dancing star

[audio:fallingman.mp3]

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. Anais Nin

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know some people are terrified of the bomb. But then some people are terrified to be seen carrying a modern screen magazine. Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most. Bob Dylan

The most successful people are those who are good at plan B. James Yorke

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers. M. Scott Peck

You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star. Nietzsche

Chaos and Order are not enemies, only opposites. Richard Garriott

Just some things to help me think….

Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air

This post was originally a comment, from the last post, in reply to a comment from PA, and it might not make any sense in parts, but I figure, why waste a load of words on a comment, when I can recycle it as a post and save myself some bother? Energy efficient that is… Go with it. You know you want to. 

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it. – Edward R. Murrow

I did a template change in lieu of actually writing anything.
I feel bad for not writing, but then, I wonder why? In case I lose the two or three people who occasionally check my blog? Kind of pointless really. Its not why I started a blog, but theres always that pressure isn’t there? To entertain…It kind of spoils it for me. And I have lost a sense of that community with some of my favourite bloggers going quiet, or just plain vanishing. Everyone seems quiet recently.
And of course I am busy with work, so can’t afford to spend a whole day spilling my guts onto a page. Or rather, preparing to spill my guts, and then spending an hour actually translating the spillage into words

And., there’s the depressive guilt that always comes when you’re actually feeling okay, and not really that depressed. I feel like I shouldn’t write about good things because it will just piss off everyone I know in the whole world because everyone I know is manically depressed, bipolar, suicidal, or otherwise generally hacked off with life.

Pole to Polar has blogged recently about the whole Top Trumps of madness scenario (does Top Trumps work as a metaphor over the pond? Not sure) so I won’t linger too much on that. The ‘I am madder than thou’ one upmanship. I feel faintly embarassed at feeling relatively ok. But I shouldn’t, because I’ve struggled to get to a state of stability for so long, and I’ve sacrificed so much to get here.
Speaking of Pole to Polar, they blogrolled me a while back, but never ever answer any of my comments or acknowledge my presence in their electronic world. I find it a bit spooky. I get paranoid. Am I just saying really stupid stuff and being ignored? Theyre not a huge responder to comments like some bloggers, but I’ve seen a fair few responses to other people, but never to me. Maybe they’re scared of responding to me? Maybe I am looking at it the wrong way…maybe they think I am weird and don;’t respond in case it encourages me But then why blogroll me?
Oh, I don’t know. These are the tiny tiny details that slightly worry mentalists even when they’re reasonably stable. I don’t wake up in the night screaming ‘why won’t they talk to me!’ but you know…it nags doesn’t it…

It brings me neatly onto another topic that has been nibbling at my cortex recently…the whole blog thing…now I can really only see the point of blogging if you get comments, and you respond to comments, and you can actually have a meaningful debate between intelligent people. Just blogging, and getting nothing back, to me, is a bit pointless. Yes ok, it gets the thoughts out, but I am looking always to growth and progression, and I know full well that listening only to myself and my own points of view is limiting and will only lead to me thinking a load of utter mad nonsense. We all need other voices to drag us (kicking and screaming) back to ground zero, the centre of our mentalist wanderings. We, especially need dialogue because we are all prone to those madcap Pirsig-like blinkered voyages into proving the world is round using only the power of our minds.
You (PA, still talking to you yes) have a fair amount of commenters, and respond well, and therefore get some discussion going, when you’re not blogging about stuff that people don’t know what to say to of course. You have been blogging for a good while now, you blog, well, a lot, and have built up a number of readers, some from the medical sector, some from the mentalist sector, some from the kinky lesbian freak sector etc.
Thats basically what it takes to get a goodly amount of commenters. That and doing a lot of commenting yourself.
And I think being female is good, as its reasonably rare for guys to bother commenting on other guys blogs. Don’t know why…I do it, but it is quite rare.

I am losing the thread…
Erm. Anyway. I want more discussion on my blog. But I don’t blog enough, I have no way of attracting enough intelligent people here, and it all seems a waste of time. And the people I like are the very people who just explode and then disappear. Regularly. Its a pain.
Ok. Fuck it. I just posted in the comments section. At least that way I won’t attract any more readers! You have to be really fucking dedicated to check the comments section of a 2 week old post! Well, check the latest comments list anyway. Which I do at all the blogs I read, but I don’t know how many people do.
you see, I’d love to ask a load of questions about how people blog, and how they read, but I’d get maybe two answers, so it would just be depressing. Maybe I should just do guest blogs on a more popular and hip blog. Steal an audience…
Minx? Dame? You need a blogger?

