Tuesday, September 2, 2014

An almost normal life




A young woman sits in the waiting room of a psychiatrist’s office. She flips through old magazines full of celebrity diets and recipes for lavish desserts, uninterested.

“OK, Sandra, you can go in now.”



Into the throne room. The palace of no return. Or something like that. Since her bipolar diagnosis (and why is everyone suddenly bipolar? Wasn’t it multiple personality disorder a few years ago?), everything has been turned upside-down.




She is on five different medications, two of them to deal with side effects from the other three. These are (supposedly) working in tandem at relatively low levels which are (supposedly) easier on body and brain. Or at least that’s the theory, until the next one comes along.

“Sandra.”

“Dr. Turnstile.” (She has never quite gotten used to that name, which made her guffaw the first time she heard it.)

“So how are we doing these days.”

Not a question, but a statement, always in the plural.











“Oh, we’re. .  . just fine. But to tell you the truth, doctor, it could be better.”

“Feeling a touch of depression lately?” (He picks up his clipboard and begins to make notes.

“A touch. It’s been. . .I don’t know. Remember I told you about my brother?”

”The one who got married last year.”

“No, the other one. I mean. . .”

“Refresh my memory.”

“The one I’ve been talking about for the past five sessions.”




“I detect a note of irritability.” He makes another note.

“Yes, a note. He’s in jail now. Embezzlement. The guy is just too clever for his own good. He’s appealing, of course. I don’t mean that kind of appealing.”

“Explain.”

“Never mind, it’s just a lame joke.”

“So apart from your brother going to jail. . . “

“Oh, everything’s just hunky-dory.”




“I detect a note of sarcasm.”

“That’s because I’m lying. Everything isn’t hunky-dory. You remember my boy friend, Robert –“

“The accountant."

“Lawyer. We broke up. It was. . . I don’t know, pretty bad.”

“Are you taking your medication?

She blinks. “I wouldn’t dream of going off it.”




“Would you like me to raise the doseage on the Seroquel?”

"No.”

“The Lamotrigine?”

“No.”

“The lithium?”

“No.”



“Then let’s discuss non-medication-oriented strategies for managing the mild depression you seem to be experiencing right now.”

“Strategies.”

“Yes. You remember what I told you in our previous sessions. The principles of cognitive therapy indicate that feelings arise from thoughts. If thoughts are excessively negative, emotions will soon follow suit.”

“I always had a problem with that one.”

“Yes, I realize there has been some resistance to treatment. This must be overcome if you are to become truly well.”

Can I be truly well if I’m bipolar?”

“Not in the usual sense. But in a relative sense, as opposed to experiencing severe episodes, then it’s possible for someone with bipolar disorder to live an almost normal life."




“Almost normal. I see. So nut cases can only get so much better before they hit a wall.”

"Sandra, that is a completely irresponsible statement.”

“But I’m just sayin’. There’s only so far a bipolar can go. The chain is pretty short.”







“That’s why it is so imperative for you to adhere strictly to the principles of cognitive therapy.”

“You see, there’s where I can’t follow you. I find it hard to believe that every emotion is just an offshoot of a thought, and that every thought can be controlled.”

“Maybe not every thought. But people have more control than they think.”

“Do they now. Then I wonder why we even need medication.”




“Sandra, you know why. You have inherited a chemical imbalance of the brain which tends to trigger extreme mood swings, which in turn skews your thoughts toward the negative.”

“But the thoughts lead to the mood swings, don't they? I'm confused."

“There is no need to twist my words around."

“OK then, cognitive therapy. That means I’m supposed to reframe negative events – “

"Now you’re on the right track.”



“. . . Reframe negative events so that they become positive. Let’s see. So breaking up with Robert was really a good thing.”

“Yes, yes – continue – “

“No matter how much I loved him, I – I don’t know. I can’t think of anything.”

“How about this for an alternate hypothesis. There is a possibility that this breakup will free you to explore other possibilities. You’re young. There are other fish in the sea.”

“Other fish.”



“Maybe even better fish. Have you thought of that? And how about your brother? Can we shed a more positive light on his situation, which is, after all, self-created?"

“Oh, maybe he’ll turn his life around in jail. Have a religious conversion, write a book, marry some woman on the outside who’s willing to wait fifteen years until he gets out.”

“Again, the note of sarcasm.”

“Yeah, but I just can’t do this. This cognitive therapy, it implies we can control just about every thought, and thus every feeling that we have. We can just decide.”

