"MENTAL HEALTH" is affecting my. . . mental health.

TOM UTLEY: How to beat the blues - award yourself £10 every time you hear the phrase 'mental health' on TV or radio

By Tom Utley for the Daily Mail

Earlier this month I invented a game to cheer myself up through these short, chilly days of January. I’m not claiming it will work for everyone, but readers may care to give it a try.

The rules are simple. All you have to do is award yourself an imaginary £10 every time you hear the words ‘mental health’ uttered on the radio or TV, or read them in the media.

I find that even on a thinnish day I can rake in a comfortable 50 or 60 fantasy quid — while if Prince Harry, a controversial statue or an internet influencer is in the news, I often notch up a sum well into three figures.

Indeed, those who follow the media may be forgiven for thinking most of the population is incapable of expressing annoyance or sadness about anything, from Covid restrictions to rising prices or even sexism in the works of Shakespeare, without complaining about the irritant’s adverse impact on his or her mental health.

Eavesdrop on almost any industrial tribunal these days and you’ll hear a sacked employee complain that the boss showed her too much affection, or too little, and that this was having a devastating effect on her mental health.

Read any report of a criminal trial, and the chances are that the defendant will say that he nicked his dad’s credit card — or drove at 120 mph up the M4, high on cocaine — because he was suffering from mental health issues.

Ask athletes or sports stars to explain a poor performance, and they’ll claim that mental health problems lay at the root of it. It’s an all-purpose, get-out-of-jail-free card. Instant victimhood for anyone looking for an excuse.

God knows, it’s no part of my intention this week to make light of genuine mental illness, because I know there is nothing more debilitating. I have a great friend who was so clinically depressed he couldn’t get out of bed for months on end, and I’ve known others whose despair was so deep that they took their own lives.

I must also declare that I’m extremely proud of the fact that one of my sons has decided to devote his life to the care of seriously disturbed adults. This seems to me to be among the noblest and most selfless careers imaginable.

No, what I object to is the modern habit of labelling every low we experience in the course of our everyday lives as a mental health issue, as if it were a clinical condition beyond our control.

The most obvious offenders are those misguided university students — often indulged or actively egged on by academics who should know better — who demand ‘safe spaces’ to protect their mental health from exposure to ideas with which they’ve been taught to disagree.

Tell them that the British empire wasn’t all bad, for example, or that unrestricted immigration isn’t necessarily an unalloyed good, and they’ll run for cover, complaining that we’re messing with their fragile minds.

Ask students of English literature to read Dickens, Trollope or Walter Scott — all of them riddled, it’s true, with the casual racism and sexism of their time — and they’ll wail that we’re putting their mental health in grave jeopardy.

On that point, it surely doesn’t help when a respected actress suggests, as Juliet Stevenson did this week, that plays such as The Taming Of The Shrew and The Merchant Of Venice should be ‘buried’, since they portray ‘unacceptable’ attitudes. Oh, how I wish actors and actresses would stick to acting, which some are quite good at, instead of spouting the half-baked political opinions apparently shared by almost everyone in their profession.

But this unhealthy obsession with mental health is by no means confined to Left-leaning students, broadcasters and Tweeters. Academics at University College London have even devised a ‘depression index’, which purports to measure the effects of the pandemic on the mental health of the nation, according to a survey of more than 30,000 respondents.

This week, if you’re interested, UCL found that between November 1 and January 3, levels of anxiety and depression in Britain rose by 24 per cent on the scale, from 5.0 to 6.2. That’s a pretty meaningless figure, if you ask me, but then misery-mongering is all the rage these days.

No less gloomy was this week’s announcement by the Oxford University Press that the word chosen by children as their word of the year for 2021 was ‘anxiety’.

This was the finding of a survey of 8,000 pupils, aged between seven and 14, who were asked to select from a shortlist of ten words the one they would use when talking about well-being and health last year (the other contenders were: ‘challenging’, ‘isolate’, ‘well-being’, ‘resilience’, ‘bubble’, ‘kindness’, ‘remote’, ‘cancelled’ and ‘empathy’).

I note, by the way, that the children picked anxiety ‘after discussing the words with their teachers’. Call me an old cynic, but this suggests that in some cases, the teachers may have prompted them to opt for it as their word of the year.

Certainly, I suspect if they had been left to their own devices, they would have chosen a very different shortlist of words to encapsulate their year of disrupted schooling. It would possibly have included ‘smartphone’, ‘Xbox’ and ‘pizza’.

But whatever the truth, I meant it quite literally when I described the modern obsession with mental health as unhealthy. Let’s face it, we all have our ups and downs as we go through life — and I know that many of us have truly dreadful lows from time to time. But I cannot believe it’s good for our well-being to label all such lows as symptoms of mental trouble.

I know it’s a terribly old-fashioned thing to say, but I can’t recall anyone of my parents’ generation complaining about the effects on their mental health of being rained on by Hitler’s bombs, night after night in the Blitz. But ask many of today’s young how they’ve been affected by gentle teasing or other ‘micro-aggressions’, and you’ll never hear the end of their suffering.

Nor do I remember anyone from my own childhood taking time off school because of feelings of stress, depression or anxiety. Measles, mumps or glandular fever, yes. ‘Mental health issues’, no.

Children given to moping or self-pity were told to cheer up, count their blessings, look on the bright side and generally buck up their ideas. I can’t help feeling that even in 2022, there’s something to be said for this approach.

