And now for more of those well thought-out, carefully constructed, completely serious essays on sensitive subjects of a political or important subjects which in no way should you take as humorous, tongue in cheek, parodies, or social terrorism (trying to piss you off because I think you could use a good off pissing (piss offing?).
Essay 1: We are all pigs beneath a tin roof.
Anti depressants do not work. Now, hold your horses, there, dear reader. Before you write me an angry letter to tell me how depressed you are, and how much more depressed you would be (or less because you would be so depressed you would kill yourself and thus stop existing entirely) without your magic happy pills, and before you write to me and say, you jerk, you drink beer, you are worse than Hitler (remember I am in Utah you out of staters) and should be burned at a stake, just bear with me, and grant me 3 hours of your time to finish a short blog of the usual length, with my usual brevity and concise treatment.
My first reason to suggest anti depressants do not work, is that no people have ever been more depressed than Americans. Also I have never met a single person on anti depressants who was not obviously depressed. Actually I can tell who is on them almost immediately, for the simple reason, that they are depressed. Now if you are paying an arm and a leg for a thing, you sure hope it works, and are bound to believe it does, and if you feel you need a thing, you sure will convince yourself you do. And hey, when you feel helpless you try anything. Every culture for about 5,000 years had a rain dance, except in Seattle, where they had dances for droughts, probably. If the ground wasn't too soaked and slippery for dancing. Does this mean, even when it rains, that there is truth to the rain dance? Benefit? Well there is no harm to it. I doubt one could argue that rain dancing made the Gods think, "look at these idiots, they actually think that thrusting of the hips and all this groveling would make us send them rain? Didn't they read the instruction manual we sent down, oh no, no...wait, here it is, we didn't send it. So they'll have to invent science. Whoops!
Well, actually I can argue that, and am, as of now. I think a better policy would have been to waive middle fingers all together at the sky and sneer, give us rain now, or else we will use our primitive cave tools to carve into the mountain face that you are a chicken and no one should worship or listen to you, because you lie, and lie, and lie again, like every drug addict, or boyfriend.
There is a benefit to placebo effect, but if you are going to suggest that taking brain altering chemical combinations is good for people, and paying a lot for them also helps, then you are a jerk. Sugar pills for free would be much better. Or how about this: stop making people feel bad in the first place. Jeez guys, try skydiving before you start messing with your brain, or go get drunk. Okay if you don't keep getting drunk, it makes you more depressed after you sober up, but just keep getting drunk! That still does less damage to your body than these pills probably do.
Now for a quick introduction to how chemicals are developed. Ever hear the 10,000 monkeys on a typewriter analogy? That with enough monkeys one of them will by accident write "War and Peace?" Well, big pharmaceuticals hire thousands of chemists and say, play around. They invent new compounds, these compounds, synthetically tricked up in labs through no plan or foresight, are then given to various animals. If the animals die, the compound is a poison and is sold as such. Pest control, and so forth. If the animal gets perky it is a stimulant or anti-depressant. Then it is given to different animals, say monkeys. If they don't die, it gets tested on humans. Any report or result that proves nothing is not reported. The companies only have to report what they want. So 10 dud results and 1 study that shows a slight improvement means a new anti depressant is on the market. And people actually tell me to take these things! Depressed people! Who admit to me they get so sad sometimes they just with they were dead or can't get out of bed for 2 days! These people say I am crazy to go do risky things all by myself in the middle of nowhere, though that: gets me high on my own natural hormones without the use of drug or alcohol, is fun, makes me happy, gets me in fabulous shape, is a break from the otherwise unbearable safe monotony of ever day life, has the benefit of taking me to natural wonders, has given me more confidence than I ever would have thought I could have before starting, and has numerous other benefits, the only downside being, I will probably die while doing it one day. So okay, it isn't exactly innocence. But its not a habit I have to steal electronics and cars to hock to support. So its got at least one up on meth.
You people are all insane. Have I mentioned this? You are. But you don't know you are. That's part of the insanity. Just because everyone is doing something does not make it sensible. Parents used to say this, now they do not, because they are too busy texting, which they used to tell their kids not to do. Now they rarely know they have kids. Anti depressants do not work, lastly, in my mind, for this reason: people are not all depressed for chemical imbalances. Autism, boredom, and depression were all invented a little after electricity, and hot water heaters. Until then, life was hard, and anyone who said that was looked at as an idiot not doing their part. If they were doing their part, they would not have had time for talking. People still died then, so mourning was tasteful, and within bounds. You buried your dad, you didn't whine about missing him to your kids and therapist for 20 years. Life was a challenge so quitting it was seen as cowardice and people thrived and succeeded as much on pure hate and refusal to be beat as to enjoyment or the pursuit of happiness. Or maybe, I mean, I wasn't there you know? But now, we are so removed from our natural environment, that I am convinced there is a fundamental disconnect. We are unhappy because we are not doing what we were designed to do and have not quite evolved out of. Our eyes cannot adjust to light changes as quickly as a light switch can open a circuit. So we get tingly dots for a few seconds. If we can keep electricity around for another 40,000 years, our descendants may be able to see instantly going from pitch dark to blazing bright rooms, but in the mean time, you cannot take enough of the cave man instinct out of a man to make reading a newspaper on a subway train in an underwater tunnel content. In his tie and business suit, some part of him, even if dormant, and never stoked or suspected, feels this is wrong. He will go to a doctor and be told he has a chemical imbalance and be assigned some pill or other. He trusts this doctor as a professional with more knowledge and expertise (or why would he be there? I have not gone to a doctor in over 5 years by the way, even for broken ankles, wrists, fevers of 104 degrees that made me break out into hives wherever skin touched skin (armpits, inner thighs) and you would not believe what else) and so will trust the pill, and expect it to work. And when we expect a thing, we will convince ourselves it is. After all, the problem is hardly defined, is at the edges of awareness. Can be kept at bay by busyness and chasing skirts or bowling or whatever else.