“Yes, more than most people realize.”




“Isn’t this creating your own reality? Isn’t that what crazy people do?”

“Sandra, you are deliberately poking holes in the therapeutic process.”

“Poking holes. Doctor, I wish it were as simple as deciding how to feel.”

“But to a large extent, Sandra, it is. Cognitive therapy is, after all, the primary mode of treatment in modern therapeutic practice.”

"Then why have they stopped saying that about being gay?”




He looks disconcerted, puts down his clipboard.

“You know. They used to say being gay was something you could change if you just decided to. You know, made up your mind.”

“That was many years ago.” He shifts in his chair.

“In other words: yes, you might be attracted to men, but that’s a choice. You can choose something else, a girl in other words, any time you want to.”

“That’s very simplistic.” He is turning a shade of pink.




“But according to the principles of cognitive therapy, it should work. You should be able to change your feelings of attraction to men just by changing your thoughts. Am I right?”

”The DSM specifically states – “

“Forget the DSM. Say you’re gay. You want to be straight, or your mother wants you to be straight. Hell, let’s face it, even with the progress we’ve made, it’s still easier to be straight than gay. You don’t have to explain yourself all the time.  So, just change your thoughts about the subject and you won’t have those feelings any more! Think about girls instead. Finito. Problem solved.”

“We aren’t discussing sexual orientation now, Sandra.”

“Yes we are. Haven’t you been listening?”




Dr. Turnstile has the look of a fish sliding down a chute and landing helplessly in the ocean. It is imperative that they change the subject before he loses any more ground.

Sandra fixes him with her incandescent blue eyes.

“It just comes down to a decision. Am I right? But the thing is, doctor – you haven’t made that decision yet. Have you?”




A young woman sits in the waiting room of a psychiatrist’s office. She flips through an old magazine with screaming headlines about Lindsay Lohan’s latest arrest on the cover, bored.

“OK, Sandra, you can go in now.”


Blingee rat



Monday, September 1, 2014

I Need My Pain




It's a good thing I need my pain, because I got the mother of all bad reviews today. "Bad" meaning pretty much dismissing The Glass Character. I was totally spoiled by my first two novels, which were widely (and with two exceptions, positively) reviewed. This included two in the Globe and Mail that compared my work to that of Anne-Marie MacDonald, Alice Munro and even Stephen Leacock.  Excuse me while I blow my nose.

The gods made me pay for all that. Obviously. I got very little coverage this time, no newspaper reviews that I could find, a little bit on the internet here and there. Newspaper review sections have dwindled, faded or disappeared entirely, a setup that isn't so good for novelists. I set up Amazon and Google author pages, this blog, a web site, a Facebook page as well as a special page for the book. But it didn't help much. When this sort of thing happens, a writer feels very alone.

It didn't ruin my day or anything - in fact I had a quite pleasant day for the most part, and I plan to have another one tomorrow. No boo-hooing or petulant foot-stamping or head-tossing or point-by-point counter-evisceration - that's childish. I did however find out who the guy was. He's a poet of the competitive "slam" variety, standup comedian and performance artist working out of Winnipeg. I'll quote in its entirety an autobiographical piece he wrote for the Globe and Mail, the "little essay" that runs on the back of the first section every day and is coveted by writers everywhere because it's one of the few paid freelance gigs left in the country. (I did a few of them myself, back in the day.) Illustrations are of course never literal or one-to-one on this blog, but arise directly from the subconscious, where Gumby reigns supreme.



I have a certain amount of difficulties at parties, for a number of reasons. Chief among them is my struggle to answer the boilerplate question, “What do you do?”
There is no complete answer I could give, aside from a downright facetious one like: “I convert food calories into muscle and fat, and in doing so contribute in my small way to the heat death of the universe.”

According to the taxman, I am the proprietor of a number of struggling small businesses. By my roommates’ accounts, I am a generally fun guy who occasionally vanishes into his room for a few hours to do something inscrutable.


To myself, I am terribly few things at all during the cruel honesty of the day, but a veritable da Vinci in those precious moments of hallucination just preceding sleep.




Call it a protracted adolescence, that novelty of our time. It may be that I drank too deeply from the cup of praise during my formative years, and have remained drunk on the possibilities of my own potential. This has no doubt been a problem for the bright and lazy for centuries, but I think that our modern world creates the conditions for this disease of habits to become a pandemic.
This is why I consider myself a New Idler, certainly distinguishable from the Renaissance Man or the Victorian Amateur or the Parisian Saloniste.
For one thing, I am not landed gentry. I am not independently wealthy, or dependently wealthy, or even well-to-do. This must be the first time and place in human history when a young man with no skills, no income and no direction can not only survive, but thrive!