These days, by contrast, I’m told it’s far from unusual for children to cite mental health reasons for taking time off sick.

Yes, I know that in many ways it’s harder for them than it was for us, given the cruelties of social media and other pressures of modern life.

But how can it improve their well-being to bombard them daily with trigger-warnings, helplines to contact if they’ve been ‘affected by any of the issues raised in this programme’ and endless items in the media about the effects of this or that on the nation’s mental health?

It’s almost as if they’re being invited to cast themselves as victims of a mental health pandemic as widespread as Covid.

I haven’t room here to rehearse the many proven ways of banishing minor woes, such as meeting friends, taking up a hobby or just staring out to sea. I will only say that if all else fails, you might try the little game I mentioned above.

The joy of it is that instead of being plunged into gloom every time another story comes up about mental health, you will think: ‘Kerching! That’s another imaginary tenner for me!’

If you’ve got to the end of this article, you may notice that I’ve mentioned the words mental health no fewer than 18 times. That’s £180 already in your fantasy bank. Look on it as a bonus to get you started.

BLOGGER'S LAMENT. I don't often copy and paste, verbatim, something I've read in the UK press, but this guy is making some valid points. He's a little too British for my liking: this "oh, buck up" and "your grandparents lived through the Blitz" attitude doesn't help a depressed person very much. But it's true what he says about mental health. It's everywhere, these days.

This, at a time when I have never EVER seen so much socially-sanctioned mental illness turned loose in the land, nor so much utter contempt for people (whack jobs, nut bars, head cases who should be in the looney bin) who suffer from the real thing.

I suffer from the real thing. I have suffered from the real thing at least from adolescence onward. Though I was never properly diagnosed, I now understand that I was clinically depressed at the age of 15. I suffered bouts of it, soul-destroying bouts that sometimes landed me in the hospital, for as long as I can remember. Not to mention the violent up-gusts that pushed me above the clouds, where the air is very very thin and may even damage your brain.

Bipolar, in other words. That's the word for it, or at least the nearest thing to describe it clinically. Am I proud of it? Not exactly, but I'm working on the shame bit. I know, in my intellect at least, that there is truly nothing to be ashamed of. But I DID create holy hell for the people I love the most, and was never able to explain it to them, because I'd "snap out of it" (at HUGE effort and strain) and try to right myself, so I looked and sounded "normal" again. For their sake.

This racked up a huge mental and emotional debt, and after years of struggle, there was a humiliating landslide. I cracked in 2005 in the most flamboyantly awful way possible. All I got out of it was a correct diagnosis, after the this-way-and-that-way that went on for some 30 years.

The average person with TRUE mental illness is misdiagnosed an average of five times before being correctly diagnosed. I will ask you to read that sentence one more time.

Five times? I think it was ten. Maybe more. Meantime, though I did moan a lot about the term "mental illness" being a trap (for how can you be "ill" and "well" at the same time?), there seemed to be no alternative. 

UNTIL NOW!

Until someone-or-other, probably an influencer on social media, decided to take "mental health", a perfectly respectable term, and squeeze and pump and inflate it until it was the size and bulk of the Hindenberg - and every bit as gaseous and overblown. 

Oh, the humanity! With this much gross and even ludicrous misuse and overuse, the whole thing becomes meaningless and - eventually - very easy to dismiss. The upshot of it is, those of us who really DO suffer, and HAVE suffered, and likely WILL suffer from "mental health issues" until we take our last breath, are still being marginalized, because we are lumped in with the chippers who are just jumping on the latest meaningless media bandwagon.

All right, I've chuffed and moaned enough for now. But I'm glad someone else is noticing this, and saying, wait a minute. It's very telling that it's a Brit. People in North America are still tiptoeing around the subject the way Tiny Tim tiptoed through the tulips. Except that when HE did it, it was at least entertaining.

💗HAROLD LLOYD Mends a Broken Heart in Dr. Jack (1922)

How can you mend a broken heart? It helps if Harold Lloyd is your doctor. In spite of the heartbreak of my failed novel (and let's not let the pain of it break through the dam), I do come back to Harold because I love him still. And in Dr. Jack, he departs from his usual bumbling youth/spoiled rich kid persona completely, becoming a responsible and admired figure in his community, albeit a very funny one. He carries himself differently as a result - like a professional, always sure of himself - and it's the right call, for a "bumbling doctor" would have been ridiculous and un-funny. He's sexier somehow, because of it all, but it's a little heartbreaking to see what might have been, had he been able to break away from his usual Glass Character persona and spread himself out. But it didn't happen - audiences wanted the shy, awkward youth who somehow gets the girl, or the (more rarely) ridiculously entitled rich kid who finally matures at the end. And gets the girl.

This is just a snippet, but I love it - just a few seconds of magic, and the look that passes between Harold and his ACTUAL wife, Mildred Davis, is beautiful and precious. The way she literally sees his image "in the cards", as if he is her destiny, then flutters her eyelashes at him, is priceless. Though there is lots of physical comedy and madcap gags in this movie, Harold's Dr. Jack remains pretty steady through it all. He would have made a wonderful doctor.

💔The Tragic Death of George Gershwin

This excerpt is from a much longer, and at times kind of tedious, bio of George Gershwin. The best part of it is the way they use paintings as "animated stills" which the camera pans across and zooms in on. I especially loved the bit where George, addled by a soon-to-be-fatal brain tumour, takes a handful of chocolates and smashes them into his chest. It was a horrible death, made that much more horrible by medical ignorance and the denial of his friends and family, who chalked up his weird symptoms to "love troubles" and struggles with his new boss, Sam Goldwyn. 

