hmmm...
This is how things happen...
Someone leaves a comment on your blog. You go visit their blog and read a bit. The person is in Western Australia but is originally from Zimbabwe, and writes about Zimbabwe.
Later, you're in a shopping centre ("mall" for Yanks and Victorians) and you're browsing through an Angus & Robertson book sale stall. the books are super cheap. You spy one which is a modern history of Zimbabwe.
So you buy the book...
Now you're reading it. And Proo's Shipping News... And it's all very slow going... Why does depression make reading so difficult? Is depression just a cop-out? Wouldn't it be better if depressives were just put up against the wall and shot for being a scourge on society? Certainly an elegant solution to a very messy problem...
Someone leaves a comment on your blog. You go visit their blog and read a bit. The person is in Western Australia but is originally from Zimbabwe, and writes about Zimbabwe.
Later, you're in a shopping centre ("mall" for Yanks and Victorians) and you're browsing through an Angus & Robertson book sale stall. the books are super cheap. You spy one which is a modern history of Zimbabwe.
So you buy the book...
Now you're reading it. And Proo's Shipping News... And it's all very slow going... Why does depression make reading so difficult? Is depression just a cop-out? Wouldn't it be better if depressives were just put up against the wall and shot for being a scourge on society? Certainly an elegant solution to a very messy problem...
posted by The Editor at
12:34 AM
17 Comments:
I know what you mean, Ron.
And then I went mad and wrote the next blog item...
Keep well, old son... :-)
In the future, you will write a post such as only depressives can write, that will alarm the rest of us who were just about to sleep through another day. Naw, I wouldn't go shooting the depressives.
but that is sad about reading. I had just enough of an attack of anxiety and depression in college that I needed meds for a few months. I was in the midst of reading Giles Goat Boy by Barth. I have never been able to pick up the book in the 40 years since so I could finish it. Odd..I can remember the characters and conceits of the book, and a bit of its plot [it only has a bit;] and I thought it was funny as I read it...but nope, can't bear to look at it.
I think this whole "losing the plot" thing has an age dimension attached to it. If it happens to you when you're young, you seriously fight it tooth and nail because the rest of your life depends upon it.
But when it happens to you later in life, epecially after you've already more or less had enough of this world and have given up to a large degree, then there's not such an urgency to beat one's daemons, and one can easily slide into resignation as I have done.
And another thing... If I were to produce a miracle of modern science and mental health, and successfully jump through all the therapeutic hoops, and become cured of my depression and anxiety, those vultures at Veterans Affairs would use this miracle to stop my pension on those very grounds. Then I would become even more depressed, go completely asocial and live in the bush, hit the grog, and top myself when it all gets too bad, probably during a cold winter sleeping rough (urban jungles don't do it for me, I'd have to kill too many other hobos just to stay alive - not good for a pacifist - I'd rather top myself straight-up), thereby saving society a bundle...
Is that pathetic enough for you?
So shoot me! (sick grin included)
re "do you want to Know, or Not Know" - morons are all really content people. They care about who might win on a TV game show, they actually watch the Logies show. Governments love them -so easily manipulated.
I am stressing about that poor child in the ICU ... AGAIN; and Chernobyl (see Suki's blog), and irritated that the Australian Red Cross has yet to distribute ANY of the tsunami donations of a year ago (true, they have not); I am wrung out for all the poor animals illtreated everywhere; and I am in constant neuropathic pain.
where was I?
Oh yeah - it's a crime that it's a crime to suicide.
I often wonder why everybody really really wants to live
(ie: "Kylie's BATTLE with cancer" - she's got a million bucks and she's seen Paris - why 'battle'?).
PS Let me recommend that you read some Carl Hiaasen instead of Annie Proo.
Google him for instant smirkiness.
Poor little Honey Bear, would you like to borrow my 'Famous Five' books?
And what do you mean shopping mall for Victorians? That's yank talk.
Brownie, I stopped giving to the Red Cross after they forgot to propmptly pass on the money I gave to them for the Bali victims. And I tell them so every time they send me mail via a neat RETURNED TO SENDER BECAUSE... thing that I do with them. I do the same with Time magazine junk mail. THEY get to pay the postage...