I have never been healthier, more romantically successful, or more full of zest for life than right now, and I can assure you that I am both penniless and unemployable. Oh, what wonders our age has wrought!
Secondly, there is that great equalizer, the Internet. Education and meaningful work once surely conferred a great social advantage on people, the ability to condescend. Whether they tried or not, the intelligentsia would simply have access to exciting new ideas, challenging modes of thought and fresh experimental data. Their speech would be condescending for no other reason than that they had all the facts.



Enter Radiolab. Enter BuzzFeed, HuffPost, the Daily What and, for that matter, the mandatory Twitter feeds of the greatest thinkers of our age. Not only is all the wildest new gossip from politics and the natural sciences completely available – for free if you happen to be one the 28 million Canadians living within walking distance of a coffee shop – but it is collated, curated and prepackaged into witty banter.
Every morning, while brewing coffee, I can stream a lesson in erudite, educated conversation that would make Henry Higgins sound like a backwoodsman.
So, with education and hard work appearing grossly obsolete, how else am I to define myself? That’s the central question for my epoch of wandering youth.




To be sure, the answer lies in bountiful possibilities of some vague, delayed tomorrow. To that end, I starting collecting lists of great books to read so I might improve my mind. The Modern Library, Time magazine, The Guardian, everyone had their say. My combined list currently has 1,028 entries, and far surpasses the number of books I could possibly read in my natural life, particularly since so much of my time is taken up with list-collecting.




I am on a trial membership with 12 different skills-building websites, each taking me right up to edge of the dedication and sacrifice it would take to make progress. I run so many free services that my laptop screen blazes and blares like a Times Square of squalid gratification.
These distractions slow down my already-glacial progress, of course, but it doesn’t matter! I have all the time in the world, and the joys of laying myself down to sleep, dreaming into the future where I am a concert pianist, a foreign correspondent, a Saturday Night Live cast member and Jonathan Franzen’s best friend, are all I need for sustenance.
In my mind, I am already there, and since a recent podcast informed me that time is unified and unmalleable, I am already there in reality as well.




The only thing that could defeat this vision of a perfect and masterful future is to collapse this superposition of histories and dedicate myself to one thing at the expense of all others. So this is the one path I must not take.
I would give up everything I have in this life, my pasta maker, my Bowflex home gym, even my ribbonless vintage typewriter, in order to preserve the dream that is me. I would sweep out every cobwebbed corner of my hobby-filled apartment to make room for more of that one truly renewable resource: potential.



Every night, I concentrate on a still more perfect future, and escape that much further from a still more banal present.
That is what I do, but this answer is a little too wide-ranging for casual party talk, so I had to spell it out for you here.


Steve Currie is an improvisor and poet in Winnipeg. In any other century, he would have died of consumption by now.




OK, this is sideslapping and knee-splitting  (or is it the other way around), I admit it, but it's also pretty revealing. From his  many YouTube videos performing in (I can only assume from audience response) comedy clubs in Winnipeg, I've discovered he's pretty young. He lives with "roommates", so is not married. From my perspective he's a child, and in the literary sense, I can't help but see him as a poseur. If I am to take his Globe piece at all literally, unless he is making the entire thing up, he's a very serious idler (he said it first, and made a point of it over and over again), with no prespects of anything much, so sharpening his teeth on poor Harold might have served him as a form of sport. Satire would not be funny if it had no truth in it: you need something real to "send up". 

By the bye, though it seems another lifetime now, I indulged in what was then called theatre sports, not doing too well in them because they resembled, to me, a sort of smackdown wrestling rather than verbal jousting. I am not unfamiliar with performance, in other words, for laughs or for not. 
But I wasn't going to do this. I wasn't! Oh all right, I'll try to find the GIF I made of him to send Matt, who as usual was a brick through the whole thing. Here are only a couple of his rejoinders to the man's hatchet job (as well as some timely advice for me):




He likes you. He did the litcrit's equivalent of the gradeschool boy putting a frog down the blouse of the girl he crushes.
Send the jerk a live scorpion.


He needs a good Vuhjinya ass whuppin.  I'll gather up the bubbas...





And a couple more of them, my favorites, are kind of unprintable.