In fact, one of the last things George ever said - miserably - was, "I should live so long as to hear Sam Goldwyn say to me, 'Why can't you write hits like Irving Berlin?'" It's true - George COULDN'T write hits like Irving Berlin because he was too busy skating rings around him, and everyone else in the competition.

So everyone, "friends" and doctors alike, ignored the fact that George was spilling his food, falling down the stairs, stumbling in his piano playing, saying nonsensical things, and pushing his chauffeur out of the driver side of a moving car. Love troubles, you see. Then he collapsed in the bathroom during one of his agonizing headaches, fell into a coma, and died, but not before they cracked his head open and "discovered" a grapefruit-sized tumour. Brain surgery wasn't what it is now, but some now believe that he could have been at least granted a reprieve, or had the worst of his agony relieved. 

So what happened? George just WASN'T a sick person, he wasn't - and part of this ludicrous denial was his own myth of invincibility. It's ironic, because he suffered from chronic digestive problems for his entire life which could also be agonizingly painful. Some believe the chronic gut pain may even have been related to the cancer which eventually ate his brain.

George's story is sad, and sweet, and not like anyone else's. He was a Mozart in his time, flaming out in a brilliant streak across the sky. No one knows what he would have achieved had he lived, but it is not a sure thing that he would have kept producing at the same phenomenal rate. Some artists are products of their time, and never quite make the transition. Harold Lloyd is an example of someone whose character would always and ever be "a youth", a young man either totally unskilled in the ways of the world, or (in a few cases) a spoiled and ridiculously-entitled rich kid. 

By the time the talkies came around, he was still playing "youths", as in Movie Crazy where he played a 40-year-old virgin still living with his parents and setting off for a great adventure in Hollywood. It wasn't just that irritating, dithering nasal voice of his, which still drives me crazy. Not everyone beat the cull. Garbo could talk like a man, but not Tallulah Bankhead. It was his 1920-ness, the way he embodied a certain era which would never come around again, and his inability to evolve into someone or something else.

In Gershwin's case, only death stopped him. It seems that nothing else could.

🙀CAT GETS MAIL!😸

My cat doesn't do stuff like this. But then - we don't have a mail slot, and it would be hard for him to get the mail out of the box.

🤍The Troll Doll Channel: MAGICAL! Spinning in Silver🤍

My trolls are a great comfort to me in this time of trial. But they're taking over my office. . .

It was ten years ago. . .

Abbotsford News, June 11, 2012

Lauren Gunning (pushing wagon) and sister Erica were among those participating in the Telus Walk to Cure Diabetes on Sunday at Rotary Stadium in Abbotsford. The event raised funds for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and its research into a cure for Type 1 diabetes.

(NOTE: the whole family is in this shot! My son Jeff (Erica and Lauren's Daddy) can be seen on the far left, and Crystal, their Mom, is pulling the wagon. Bill and I are in there somewhere - see the lady with the short hair and the green-striped shirt? And Bill is the guy to the right of her in the grey Tilley hat. Hard to believe it was that long ago!)

😵HAUNTING VOICES FROM THE PAST: Historic Re-enactment of the EDISON TALK...

My dolls are very generous with their time (meaning, all they do is sit there being dolls), so they were happy to do this historic re-enactment of the CREEPIEST doll in human history - the infamous Edison Talking Doll. This thing had a tiny record player inside it which had to be cranked, and which broke after only a few uses. The dolls were so frightening and expensive (something like $10.00, which would be like $200.00 now) that they only lasted a few weeks on the market. So the ones that were manufactured must have been warehoused somewhere - or collected by a few people interested in macabre artifacts. This was the pre-pre-predecessor to Chatty Cathy and other hideous "talking" dolls, so once again everyone claims Edison was "ahead of his time" - but I also found video of French dolls which laughed and talked using the same primitive technology. My feeling is that, as always, Edison stole someone else's brilliant idea, but he managed to botch it just the same.

🙏MORAL TEACHINGS THROUGH PUPPETRY😃

Puppets are humans in effigy, which is disturbing enough in itself. But this little blonde girl is beyond creepy - she looks like someone I sat next to in Grade 7, glasses and all. The fact that she is spouting Christian propaganda (the audio of which is blessedly muted) just adds another level of dismay. 

True things: a comment, maybe to myself

This somehow ended up as a comment on a YouTube video, but it poured out with such force that I thought I would place it here and not just let it sit there, likely either unread or shot down by someone who disagrees. But it's a way to try to describe the process of something so deep that is really beyond any words.

ferociousgumby
5 minutes ago (edited)