The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate – Joseph Priestley

COMMUNIQUE

****Incoming message from the big giant Ian*****

‘… the history of Society is only, after all, a symptom of increasingly more organised madness.’ - Kilgore Trout

Bill used to give himself lots of lateral downtime, or so he called it. This would involve him, maybe a beer and smoke, and lots of time drinking tea. It would help his creative preserves he said, sort of allowing himself to become sort of a better being, he said.
Strange thing was, Bill never did seem to get any better as the weeks would slip by.
Then one day, there was mum making mince in the kitchen on this summery evening and Bill turned from where he sat on the backdoor step , saying casually
“Thats it Marjorie, i have decided its probably better if i lived the rest of my life as a Bedouin Dancer”
and so off he went. I never did find out, but i like to think that somewhere in the corner of the world Bill does still whirl away in long desert robes.
And so it went.
***
When i was 23 i believed my friend was trying to poison me. I saw the vapours, and we didn’t like each other too much at the time anyway.
When i was 21 i believed Pearl Jam wrote a song about having seen me at a live gig.
When my Dad was fifty, my sister once told him about eating healthily, eating pasta. He always counted the pasta shells: thirty to make a good meal.
And on it went.
***
All life is, is one whole big collection of stories. I made this decision years after hearing that infamous ‘The Whole World’s a Stage, and we merely actors upon it’ – it took me a while to really grasp it Shakespeare, i guess i was always a windowshopper decider. Just like all the books on my shelves over the years have grown and shrunk, my life has been filled up with faces and lives and ideas. Little fragments of dreams and other worlds appearing and gently snuffing out, forever forgotten. Some enduring books and even whole collections stand constant and dusty, assured of their faded importance.
Life doesn’t have to make sense.
***
So this was it, i had decided to not sleep with my ex tonight. I would go around, collect some of my stuff, we’ll talk and watch a movie, she will see that i am still a nice guy and i will leave this evening both of us feeling like we are better individuals. I felt good, imagining myself like a Sufi Prince detached and joyful about my life. This would just be the beginning, i would start being a better human being across the board; i’d be able to politely turn down the lures of drink or boredom or melodrama. I’d start studying again and using my life creatively.
The next morning found me sauntering back home, and so on it went.
***
maybe i should get off the tablets-
i was chatting to a friend of mine today, this was the guy who told me a while ago: ‘It takes three years to recover from a breakdown’,
he seemed to be a little sad this time. I don’t know, something in his eyes maybe. My friend’s an ex-soldier, living on a frantic low income as a builder. he drinks hard, harsh tinnies in the town square – he’s a great guy; he’s always willing to have a cheery word. I remember once, before work i was sat, 8:45am in one of his old cars, with two of the local town street celebrities. We passed around some harsh weed and one of the guys behind me started going on about the beer he’d spilt in his lap. He’s got a wonderful alliterative use of the most disgusting swearwords of all time. The ex-soldier start saying ‘calm down, calm down’ in that slightly scary paranoid way: this was it, i thought. My Life is a Comedy. I am a bizarre rerun of Last of the Summer Wine.
He asked me what i was doing with myself when i saw him today, i always say an embarressed ‘Nothing.’ Shit. What are you supposed to say to that? I wander around morose, i shake with fear in my own home, i try to get by. He always gives me strange advice about ‘Doing What You Want To Do!’ going back to university, become a proffessional guitarist. I like him for that.
But today he seemed a little sad, almost as if he sensed my embarrasment, my reticience at our usual, ritualized question.
It takes three years to get over a nervous breakdown, my last breakdown was 20 months ago.
And so it goes.
***
Earlier this year i wrote a story about an improbable interview between various future me’s. They had all been different versions of me from different future dimensions, about six years from now. The current me (2007 me that is) interviewed them.
They kept on saying the same thing.
***
The first time i had sex was on a friends sofa at the end of a party. I was stoned, and fumbled a lot. The lass who had chosen me had a little daughter, only a baby, and she was committed to study Law and maybe go to University so she could get to know how to keep custody of her kid. i sometimes wonder what happened to her and her kid, what her alternate future dimensionary self would be like. I actually had an experience of meeting a future alternate (but at the time current i should say) dimensionary version of another young mother i knew.
Her name was Dannielle …(Bossinau?? I never could figure out how to say or spell her name). We knew each other as juniors and kids, i had a bit of a crush on her.