In any case, it made me feel like a warm puppy inside. I just wish someone else would give this thing a fair trial. If one negative review stands as the ONLY review, I feel like I'm in an uncomfortable position. He has a right to like, dislike, diss, not diss, or make a paper airplane out of Harold. But I wish there were something on the other side of the balance. 


Is all.







Post-post post: And this. I am glad I have friends, though they be few and far away. The ones I have, the few who "get" me, and I them, are precious to me. This is what my pal David West posted on my FB page after the review debacle:




Margaret Gunning, I say your The Glass Character is a wonderful book for all the many reasons I have mentioned to you. Ignore the rave reviews, ignore the scathing ones. In fact, ignore them all. It's what you think that matters.
You are a real trouper and a real professional.
Three novels, Margaret. I consider that a triumph. I want to hear you are hard at work writing instead of reading s***ty reviews. A waste of time.

Sunday, August 31, 2014

IT'S A LIE!: The plump juicy raisin scam




All right.

I've already spent too long at the computer, and have "keyboard finger", in which my arthritically-swollen right ring finger twinges like a toothache every time I hit a key. This finger has such a major swelling in the knuckle - the one nearest the nail - that it pushes the end of my finger inward, almost sideways. It's permanent, i. e. nothing that will ever go down. And all my other fingers are following suit.

But in spite of that, I have something I've wanted to say for a long time, and now I must say it.





You know Kellogg's Raisin Bran with their cute little ads? For years now, they've been talking about "plump juicy raisins", and no one is saying a thing about it! I can't even find a rant on Google. In fact, if I go on Images, I get mostly decorative pictures of raisins in bowls, presumably looking Plump and Juicy.

SINCE WHEN IS A RAISIN PLUMP?? They are brown, sometimes even black, deeply wrinkled (worse than pruny, since the new pitted prunes are more flat than wrinkled), and dessicated-looking. That brings me to JUICY. Try to extricate an atom of juice from a raisin. Just try it!




Advertising Mascots - Objects

California Raisins - In 1987, the advertising world was taken by surprise with the popularity of a group of animated singing raisins who pushed the goodness of sweet, juicy California raisins.

And yet, here is a snippet of the copy describing the nightmarish California Raisins. And yes, there's that word again: JUICY. A juicy raisin!

Doesn't anybody THINK any more?

Why does everyone accept this "plump, juicy raisins" crap without question? The same reason they accept a lot of other things. Huh? Duhhh? WHY aren't they plump and juicy? They're raisins, aren't they?

Oh God. I hate the human race.







I hate Raisin Bran and their goddamn ads, their "the rai-sunniest brand under the sun!', implying, nay, ADMITTING  these things have been baking under the scorching sun in Fresno. Baking until they are dessicated, meaning DRY, NOT JUICY. "Plump" is even more mind-boggling, like saying Kate Moss is plump. Another ad had something like, "Plump goes east, Juicy goes west. . . "




These things, hard, dry, wrinkled, brown or black, often with teeth-jarring unpleasant grit in them that you can't get rid of, are meant to be a (heavily sugar-coated) chewy relief from the crumbly disaster that is bran flakes. We have a problem with bran flakes, All-Bran, bran muffins,and all other bran-containing products. We all know what they are designed to do, and not only that, THEY LOOK THE SAME WAY GOING IN AS THEY DO COMING OUT. They look pre-digested, processed, and spewed out.




Bran muffins might as well be meadow muffins, as far as I am concerned. They look like something a cowboy would fnd along the trail. The only thing in this world more turd-like is the prune, and NO ONE talks about "plump, juicy" prunes, do they? That is because they are a DRIED fruit, not a FRESH fruit. A DRIED fruit has almost all of its moisture removed, which is why it wrinkles up like that!





Someone should slap the Kellogg's ad executives upside the head, but no one will, because by now, the public seems to AGREE that raisins are "plump" and "juicy". Most of the Google images I found, depicting dry, wrinkly, dessicated raisins, were under the heading "plump and juicy!". Big Brother (or should I say Big Bran) has triumphed once again.

(P. S.: there is only ONE way a raisin can be "juicy", and that is from saliva. Let's not go there, shall we?)





Order The Glass Character from:


Thistledown Press 


Amazon.com

Chapters/Indigo.ca

A festival of GIFS from the 1950s: "Look! Up in the sky!"





Full marks if you can guess where this came from. I stumbled upon it during my late-night gif-image crawl. Looked like it might lend itself to some experimentation.