@D Onion Just to throw in my two cents: I kept getting told by therapists, ministers, etc. to "forgive myself". But then in the next breath they or someone would say, "There's nothing to forgive." So I would get stuck: OK, nothing to forgive, so I CAN'T forgive? So what do I do? BUT, I know I did a lot of damage to myself and the family when I was deep in my alcoholism and undiagnosed bipolar. Yes, I DID hurt them and confuse them, and I failed to explain it because I was too deep in the chaos. So now I have this "voice" - I'm not psychotic, it's just a helpful voice I hear in myself - saying, "OK then, you did nothing wrong, but often you BELIEVE you did. You still carry it. Can you feel compassion for that hurt, confused, lonely, screwed-up, struggling person you were?" The answer is yes, I can. Compassion IS part of my deeper nature because I am empathetic. I also feel some compassion (pity is more like it) for the people who hurt me. They are kind of pathetic, after all, and I can't think of anything worse than to BE that way. But when people say things like, "Oh, you MUST forgive them (your Dad, sister, bad therapists, etc.) or you will be in a state of rage for the rest of your life", I believe this is a very sneaky form of the Christian agenda. No, I not only don't have to "forgive", I do not have to do ANYTHING AT ALL. That is up to me. Compassion has crept in like a tide, gradually and gently, and it amazes me, BUT I had five years of therapy that was sometimes overwhelming and often didn't feel like it was helping me. But it is now over 20 years later, and "something" happened deep inside that is really only making itself known to me now. "Forgiveness" gets my back up because it implies "it's OK what you did". It is NOT OK what my Dad, sister, bad therapists, etc. etc. did to me. And I don't feel OK about hurting myself. But I DO feel deeply for that hurt and confused person, and if I could only talk to that hurt younger self now (which in way, I am) I would say, "You're in terrible pain and feel alone, but you're getting through it, and that is incredibly brave." Is that "forgiveness"? I think it's more complex and goes far deeper. I don't like the "f-word" because of the toxic way it was pushed on me by the church and others who "only wanted to help me". Is there any other way? Are they right that I "MUST" forgive myself or be in a state of rage, etc. etc.? That's a bunch of hooey and only represents a way to get me to shut up. Think of it this way: if you think, "OK I'll forgive my Dad", it means you can't really talk about it any more or people will realize you have NOT forgiven your Dad. It is a way to get you to shut up about it because it makes THEM uncomfortable to witness those emotions. They are threatened by it, so they will find a way to silence you. Like the Bible, forgiveness can be used as a weapon and is actually very selfish of THEM to push it on you or anyone else. It is some sort of awful test of whether you're a good Christian or good person or - whatever. But the compassion came from somewhere so deep it feels like a kind of miracle. It's not up to me, I can't "summon" it, but when I feel it and want to just push it away or tell it to get lost, I do have a choice to let it be (let it be, like the song says!), and let myself feel the untying of knots inside myself. Really, if you believe in Jesus at all, compassion was "his way". It was being in a state of grace. All the emphasis on "forgiveness" may even be a mistranslation of the Biblical text. I have read that the root for "forgiveness" means "to untie". Sorry for the length of this! Once I got going, it was hard to stop. If "the f-word" doesn't work for you, there are MANY other ways, and there is YOUR way, which will eventually make itself clear.

🌹🤍BETTY WHITE: We're going to miss you so!🤍🌹

From Golden Girls to Sue Ann Nivens to dozens and maybe even hundreds of appearances elsewhere - including a sitcom she starred in before I was born (and I am soon to turn 68!). We'll miss her so - she was a light in the world, and you never heard her whining or complaining (which is all I seem to hear now!). I made this animation years ago from a photo shoot she did while enthusiastically eating a hot dog. 

💥The Troll Doll Channel: 😲OW-EE! Crash-landing for Twirling Troll💥

SMASH!!

                           

Don't Crush Oobleck Too Hard

Or else.

MERRY CHRISTMAS from the DOMINO CATS!

This is one of the most incredible videos I have ever seen! I cannot imagine how long it took to set up, or if they needed different takes. And how many cats do they have?!

Merry Christmas to my readers, wherever you are!

💗MY VERY LAST pandemic hair update: blessings in adversity💗

I swear, this is my LAST. Even with the new variant. 

😾CHRISTMAS AMBUSH! 😲 Kitty LUNGES at me from under the tree!😾

A Christmas classic, taken several years ago. Bentley still slips under the tree and hides, or even tries to climb it. Last night he got his toe caught in the base of the tree and had to be rescued. That's what we get for having a TREE in the house for weeks on end! 

🎅SANTA CAT?!😳 BIZARRE '50s Christmas Puppet Show😽

Children's programming hit a peak of surrealism in the early 1950s, when puppet shows abounded. These look like marionettes, with great staring eyes that almost resemble anime eyes. The "cat" is weird even for a cartoon cat (and cartoonists NEVER seem to get cats right - except, maybe, Archie and Mehitabel. I will just have to do a post on THEM.)

🎅STRANGE AND SURREAL SANTAS🎅

Would it be Christmas without bizarre Santas? Not MY kind of Christmas.

🎅😽CAT goes COMPLETELY NUTS UNDER CHRISTMAS TREE!😽🎅

This is one of my favorite cat videos of all time. A seasonal favorite. My cat has never done this, but he''s known to go a bit wacky, what with ribbons hanging down, flashing lights, dangly ornaments, trees brought in from the outside - what cat wouldn't go a bit nuts?

Capybara enters its spa bucket

I love capybaras! What's not to love about a 200-pound rodent who squeaks and squeals like a giant guinea pig? Their eyes and nostrils are all the same level, at the top of their head, kind of like a crocodile's, because they are aquatic animals and spend a lot of time underwater. I suppose they could hide from predators that way, but what sort of predator could handle a creature like this? To me they resemble giant beavers without the flat tail, or those prehistoric mammals who for some reason were so gigantic. When I first got interested in them, there was one website which had no videos, and now there are entire channels devoted to them. Some things are worth waiting for.

