Ghosts
One of my favorite poems by the MC of the open mic I go to
“The journey is long and full of cancer
Sweat shops, poisoned crops, lead-laced water
And rare neurological disease”
Mental Advent
A parody of advent, for people who the church wished didn’t exist.
Week 1: The Empowerment Candle – Hope is great but without power it usually just melts away. For example if you are in an abusive or exploitative situation, having power is what counters these people and buys one hope. Even being able to believe in religion is a form of power because you need to play cognitive tricks to pretend there is a god there that loves you and get the placebo response from these practices which sustain you.
Week 2: The Ativan Candle – The times I felt the most peace were when I was on the anti anxiety drug Ativan. People bemoan the fact that so many people are hooked on drugs and alcohol but there’s a reason for this. They work! Religion can work for some people but requires a lot of brain power, an acrobatic act of holding on and letting go, that is out of reach for a lot of people, especially those with mental illnesses.
Week 3: The Mania Candle – Joy is great too but is just a weasel word that, when pressed, Christians admit doesn’t mean anything even close to happiness or pleasure. The only time I experienced the Holy Spirit moving was when I was manic so I think mania should get a better hearing.
Week 4: The Significant Other Candle – Because the culture is so hyper individualistic often a significant other is your only true friend (this is particularly true if you are male). Obviously love is harder to come by the less healthy you are but even bad relationships should be celebrated because people are reaching out and trying. Of course this day you should celebrate looking good and making a lot of money because these are so important in finding love.
Purple Motion
One of my favorite tracker artists of all time Purple Motion just released his CD on Spotify. You can see a YouTube Version.
Tracker music was from the Amiga days when you had a lot of synthesized instruments and sampled ones. The parameters made for a really unique sound. I owned an Amiga 600 so part of it is nostalgia.
epistemology of mental illness
I think on a deep level the millennial generation’s (1 in 4 of us has a mental illness) drift away from religion and traditional moral constructions is explainable by something I like to call an “epistemology of mental illness”. Things simply don’t work the same on a deeply human level. Take my poem
psychology says we want to kill ourselves when we are insane
and want to live when we are sane
bipolar disorder says exactly the opposite
I and lots of bipolar people live in an inverted reality. Mostly because depression is so powerful it becomes reality so escaping reality becomes the only way to really live.
mental illness a template
your emotions divorced
from your circumstances
and they wonder why we love getting high
I can watch the most beautiful sunset and feel like shit and sit by a heating vent and feel great because my emotions are at the whim of the chemicals in my brain and little else. And then we have people using alcohol and drugs to actively divorce their emotions from their circumstances, partying. But the more you do the more divorced they become and it’s a vicious cycle.
Mania is a starred Mario
But back to depression
You pick up with the amount of fortitude
You left off with
The starred Mario analogy describes the recklessness of mania, how it makes you feel invincible and this is it’s beauty but also it’s bane, as this recklessness can cost you falling through the bottom of the screen which you are not protected from.
But back to depression, the amount of fortitude is like a the same variable in two different namespaces, non depressive namespace and depression namespace. Modifications in one namespace doesn’t affect the other. So when you leave non-depression you pick up with the amount of fortitude possessed in your depressive state. This flies in the face of everything religion and traditional culture tells you, because rest and joy are supposed to tide you through the bad times.
(anti natalism)
if life truly were a gift
mine would be received as one
One of the Christian tropes is the “sanctity of life”. Apparently it doesn’t cover how you get treated in church because I don’t get treated well there so I’ve stopped going. Also, what is your value worth if you can’t cash it out? If your therapist thinks you’re worth something that’s great, but once you walk out the door of that therapist’s office if you can’t cash out that said worth on a date, at a job interview, or in church, what is it really worth? It’s like salt that doesn’t have its saltiness.
Accessibility Episode
My friend Liz talks about web accessibility and disability. Long but well worth it.
For those of you who can’t get the embed here is the link.
playing to the sound guy
I feel like no one reads my blogs anymore which causes me not to write for them which is a vicious cycle that keeps going. I wish I had my Xanga back, I had regular readers then and that motivated me to write.
Shame Away
Who would have thought, you couldn’t shame away a disability!
Piece of History
Really interesting piece of history pertaining to slavery.
You’ll Never Be as Radical as This 18th-Century Quaker Dwarf
Men are different than women
Imagine if you had the ability to clone adults with technology similar to the Star Trek transporter. If you cloned a desirable women there would be another desirable women. If you cloned a desirable man not so much. This is because you’d have to clone his good job as well and simple economics wouldn’t make that possible.
Trust
According to a Pew survey millennials are not trusting:
Millennials are less trusting of others than older Americans are. Asked a long-standing social science survey question, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people,” just 19% of Millennials say most people can be trusted, compared with 31% of Gen Xers, 37% of Silents and 40% of Boomers.
I think this mistrust informs our perception of value. Pretend you are in a casino at a poker table. But you don’t trust that the poker chips can be cashed out so you don’t bother playing. For a lot of us, a thing’s value isn’t derived from what it is claimed, it is derived from how easily it can be cashed out. Think of the “you have innate worth” trope that gets trotted out time and time again in modern psychology. We ask, why can’t our supposed “worth” be cashed out anywhere but the therapist’s office. Why can’t it be cashed out at the job interview or in church or at the club? And if it can’t be is this worth worth anything in the first place?
When there is mistrust in the financial markets everyone flocks to gold. When there is mistrust present in a generation people flock to things that can be seen and felt. We flock to pets, platonic relationships and nature. Religion, marriage, and political parties not so much. The bigger of a group of people involved in something generally the worse the results. As I wrote in my other blog, trusting is deferring to a person or institution with power with a best case scenario of breaking even.