I don't have the capacity to do too much here. In fact, it's rare I that see any gifs that have real technical merit, and most are only one or two jerky seconds. (Ahem.) This is the slow-mo version, making me wonder if the animator somehow transferred actual writing to the screen. Well, they must have! I know almost nothing about animation and have to limit myself to 15 seconds max.




This backwards version is also interesting, as the title eats itself. It seems a bit jerky, and faster than you would think at "slow" speed, but it's probably only registering a few frames per second.




All right, this is the last one, at "normal" speed, but it plays very fast. Reminds me of someone sucking up a wet piece of spaghetti.




For some reason I love these. They remind me of the old "fill-ums" we saw in the basement of McKeough School in Chatham, Ontario when I was in Grade 3. These "fill-ums", though paralytically dull (hygiene, geography, National Film Board stuff) were a nice break from classes that were even more paralytically dull. 




I like this, too, a sort of reverse countdown. Countdowns remind me of the astronauts, of course. Gus Grissom and the like. There are a lot of phony countdown headers on YouTube, and you can tell they are phony because they go down to 1, which a real header NEVER does (don't know why). This is from some Paramount thing, and once I slow it down you will be able to see the details.




I think I see "SMPTE UNIVERSAL LEADER" before the countdown. The top one is the hardest, because the brain will more quickly recognize a real word and its meaning. I have no idea what the captions mean, some sort of arcane code. Is it a real header or "leader"? Is it really from Universal Studios, or does this mean it's a sort of generic leader? Now that I look at it again, yes, I think so, though SMPTE makes no sense at all.




There is a reason why it was effortless for me to memorize High Flight for school. I already knew it. Anyone who had ever stayed up past 11:00 p.m. knew it. For reasons which are now completely incomprehensible, many TV channels used it as a signoff before the long "boooooooooop" that ran all night and used to scare the hell out of me. Most things scared the hell out of me then.




This is, in part, an experiment to see how many 15-second gifs I can run in one post. I want to see if the whole thing crashes or what. The opening of The Adventures of Superman also scared the hell out of me. It was intense. Another incomprehensible thing is how George Reeves ever ended up getting the part - a paunchy, not-very-good-looking middle-aged man who couldn't act. Later, he either committed suicide or was murdered by the mob, like Bob Crane who was rumored to have made soft-core porn films in his basement. Bob Crane was better-looking, however.




There were a couple of other things about the intro that scared me. The way Clark Kent morphed into Superman was scary. In this case it's reversed and in slo-mo, so it appears that Superman is morphing into Clark Kent (who, as we all know, was partially inspired by Harold Lloyd. Though how anyone can be "partially inspired" is anyone's guess.)




I was maybe three or four, five tops, when this show would come on, and it was already in syndication. My brother had a Superman costume that he'd put on, and he would lie along the back of the sofa and go "Pssssshhhhhhhhhhhh!" I didn't know it was an American flag flapping behind Superman, in fact I didn't know what the hell it was. The announcer, who turned out to be Bill Kennedy, a B-picture actor and host of a long-running Detroit movie program, had a note of hysteria in his voice that just mounted: "Superman. SU-perman. YES, it's SUUU-per-mannnnn!" Last night when I played the clip over and over again,  looking at the menacing flag flapping around, I was reminded of Nazi Germany: "Is vee not zee Super Race? Super Duper Super Race!"




I think this housewife has had too much coffee. This was a demo of the new television technology: the remote control! It had a cord on it, which is carefully hidden beneath her wrist. I converted a faded color print into b & w for effect, though the announcer, who had the strongest Bronx accent I have ever heard, kept talking about "culluh teck-NAHHH-la-gee".




Very early Disney, in which Walt himself does Mickey's voice. This was so freaky, I had to see what it looked like slowed down.




Good night, all.




(Special Bonus gif. You thought there wouldn't be a Special Bonus Gif? There are literally thousands of snippets on YouTube of completely unknown provenance. I mean: where do people GET all this stuff, old ads, old TV shows and cartoons, and even TV station signoffs from 70 years ago? This one is for WABD, New York's Window on the W(blkphtdbt).  WABD was on the Dumont Television Network, which for some reason reminds me of Milton Berle, whom I never liked. I was two months old at the time. Dumont bit the dust a long time ago, and back in the 1940s its logo was mighty strange, quavering and flashing, with Lady Liberty's torch cut off at the top. No one called it TV then, and it was common to refer to viewing as "looking at television".)





Order The Glass Character from:


Thistledown Press 


Amazon.com

Chapters/Indigo.ca

Resurrection