Invisible, like the wind: the divine feminine in Bob Dylan's Mother of Muses

 

Mother of Muses

Mother of Muses, sing for me

Sing of the mountains and the deep dark sea

Sing of the lakes and the nymphs of the forest

Sing your hearts out, all you women of the chorus

Sing of honor and faith and glory be

Mother of Muses, sing for me.

Mother of Muses, sing for my heart

Sing of a love too soon to depart

Sing of the heroes who stood alone

Whose names are engraved on tablets of stone

Who struggled with pain so the world could go free

Mother of Muses, sing for me.

 

Sing of Sherman, Montgomery and Scott

And of Zhukov, and Patton, and the battles they fought

Who cleared the path for Presley to sing

Who carved the path for Martin Luther King

Who did what they did and they went on their way

Man I could tell their stories all day

 

I’m falling in love with Calliope

She don’t belong to anyone, why not give her to me

She’s speakin’ to me, speakin’ with her eyes

I’ve grown so tired of chasing lies

Mother of Muses, wherever you are

I’ve already outlived my life by far.

Mother of Muses, unleash your wrath

Things I can’t see, they’re blocking my path

Show my your wisdom, tell me my fate

Put me upright, make me walk straight

Forge my identity from the inside out

You know what I’m talking’ about.

 

Take me to the river, release your charms

Let me lay down a while in your sweet lovin’ arms

Wake me shake me, free me from sin

Make me invisible, like the wind

Got a mind to ramble, got a mind to roam

I’m travellin’ light, and I’m slow comin’ home

In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory, and the mother of the nine Muses. The term Mnemosyne is derived from the same source as the word mnemonic, that being the Greek word mnēmē, which means "remembrance, memory".
A titaness, Mnemosyne was the daughter of Uranus and Gaia. Mnemosyne was the mother of the nine Muses, fathered by her nephew, Zeus:

 
Calliope (epic poetry)
Clio (history)
Euterpe (music and lyric poetry)
Erato (love poetry)
Melpomene (tragedy)
Polyhymnia (hymns)
Terpsichore (dance)
Thalia (comedy)
Urania (astronomy)

BLOGGER'S COMMENTARY. I have fallen in love, not with Calliope, but with Bob Dylan, all over again. Only now he's an 80-year-old phenomenon once more in the thick of a year-long world tour, a task which would be daunting to a man half that age. Yes, and that tour likely features mostly new material, including songs we have not even heard yet. Through the wonders of YouTube, we are now able to hear and even SEE him perform only a day or so after the show. Entire performances are popping up that only took place last week.

Mother of Muses is one of my favorite songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways (released last year, and considered by many to be the finest album he has ever produced). It's both tender and haunting, with an undertone of flinty defiance as he rhymes off the names of the heroes he so admires. (Only Dylan could mention Elvis Presley and Martin Luther King in almost the same breath, and still make it work.) Initially, this post was going to be "the divine feminine in Rough and Rowdy Ways", but there were so many references to women, divine in one way or another (like the "transparent woman in a transparent dress"), that I had to cut it down and focus on one song which seemed like the concentrated essence of all the others.

Yes, Mother of Muses is a lovely and poetic title for a sighingly beautiful song -  but until I did a little bit of digging, I had no idea what it really meant. My Greek mythology is rusty, but Dylan's isn't. His knowledge of mythology, literature, and (most especially) the Bible is legendary. Not only that - his knowledge has both tremendous breadth and spooky, mysterious depth.  In fact, I believe Bob Dylan is one of the greatest minds of our time. Who else has won the Nobel Prize for writing what is so erroneously labelled as "popular music"?

So what I found, and maybe it should not have astonished me as much as it did, is that there WAS an actual "mother of Muses" named Mnemosyne. I had heard the name before, of course, and the term "mnemonic" as a device for remembering things. But Mnemosyne is not only the mother of memory, but the mother of NINE muses, the first one being Calliope (the one Bob Dylan is falling in love with), who is responsible for EPIC POETRY.

Which is why this song completely knocks me over.

It's perhaps no mistake that in calling on his "muse", Dylan chooses the "mother of all Muses", one who has the power to transform and redeem. She is not unlike the female face of Jesus. This verse especially spells out the extent of her power:

Mother of Muses, unleash your wrath

Things I can’t see, they’re blocking my path

Show my your wisdom, tell me my fate

Put me upright, make me walk straight

Forge my identity from the inside out

You know what I’m talking’ about.

The line "put me upright, make me walk straight" has made me weep more than once. Dylan is 80 years old, looks as old as time, and seems small, slight and frail.  I know very well from my own deteriorating body about the ravages of age and the slipping away of mobility. This line describes a power which can literally lift him up bodily and set him down on a purposeful path, guiding each step along the way.

But the spookiest line of all in this richly-laden poem is, "Forge my identity from the inside out/You know what I'm talkin' about." No, we don't, Bob - we are gasping in awe at the way in which an ancient Greek goddess can become your own mother, with the relationship close enough that she seems to have literally given birth to you. I've worked my way through many a Dylan biography, and the one I am reading now (a 1,000-page tome by a Scottish writer named Ian Bell) focuses mainly on the fact that Dylan's identity as an artist is in a constant state of flux, as if he doesn't really have one. I hope he is listening to this song right now.

Just think of it: those "women of the chorus", the nine Muses who call Mnemosyne their mother, are almost literally Dylan's backup singers. But this primal mother-figure also has a son, and as we trudge through the travesty of a season originally meant to honor the Son of Man, I am immensely grateful that our greatest living poet has found yet another way to be born again.