I agree with your musings about suicide and the mad craving to live and I will Google Carl Hiaasen. But I will persist with Proo's Noos...
JahTeh, I read all the famous five books in the fifties. It's how I learned English after we migrated here from Austria in '56. (No, not Austrian, Transilvaian. We were foreigners in Austria as well. I've only ever been treated as a foreigner.) Ten years prior to that, my mother gave birth to me in a place called Bad Aussee. How could she have known?
"Bears are asocial, secretive animals" (David Graber).
I love cemeteries and the Old Cem here in Ballarat has wonderful gravestones since the 1850's. One of them is a gentleman from Transylvania. I didn't know it was Austria. Thanks Dodgy.
Translyvania, did you ever meet the Count?
No, no, no, Brownie, Transylvania is a region in Romania (that bit which is ringed by the Carpathian mountains)
Ethnically, it comprises three groups: (1) Descendants from Saxon settlers dating back to about the 1100's (that's us mob);
(2)A Jewish community.
(3)The "native" Romanians, (ethnic remnants of the old Roman empire).
It's all very complex. Transylvania claims to be the earliest truly free (non-feudal) and democratic society in the world. (The Ancient Greeks don't count because in their 'democracy' only rich and well-connected people were 'citizens' with voting rights.)
Near the end of WWII my family fled that region because of the advancing Russian army, and we found ourselves in Austria as refugees and "foreign scum", then we came here as Ten Quid Reffos and were soon put in our place as "foreign scum". To be fair, we received a lot of support from Australians who were not part of the Anglo Empire's Master Race Bastards Club, i.e. just decent Labor voters. But I was too young then to pick up on the subtle political nuances.
Won't be long now before The Garden Gnome Of Steel cancel's my citizenship and "renders" me back to Vienna on an Air America flight in the dead of night...
No, JahTeh, Vlad the Impaler was a myth created to scare the bejyasus out of kids so they'd obey their parents. There was a Count Dracula but he was a harmless inbred royal whom the rest of the community tolerated because the could outvote him on issues of any importance. Remember..."Nothing in this blog can be believed..." ;-)
I'm young. Last year I was 29 and I haven't been able to read a book in almost 2 years. But you've illustrated exactly why I never liked Darwinism.
Its premise is never explored, only accepted as fact. That premise being that the 'objective' on this planet is survival.
Did you ever wonder if it's the other way around? Maybe not being able to get into a book is making you depressed. Maybe it's your 'creative' telling you it's time to come out and play. Maybe your head needs a break. It could be time for a project, Bear.
It ain't drugs you need (don't get me wrong, I love drugs) - but sleep won't quite cut it either. A project will not only occupy your mind, it will leave a statement (depending how well you construct it) that lives longer than you.
I've always liked the idea of my death being celebrated - like my birth.
Why isn't depression a choice, Gerry?
Rocker, without defending Darwinism, I'd say that there are scientists exloring and checking it out it all the time. And then there are scientists who are creationists trying their darndest to disprove the theory and they haven't exactly come up with stuff which is more believable.
It's a theory, and I think it's the best one scienc has got so far. There's absolutely nothing stopping another scientist doing to Darwin what Einstein did to Newton. But until that happens, Darwinism will have to suffice. It's just a theory...
Come out to play? No thanks.
This blog is my current project. I can hurl my shit at the world without going out into it. Perfect.
Depression a choice? Interesting theory. Who knows, maybe you're right. When it becomes scientific "fact", I think you'll find suicide rates going exponential. And the whole world will shout "good riddance" no doubt. You might be on a winner there, Rocker. We chronic depressives are all just self-pitying malingering welfare fraudsters. Pathetic losers, all of us. We should be rounded up and shot lest we piss on someone's parade as we drain the welfare budget.
I think I'll just stop here...
Ooh, I want a lapel pin that says I am a malingering welfare fraudster. I have to leave out chronic depressive because that only happens when I see the big 'A' in a mirror.
JahTeh, you forgot "self-pitying". But I don't think that describes you.
Dracula can't be a myth. We've all seen those bleery mesmering 'come hither and bare your neck' eyes you posted.
Vlad the Impaler must be somewhere in the family too considering how your tongue is inclined to impale misandrists and evil politicians.
What can I say...
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