One day a friend in a college class was detailing to me the finer points of the CB radio. It was a little world that suddenly opened up for him who was like me i guess, a bit of a loser. A little whole community of people who talked to their husbands working on the passing boats, people chatting away about their corners of their world and the tasteless obsession of listening-in to the emergency service radios. Anyway, it turned out he had talked to Dannielle! He didn’t know her, but apparently she’d asked after me because she found out we both went to the same college. She’d dropped out after school, and had a kid. She lived with her parents, and was cheery.
I never heard about her again for years until i met her future (but at the time current) alternate dimensionary self. One summer break from University i bumped into her outside her old house just a street away from my estate. She looked really good, had her baby with her and i was struck by how things could have been different, how my expectations of her were so removed from this version of her.
Maybe i’ve got a single-mother thing.
***
When i was 28 i still believe that maybe, somehow improbably my future could be ’saved’ by a glorious secret talent or luck or divine will.
When my Dad was 28 he believed that if he opened the front door a gunman would blow his legs off.
Puts it in perspective, sometimes.
***
Another other girl i had an unbearable crush on was my sister’s best friend. Her brother didn’t have any future alternate dimensionary selves. Her brother and his best friend killed himself in his car. He used to help me out at the Boys Brigade Youth Club. I kinda idolized him, in a teenage way. The dissappearence of his future alternative selves had a huge impact in our community, far more than i had realised until, years later my ex-fiancee (who had come from the same town i had, had used to go to the same places but we had met in a far off university in another Country) had told me the story of the couple of well-liked boys who had killed themselves in their car outside one of my old haunts.
Their tragedy escaped me really, like a transatlantic cement truck gliding past me on a foggy night. But the wider community didn’t know that my sister’s best friend’s brother had written what i still think is one of the most touching comments upon life. Apparently a part of it read; that all he wanted to do was to go live in Middle Earth with the elves.
***
One alternate me did most of the things i never did. When he was 9 he really believed in the power of that title ‘Man of the Match’ for throwing himself bodily against opponants as Defender. Shit. Why not- its not as if he was ever going to score or anything. He liked winning the mock boxing fights my friends used to have at 15. He probably even learned to write well, get good marks at Literature and now works as a clerk or a bookseller. His life is probably small, still in Southend but he feels comfortable, and confident, happy.
He’s lucky, he never made the mistakes i did, or the divine will looked favourably on his life. Just think, if there really are infinite dimensions then in one of them there is the Perfect You!!
What a jerk they would be at parties.
I wonder if the other alternate me sometimes stops at a window, before he answers his partner cheerfully and honestly as he always does. I wonder if he too is ever scared that Reality can shrink schizophrenically, in fragments.
***
There is this state i get into sometimes, when i’m really really high that somehow all of these stories make sense… My life is part of some big pattern, and its no big deal to worry about anyway. It’s peaceful.
***
Another alternative future me i bump into regularly goes to television and radio production shows. The kinds which like audiences to cheer and laugh or make votes and things. He tells me that if junkies were given adequate places to live, with reasonable rents you wouldn’t have this image of them all living on mattresses in squatted flats robbing bins for food. Poverty and addiction are directly related, as the Ratfarm experiments showed. If you were given a better and better environment to expand into you would, logically have no reason to try to escape it.
I feel sorry for this future alternative me. He’s doing well, but he became better friends than i did with Adam and Smiley, two of the older guys in my college philosophy class.
Red haired anarchist-buddhist Adam doesn’t have any future dimensionary selves either – we never knew but Adam had a genetic heart complaint, and once, taking whizz he just dropped down dead. Adam himself knew about it of course, which was probably why he started taking the whizz. I guess he just didn’t like having all these alternative future dimensionary selves running around.
***

(sub)missive from: Sacred Chao Brigade. Hail Eris.

let it go

I may still have a visitor or two left. I think so at least.
This has not been the most interesting of blogs lately, but it was never my intention to edify and entertain, nor even, like some other bloggers, the purpose to educate on the nature of mental health. I blog when I need to speak, and when I have something I want to say. Or when I’m just plain bored.