POST-POST-OBSERVATIONS. You knew there had to be more! I noticed that in the Wikipedia entry, Mnemosyne was called a "titaness", which is a half-assed way of saying she was a bloody TITAN (why not just come out and say it?). This means, among other things, that she really kicks ass, with considerable mythological clout behind her motherly legend. I knew nothing of titans, and found way too much when I looked it up, but here is the gist of it for those who are interested:

In Greek mythology, the Titans were the pre-Olympian gods. They were the twelve children of the primordial parents Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth), with six male Titans: Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, and Cronus, and six female Titans, called the Titanides or Titanesses: Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, and Tethys. Cronus mated with his older sister Rhea and together they became the parents of the first generation of Olympians – the six siblings Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, Hestia, Demeter, and Hera. Some descendants of the Titans, such as Prometheus, Helios, and Leto, are sometimes also called Titans.

So if we got the whole clan together for Christmas, we'd need more than one turkey.

VICTORIAN DANCING KITTIES! (animation)

One of my favorite handmade animations. 

WHY is there a SQUIRREL in It's a Wonderful Life?

This is an annual mystery which I have never solved. WHY is there a squirrel in the middle of It's a Wonderful Life? Uncle Billy has a pet crow which appears from time to time, but this squirrel seems to have come out of nowhere. It's a well-trained squirrel, if not a compassionate one, as it clings to Uncle BIlly's arm while he sobs his heart out. The story all ends well, of course - but nobody talks about what happened to the squirrel.

🎅BADLY-ANIMATED (but pretty!) CHRISTMAS CARD🎄

This started out life as a gif, got filed away, and has been resurrected on YouTube. It's incredibly cheesy, but that's part of its charm. The horses appearing and disappearing is both lame and magical. 

🎅🙄SMOKING SANTA!😳🎅

It wouldn't be Christmas without bizarre Santas smoking pipes.This is from an incredibly weird Christmas puppet show from the 1950s. 

Eartha Kitt - Santa Baby (Official Audio)

It might be a BIT early for this, but not by much. How many versions have I heard of this Christmas classic by various female singers who almost ALWAYS turn it into a parody. Of what, I am not sure - Mae West, Betty Boop? It's always sung "campy", like a drag queen would do it (and this IS a favorite song of drag queens). Eartha Kitt nails it because she actually sings it very straight (I mean in the old-fashioned sense), letting her purring voice and clear enunciation of the delicious lyrics do the job. 

Favorite line: "Santa Baby, just one more little thing - a ring. I don't mean on the phone."  Whoever wrote this was a genius!

Home movie! Grandgirls having a hoot

 

A tiny home movie taken on Bill's phone. As usual, the girls are hilarious!

Here's the gif version - cropped with no sound.

Why I Quit AA

BLOGGER'S NOTE. As I celebrated 31 years of sobriety today, I remembered something I had written WAY back - in 2010, as it turned out. I was just beginning to blog on Salon.com, and was naive enough to publish the piece - after which I was bombarded with the most hateful comments I have ever received about anything. One small sample: "Where did you attend meetings - in a lunatic asylum?" I was called nuts, looney, a whack job, a head case, and every other hateful synonym for "mentally ill" that anyone could dredge up.

I think, to some extent, it proved my point.

AA saved my life, but that doesn't mean it's appropriate to cling to a life preserver forever. Re-reading this for the first time in more than 10 years, I'm kind of taken aback by the anger in it,  and in the way I didn't spare the horses but came right out with every objection to the program I'd ever felt, and was never allowed to express.

So I'm re-publishing it today, since I still agree with most of it. I did sift out some extremely valuable life skills from attending meetings, but most of that was gathered wisdom from the friendships I had formed. It was the people, not the program which saved me - and yet, AA constantly focuses on "principles before personalities".

At any rate, I stopped going to meetings in 2005, and am sober today, and surprisingly happy and well given all the current circumstances. But since I've been given the power and ability to express things, and enough guts to put it out there in full knowledge of the risks, I won't waste this piece by keeping it in a moldering file. 

I have no idea if AA is different now. I even flirted with going to a meeting during the most brutal phase of the pandemic, not so much for the program as for the people. I just wanted a little companionship, what they used to call "fellowship",  with people whom I knew would be struggling with the whole situation. But all the meetings had been shut down due to quarantine.

Why I Quit AA

A sober alcoholic’s journey back to individuality

The other day I was lurking around in the children’s section of my favorite bookstore, trying to figure out what a four-year-old grandgirl might want for her birthday. Flipping through the $30 board books and propaganda about toilet training and environmentalism, I heard someone call my name.

I looked up. Oh, hi, Jim. Oh, I’m doing OK. Yes, really. Just doing a little shopping here. No, really, I’m OK. How are you?

It’s hard to be looked at with a mixture of embarrassment and pity, but that’s what I was seeing in Jim’s eyes. Clearly he didn’t want to run into me, as he had been making certain assumptions: that I had either “gone back out” and was drinking again, or else was in such a state of “dry drunk” rampage that I was making myself and everyone around me miserable.

Welcome to the wonderful world of an ex-AA. As with an ex-con, the sense of ensnarement never ends, at least not without a Velcro ripping-away and endless guilt.

There was a time when I needed AA like I needed to breathe. Yes, I am a real alcoholic, and I didn’t fully realize it until I crawled into a meeting on my belly in 1990. Scared sober, I became enmeshed in an organization that quickly took over my life. Moreover, the more embroiled I became, the greater the praise heaped upon me. If I went to a meeting every day, I was a “good” AA member; more than once per day, and I was a spiritual giant.

