Bonfire of the Insanities

Probably self control. I need to find some medium between going about life with my psychic sphincter tightened and just giving in to every random impulse.

Who says it has to be chronological? I'm reading and listening to tunes, throat like daggers. Anybody know any good disaster movies?

;)

This is not a very well thought through idiom. How do you catch flies with vinegar? How would you make vinegar in any way attractive to flies? Even really good balsamic vinegar, the stuff Italians use to solve digestive cramps, isn't going to appeal to flies, realistically. If you made salad dressing out of it and put it on a really nice salad, sundrieds, celery, fetta, well they'd probably eat it. But honey is a glutenous substance. Vinegar isn't. Once a fly lands on your honey coated waffles, they're pretty much fucked. They can't move. Vinegar, on the other hand, doesn't hamper their movement. It just makes them bitter.

Since I last wrote, I took the other album around to my uncle. He told me a little about the revolution of culture that occurred in Germany in 1945. It turns out his Dad was shot in November of 1945, not on Armistice Day in April as I had previously thought. He said the American troops were very disciplined, there was relatively little looting under U.S. occupancy because there were serious consequences. But when the Russians took over East Berlin, crime was rampant. The Russian Army was a fairly undisciplined army, conscripts, Cossacks and barbarians. I guess that's a fairly black and white way of looking at it. What's interesting to me is that from being a first world industrial power with a fairly slick modern society, it was possible for East German people who were fairly well educated and used to mod cons and government that at least made themselves sound reasonable to be overwhelmed by a dictatorship. They'd been in the midst of a European civil war and people were hurt, tired and desperate for some semblance of normality, sure. Also, there had been so much unproductive conflict--people fighting for rights that they thought were reasonable and just. But I guess when you're the loser in a World War you have to adopt all sorts of unreasonable bargaining positions. They didn't have a lot of choice.
It's a strange perspective shift though. In the lifetime of people you know well and can talk to, Germany in 1945 was a fairly competitive society. Their automotive factories had been hit pretty hard through the war, and R & D was at a standstill for about twenty years, if not backwards. Yet in terms of social control, they were already enforcing, for example, driving under the influence limits. Which is so anomalous when you consider the degree of chaos that you read about. (And of course media saturation with the Holocaust, but I won't get into that). Recently I read Once, Then and Now, by Morris Gleitzman to my 6 year old son. He loved it, but I was reluctant to read it to him at first, because it was about the Holocaust. His comment was "Wow Dad, I never realised reading could be so cool!!".
It's just so contradictory that a society that listens to pretty sophisticated music and has a relatively sophisticated economy for the time can simultaneously systematically hunt and kill each member of a given race. So it's OK to shoot someone for their colouring or religious beliefs but if you drink and drive, you're a bloody idiot?? To me it's strange that those 2 ideas can coexist.
Anyway, we've lined him up with a psychologist. He seems to brighten when somebody is interested in his story. It's pathological sadness though, no two ways about that.

Anyway, chip in from wherever you are. It encourages me to start writing again.

Recently a tragedy rocked my family. She was like a second mother to me. I tried to write through it, logical front brained poetry that kept my aunt's death in its place. You can't write poetry like that. You can't write about grief and loss like that. It needs to surge over you, sine waves of melancholy, froth, foam stinging breeze of despair, smacking you almost out of your little life raft, making you cry out hoarse for someone to save you. You can't let it rip you apart though either. Better to have a star to steer by, or some kind of tide or something. Something that you can long for and still find pleasure in, or bitterly hate and smile at in the same breath.

I read somewhere that grief takes 1000 days? We've set our watches by that.

She is survived by my uncle, 77 years old, children and grandchildren. My uncle is devastated--nobody expected her to predecease him. There are financial pressures, children to be dealt with, many of whom have suffered injuries themselves from the accident.
It's about 6 weeks since it happened, just before Christmas. In trying to help him cope with his pathological sadness, we have rediscovered a common interest--jazz. His family were stuck in the Eastern Bloc after his father was shot on Armistice day. He migrated to Australia in 59, but before that, in his youth they used to listen to big band jazz--Dixieland revival, Louis Armstrong's Allstars. He found it exhilarating, breathy contrapuntal rhythms delivered in brass orchestra format. Squealing, diving melodies cut through the speaker static like seagulls through a storm.

When the wall went up, it all changed. All you could get on the wireless was communist marching music. The only syncopations were goose steps. In 49, bootleggers would sneak 45s into Weimar. Real pirates, Kurt Napster, Wilhelm Vuze, Felix Limeweber. You couldn't play too much or you'd get caught, so they would listen to the gramophone in secret.

He's still in the dark ages in terms of computers. So my plan is to listen to and burn for him one jazz album per night for the next thousand nights. Give or take...

The first album I am listening to is Summit Meetings by the Metronome All Stars. Join in if you want. I'd be glad of the company.

8 Demanding Patients. One of them: the Golden Greek with Blu-Ray Vision, believes he is one of the finest medicolegal minds the world will ever see. In reality he is a butcher and has lost his job recently due to delusions of grandeur and auditory hallucinations. He spends most of his time asleep. He wants to have radiotherapy, not to get rid of the voices, but to piss them off. Alternatively, he'd like an exorcism. He has two volumes. Deafening and off.
Young Grasshopper. Polite and pleasant, this young man is well into his MMA, He's well read and had recently been baptised. His idea was to initiate a spiritual cleansing by entering a cathedral, pulling down the crucifix, as he believes the icon for Jesus should not be an instrument of torture and death. He jumped up and down on it, smashed it, lit a bowl of dried flowers alight and rubbed them all over his body. He stated you also need blood for a good spiritual cleaning, but he couldn't muster any up. He was laughing up until the point a man tried to put the crucifix out with a fire extinguisher. He grabbed the fire extinguisher and threw it across the room, using his "spirit leve" (sic) to measure the altar.
He's a pleasant enough guy, a lot of staff think he's a sociopath and he can be very devaluing of staff, but that he is still sick.
This other lady I've known for about ten years. She's got schizophrenia and she is absolutely horrible at all hours of the day. The first tine I met her again, she said: "What do they call you this days, Jeep?"
"Registered Nurse is what they put on my name tag."
"So they call you that to your face, do they? What do you think they call you behind your back? Could it be 'cunt' Jeep? Do you think they might call you cunt?
2 Weeks later. I make her a coffee, just the way she likes it. I hand it to her. "Don't look at me like that," she says. "I still think you're a cunt.:

Like an overflowing kettle that has short circuited and thrown me forcibly across the room, Myles Barlow's show has had some electrifying thrills and spills. Now, as I contemplate the final episode, I eat a muffin of melancholy at a café of desolation and wonder what burn treatments of banality could soothe the shock to my soul.

Patient: Nurse, what will this medication do to me?
Me: Well your face will feel a bit numb at first and then you'll feel like the king of the world! Til you crash and then you'll feel like shit. Not really. I don't actually know what it does. The doctor did tell me, but I couldn't seem to get interested. Do you still want it?