It would be impossible for me at the moment to trawl through what has been happening in my life, my emotions, my hopes, fears and dreams. Life is, as it always has been, an adventure with infinite vistas. Look one way and you miss something equally amazing over there…And there…

I am in contact with anyone who even vaguely cares about me, so they know I am ok. And I am ok. I am pretty good to be honest. I feel guilt for having the temerity to feel less than distraught. Or like killing myself. I think I can lay the kudos for this emotional renaissance at the door of prozac, but I also hope that in some vital ways I have grown, and matured, and have learned to handle life with a smidgen of sense. Have I actually learned something from the boulevard of broken dreams that is my life? A little. Maybe. I hope so. I like to think that life can improve. I cling to that hope. Its what keeps me going. Keeps me coming back for more.

I know though, that without prozac I would probably be a total mess right now, and I am glad I am not, for I would be missing so much wonder. Life is sorrow, but that is just one aspect. Acknowledge the sorrow, and let it go. Life is still there, waiting…

let it go–the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise–let it go it
was sworn to
xxxxxxxxxxxxxgo

let them go–the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers–you must let them go they
were born
xxxxxxxxxxto go

let all go–the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things–let all go
dear
xxxx so comes love

Vows

Words like violence
Break the silence
Come crashing in
Into my little world
Painful to me
Pierce right through me
Can’t you understand
Oh my little girl

All I ever wanted
All I ever needed
Is here in my arms
Words are very unnecessary
They can only do harm

Vows are spoken
To be broken
Feelings are intense
Words are trivial
Pleasures remain
So does the pain
Words are meaningless
And forgettable

All I ever wanted
All I ever needed
Is here in my arms
Words are very unnecessary
They can only do harm

I wonder how many emotions it is possible to feel all at once before you just, kind of, explode?

Boredom strikes

Ok…I’m bored. Officially bored.
I think the arrival of summer has done it. I get all antsy at this time of year and want to do crazy stuff, mostly travelling, doing mad stuff, and generally being irresponsible.
I want to talk to total strangers, do stuff I don’t normally do, get on planes to random destinations…
Somebody talk to me! I’m even getting bored of blogs…all we do is sit in our little ivory towers chucking bits of fluff at each other…where did the love go?
Well, I do talk to a couple of people through email and IM, but it’s not good enough. I need more.
My google id is gloomferret@googlemail.com. go ahead. add me, talk to me when you’re feeling frisky. Or not. Anything!
Otherwise, email me with something interesting about yourself, or what youre doing in life, or suggestions to relieve my boredom.
Come on people! If I don’t get some help I’ll end up on a plane somewhere weird…

Waiting for the kick-off

Thats how I feel. The pre-match posturing is going in my head, theres lots of faffing around, lots of delays, conjecture, a few minor celebrity interviews, but theres a tension, as everyone waits for the big event.

Before I begin to warble, can I point out the new ferretsounds device in the top right. See it? (points with much grandiosity like a be-leotarded magicians assistant, or a retarded assistant more likely) It will be populated with some soundtracks to my gloommusings, so you too can sing along as you read. If you have any requests, just give me a shout.
you need to click on a tune of choice to get it to start. I didn’t want to bombard people with tunes without prior consent. That would be rude, and may result in the onset of severe depression in many previously happy people.
The only problem with the clever device is that if you click to a different page in ferretworld, it resets, so don’t click if you’re getting into a tune! There’s no fastforward on this thing…you’ll have to sit through the whole track again. Nooooooooooooooo!

If you get hooked on one of the tunes, just contact me and I will ‘enable‘ the supply of the merchandise. I don’t want you addicts sucking off my bandwidth to feed your filthy music habits.

So. Back to me. Its why you’re all (all! Like theres more than 2 of you…isn’t the internet such a sad place.) here after all. Lord knows why (and I’m sure that he does…I wish he’d explain it to me sometime…)
Yes. Its going to be one of those posts, with branching parentheses (great name for a band btw) and subplots, flashbacks and all manner of jiggerypokery that’ll leave you dizzy and weak at the knees.
At the end of it, I still won’t have constructed any kind of theme or overarching subtext or indeed a moral, and you’ll be left feeling cheated and somewhat let down. This post is beginning to sound like one of my relationships isn’t it?