It’s often said at meetings that you never graduate. This might be OK if I at least had a sense of moving on to another level, but this is discouraged. People with 20 years sober are supposed to say at meetings (whether they feel it or not) that they are at exactly the same level as the newcomers, and are only one drink away from disaster.

I agree with this part: I’ll never be safe to drink again, and I’d better not forget it. After years and years of having this fact jackhammered into my head, I think I’ve accepted it (for after all, “acceptance is the answer to all my problems today”).

From the very beginning, I was disturbed by certain pervasive beliefs in the organization. Conformity is one. Don’t ever speak “outside” the AA rhetoric, or other people will assume you’re not doing it right, or you’re fighting the mighty truths of sobriety. There is such a thing as AA dogma, often promoted by the elder statesmen: one elderly man, a veteran of World War II, came to the same noon meeting every day (supplementing it with evening meetings nearly every night) and talked at length about the war. He talked about the war as it applied to AA, of course, about how he drank his way through the horrors of the battlefield (who wouldn’t?), came home to a wrecked life, and began to set himself straight on the Road of Happy Destiny.

I can’t begrudge an old man the comfort and safety of sobriety, but why do exactly the same dynamics have to apply to a 15-year-old kid? In AA, one size fits all, and if it doesn’t fit, YOU are made to fit yourself to it. If you ever hear a criticism, it’s always couched in terms of “well, I used to object to this and that” (I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see). But glory hallelujah, now I see the light.

The 12 steps, forged in the ‘30s by a failed stockbroker and an inebriated doctor, are all about breaking the will, surrender, and absolute reliance on God “as we understood him”. Though the founders were in some ways quite spiritually evolved, leaving the door open to diverse interpretations of the divine, the actual practice of the program involves the God of Sunday school and revival meetings and “that old-time religion”. As usual, the practice is light-years removed from the actual text.

We constantly hear things like “ninety meetings in ninety days”, “it works if you work it”, and reams of other cute sayings (my favorite of many acronyms: sober stands for “son-of-a-bitch, everything’s real!”). None of these are found in the main text of Alcoholics Anonymous, usually known as the Big Book. Though many members preface everything they say with “the Big Book says”, their interpretations are often pretty far off the actual content.

But that’s not what made me quit.

Though there was one defining crisis that caused the actual split, there had been a steady accumulation of episodes that disturbed me. No one seemed to be willing to talk to me about any of this, as they were too busy going on and on about humility, surrender and the “incredible journey”. (Many AA members I knew literally had no friends or even business associates outside the program, and had brought their spouses and children on-board. Those who didn’t usually ended up divorced: AA widows abound, and affairs rage in spite of the organization’s unnaturally pure motives.)

Item: I was a couple of years in, doing well, stable, sober, and going to five or six meetings a week. Anything that bothered me about AA and its principles was relegated to some sort of seething pit of doubt that was without question my fault, due to my arrogance, lack of surrender and refusal to absolutely rely on God.

For you see, “everything happens for a reason”, everything happens “the way it’s supposed to happen”. (When my son’s roommate was savagely kicked to death outside a bar, an AA member I knew said it was “all part of God’s plan.”) You hear this nearly every time. Though I didn’t voice my objection, because you don’t do that at meetings, this seemed like passivity to me. “Self-will run riot” was the ultimate evil, but it often seemed that having any individual will at all was somewhere between a sin and a crime.

My friend Louise told me this story: she had been horribly abused as a child, bullied by a sexual tyrant who was now beginning to abuse his grandchildren. As she sat around a campfire meeting, an exclusive club in which your deepest feelings were expected to be revealed, she finally shared the agonizing decision she had made: “I’m going to lay charges against my Dad.”

There was a brief, embarrassed silence, followed by this from the meeting’s ringleader: “Louise, I believe you have a resentment.”

There followed a long discussion (or rather, a series of uninterrupted soliloquys: AA doesn’t do “cross-talk”) about how Louise had to surrender, let go of her anger, forgive. This was what she “should” do. I met her several months later and asked her how she was doing. “Much better. I’ve left the program. I was tired of twisting myself into a pretzel.”

Another episode, even more harrowing, involved a young woman who had been systematically tortured by her father. Her sponsor told her she must pray for the person who abused her, and wish for him everything she would want for herself. If she forced herself to keep doing this for long enough, she would actually want these things for him and feel mercy for him. She was also told during her Step 5 (the confessional step) that she must always look for her part in everything that ever happened to her. She wrenched her brain around trying to figure out what her part was in being sodomized at five.

She stood up at the meeting, looking fragile as glass, with tears running down her face. “I just don’t know how to make amends to my Dad. My sponsor says I’ll feel so much better if I do. But I feel like killing myself. I guess I’m just a lousy AA member. This is supposed to work. I’m not supposed to feel this way. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

I would have talked to her after the meeting (God knows what I would have said) except that a phalanx of members swarmed her afterwards, eager to make her case fit the immutable model. I wonder what happened, if she ended up like Hannah whose background was similar. Unable to endure what had happened to her, she committed suicide. Members talked about “those with grave emotional and mental disorders”, and carried on.

