002
[from Clovis,
California]
-The Good Girl is quite a bit about PLB & a whole lot about
me if I ever started drinking. It is for the former fact, mostly, & the glorification thereof, that I hated
it.
30 August 2002
[from Clovis,
California]
-Feelings of apprehension/anticipation. Mostly, most likely,
wishful thinking.
-It's like weekends actually matter again.
Introspection, My Worst
Friend* (Current)
Ye Olde Archive (Past)
The Blue Pyramid (Source)
Tell me this is not the end...*
*-lyrics from an as-yet unreleased song, "The Same Old
Frontiers",
by SWClayton.