We don’t know ferret, you never tell us anything juicy like that…

Oh god, now I’m turning all minxy, I can’t have that. She’s a total basketcase. Stop it right now or you’ll be flying around the world looking for a good time. (I said stop it!)

I need a beginning. Yes I know I had a perfectly good one, but I went and ruined it by digressing.
Start over. Deep breath.

I have a migraine starting. Hows that for a good start? My right eyeball feels like someone is trying to poke it out by thrusting a stick through my head from the back of the skull and forcing my eyeball out from behind.
I trust this is not in fact the case.
I also feel as if my sinuses are closing down, in a way akin to when there is a hull breach and the blast doors automatically seal to preserve the atmospheric pressure. What do you mean you have no idea what I’m talking about? Have you never being in an interstellar vehicle when there is a hull breach? Philistines.

To combat this evil brainmonster I am going to down a cup of freshly pressed columbian (coffee not cocaine, mores the pity) and 50mg of sumatriptan. The general onset of this combo usually takes about 20-45 minutes depending on how quickly I take it when the migraine starts moving in, and whether I can relax or not while its doing its thing. Sumatriptan causes constriction of the blood vessels in the head, and dilation of said blood vessels is reckoned to be a reason for migraines. Caffeine also constricts blood vessels in the head, hence its addition to some headache tablets.
Caffeine alone doesn’t help my migraines, but in combination with the sumatriptan seems to work better than the sumatriptan alone, so theres some kind of synergy going on there.
Theres also a whole tie-in with sumatriptan acting as a serotonin leveller, because serotonin tends to go totally wonky prior to migraine attacks.
Are my migraines linked with the depression? Most probably. When I started on prozac the frequency of migraine attacks reduced quite a bit. I still get them once or twice a week. When I was on Citalopram a while back, I had a period where I maybe 4-5 days of the week with a migraine. If I wasn’t depressed before, having a headache every day sure would have done it. Its the reason I had to come off citalopram. It worked pretty well on me, but having a headache is no improvement on being depressed. I was just miserable for a different reason, only with a migraine I couldn’t even do anything at all. At least miserable you can kind of slope around looking mournful, eating the occasional bit of toast and marmite and grumbling.

Oh. Woe is me.

Sumatriptan is wonderful though. I only found it 2 years ago, shortly after my nervous breakdown and getting my current doctor, who, although not a great conversationalist is pretty good at handing out the right drugs, and does at least listen to my ramblings about what drug I want to try next. Its had a fairly amazing impact on my life. Previously when a migraine hit me, I’d be out of action for at least 24 hours. People who don’t get migraines don’t quite understand what all the fuss is about. They work through headaches, why can’t you? Seriously. A headache is something that migraine sufferers consider a precursor to actual pain. I tend to ponder on a headache for a few hours, trying to assess whether it is going to evolve and worsen into a migraine. A headache is childs play. Of course you can work through them. They don’t really hurt that much.
A migraine is like being stabbed in the head, eyeball, temple, repeatedly, for hours, while you are dripfed psychotropic drugs that make you nauseous, and make your vision totally screwed up. Objects take on a curious quality, they shine, and everything has an odd timelapse quality, making trails when you move your head. Light is painful. Noise is unbearable.
Pffft to your headache.

Anyway…I’ve been writing this post for about an hour and a half now. The sumatriptan is starting to take effect. I haven’t actually being writing for that long. I keep doing other things. I can’t look directly at the screen too long because its too bright. I would put on my new prescription shades, but they are a slightly different shape to my glasses and my eyes don’t want to have to deal with the different perspective they lend to the world while I’m in this state.

I should get to some point or other, but what the hell. This rambling is keeping my mind occupied and stopping me thinking about all the things I should have done this week but haven’t.

Ok. the triptan is really starting to make me stoned now, so I’m going to publish this and add to it hopefully as we go along.
My mind is melting. Which is nice. Seek respite in oblivion. Thats the ticket.

Jesus wants me for a sunbeam.

beaker 001

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beaker 001, originally uploaded by gloomferret.

Just got a new camera so I’m testing it out on beaker

Flickr

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