If I am painting AA too darkly, if I am leaving out the tremendous compassion I found at those early meetings, then I apologize. But as time went on, I found I couldn’t keep the dogma fresh. Except for some of the stories in the back, the Big Book has not changed since its first printing 60-some years ago. What other self-help program wouldn’t update itself in so many decades? What about all the discoveries we’ve made about family dynamics, about heredity, about mental illness? What about issues of race, of sexual orientation? (There are a few “gay AA” meetings in which members are held in quarantine. But in the general assembly they have to keep their mouths shut. I once saw a man at an open meeting refer to coming out, prompting an old geezer to literally stomp out of the meeting saying, “I didn’t know this was a meeting for fags.”) No, it’s all swept into the great gulf: obviously the program “works if you work it” the way it is, so why change it?

But I have come to believe that if the program works, it is because people sublimate their individuality, their power to differ, discern and object. The fact that the 12 steps have been applied to every addiction and disorder in existence alarms me, as if the steps truly are the holy grail of recovery, unassailable, irreplaceable, and beyond question.

My irritability mounting as the years went on, I finally hit a real crisis in 2005. I had suffered from some kind of psychiatric disorder all my life, and in spite of years of good remission I feared a return, but was repeatedly told in AA that it would never bother me again if I stayed sober and constantly relied on God. It was obvious to them (though not to me) that it had all been caused by the demon alcohol. I secretly took two drugs to control my whatever-it-is (and in all that time I’d never had a correct diagnosis, because the psychiatric system is so incompetent, abusive and full of shit that it deserves to be torn down forever). Suddenly I learned over the ‘net that both these drugs had been recalled at the same time. My doctor had no idea this had happened. So I was left with a choice: try something new, as my doctor recommended, or go “drug free”, as all my AA friends had been urging me to do.

My first reaction was a huge flush of euphoria, of tremendous energy, and an eerie turning back of the clock. I had never had so many complements about my appearance: I looked ten years younger! Looking back on photos of that time, my eyes were like pinwheels and I was constantly beaming, but apparently no one thought this was wrong.

Oh, and the compliments on finally being “clean”! “Oh, thank God you’re finally off all that stuff.” “I knew you could do it!” “See, you don’t need to lean on pills because you have God in your life.”

My sleep was whittled down slowly, but by the time I was down to two hours, strange things were starting to happen. In deep hypnosis (by a friend who didn’t know what he was doing), I had an encounter with the Divine that was completely shattering. Almost at the cost of my life, I learned that “meeting God” isn’t at all peaceful or pleasant. The ancient belief that we will die if we see God face-to-face turned out to be true.

The sickening free-fall that followed, the dive into a depression that pushed me below ground, is beyond my powers to describe. It was three years before I began to feel like a human being again. I am now on five drugs and have finally found a decent, competent psychiatrist on the recommendation of a friend. I no longer take medical advice from people who aren’t doctors or try to “heal myself” on milk thistle or coffee grounds But when I think how close I came to giving up and committing suicide, it makes me shudder.

AA did not help me during the most harrowing time of my life. All I got was more unhelpful rhetoric. I wasn’t surrendering, I wasn’t practicing the principles, I wasn’t adhering to the tenet of “no mind-altering substances” (another thing that’s not in the Big Book, but often “quoted” by members with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other). In other words, it was my lack of commitment that had made this happen. Almost everyone assumed I had “slipped” and was drinking again (which I didn’t – I had a healthy terror of the stuff by then). At first it was subtle, but then I felt roped off, excluded, unable to strike up a conversation with anyone. I stood in the crowd after meetings looking at a lot of turned backs. Even my sponsor always seemed to be busy.

I had been a loyal, sober member of the program for 15 years.

It didn’t really occur to me, because I had been so thoroughly indoctrinated, that there were other, equally effective ways to be peacefully sober. So I ventured out. I rediscovered a close friend who had also dropped out, and we compared notes. I began to realize that in any other case, if a human being were relentlessly exposed to the same simplistic information over and over and over again, it would be reasonable to assume they “got it” and wouldn’t need any more exposure. Do we go to Sunday school until we’re 47? Do we need to have the Golden Rule blasted into our ears by loudspeaker every morning?

OK, I realize that if AA no longer means what it used to, I don’t have to go. But the guilt still sometimes jabs at me like pinpricks, even two years after I left. The pity in Jim’s eyes, the sense of “oh, she’s going to fly apart at any minute” was palpable. In his view, there is simply no way that an alcoholic can ever stay sober and be happy and productive (though the program is not very big on “productive” and discourages normal ambition) without relentless exposure to the principles of the program.

I hope I don’t drink again, but I know there is no guarantee I won’t. I am profoundly committed to the sober life. I do appreciate what I was able to learn from my many years in AA, but I don’t think I’ll attend meetings again unless my view changes or I find myself in a dangerously slippery place. And if I do, I will not expect “fellowship” or any kind of a welcome. I can imagine what they would think if they saw me again: some version of “I told you so”.

I no longer see AA recovery as real recovery: as with “that old-time religion”, no one questions the tenets, assuming they are infallible. Longtime members creep me out. They are broken records of recovery, parrots fed on the same bland diet, grateful to be huddling together in a place where everyone accepts them and nothing ever changes.

But that’s not life. Things don’t stand still except in old Jimmy Cagney movies, preserved in time. Life necessitates constant adaptation to change which is often unexpected, wrenching and unwelcome. But we are not taught that in AA. We are taught to rely absolutely on God “as we understood him”, to believe that everything happens for a reason. When adversity hits, we’re told it’s “all in God’s plan”.

If this is so, I think I’ll make a plan of my own.