Pigs on big farms spend all their lives under a tin roof, never seeing the sky. They do not even know what a sky is, so how could they know they are missing it? Chickens who are "free range" (a garbage term) are provided access to fresh air, but only after 5 weeks- until then they are kept indoors for their own safety from germs (legal) and by that time, they are so accustomed to life in a pen, they will not go outside, for fear, and from shaky legs that they do not trust. But this choice of staying inside does not mean they are meant to, that they are happy having wobbly legs and having never seen a sky. They miss the sky, though they fear it and it feels unnatural. They have no nature anymore, and they cannot be happy. Yes chickens and pigs are now bred selectively without a "stress gene", meaning they cannot be happy or unhappy, and can now be cultivated with their tails and with their beaks as they will not let other pigs eat their tails and open them to infection, and will not peck their neighbors to death in frustration, but that is not happiness, and if you think it is, then go sign up for a frontal lobotomy, or shove a pencil through your eye at just the right angle...I support D.I.Y. attitudes in all things.
Do I need to bang home this analogy? Touch screens are not our natural environment. TV is not our natural environment. Rock and roll, or bless me, thank you depression era stars for writing it, early swing music, is not natural. Spend a little time each day detoxing: garden, meditate, read (still not natural, but closer than a computer screen), make food from scratch, take up a new hobby. Play darts (the modern miniature golf of spear hunting), go skydiving. Do something you never thought you would do, and never thought you could and think you should not. Move across country, or to Alaska, or to Siberia. Try anything. You're depressed already. And its still better than taking drugs from evil bloodsucking corporations bent on world domination that you have no idea even how to pronounce. Take a risk. Risk everything even. Go gamble, hell, why not? We are the least happy people in history, I imagine. There was no whining, few diaries in older times. People did not walk about in fear, or misery. Slaves were happier than Americans are right now. And yet look at all our pleasures...our bodies are designed for bouts of activity, for desperate escapes, for danger, for threat, for long periods of inactivity- broken up by emergencies. Without the emergencies we fall into malaise. I was never happy growing up. And I thought the problem was me. I was comfortable, I was loved (theoretically), I was safe, the environment I was in was good. It was just all so damned boring. I thought that all the time. It would be better if it were worse, just so something might happen. The Diary of Samuel Pepys is interesting. He gets into these zones where he says "Up. And to the office. Went as far as I dared with a pretty wench at the King's Tavern. Then home and to my wife." About 10 times in a row. And then you get, "All of London is on fire! And the Dutch fleet is rumoured to be at the mouth of the Thames, having sunk or captured 5 of our best ships. God preserve us! We shall all be sold into slavery or worse!" Then the entries are good for a few weeks before settling back into the tedium. We really need that government Viking program of mine.
Essay 2: Look what you've done with Zeus!
Blogs are a funny thing. Mostly, they are badly written without much thought and are dull if not trash. Few people say anything and few readers want to find anything being said. They are generally tedious. Hey at least I am not that! I make it a full time hobby to offend people. If you can go even a day without offending anyone at all, you probably are not saying anything. Or much. And if you have not been offended today, your friends and enemies are too boring. Find some new ones.
But if I were to write a brilliant poem about a deep and abstract concept, you would not read it. But a half-hearted blog, which amounts to little more than a diary, with the added vulgar touches of being written for others to see (oh the vanity!) and wasting electricity to be both written and read, a blog, I say, you are reading right now, as you can see. Yet I am writing one. It amuses me mildly at times.
Had the founding fathers had a magic crystal to see the future with, and if they could view you, and your neighbors dear reader, how do you think they would feel exactly? Proud? Happy? Confident and assured they were on the right path breaking from England?
"Look what a well-read, fit, healthy, moral, intelligent, and industrious people we have formed. Honest in their dealings, happy and generous and communal. They have done away with slavery and are atop the world." Is this what they would say? I doubt it. I think instead they would have torn up the Declaration of Independence and turned themselves over to England for immediate hanging. Hanging would have been too good for how they felt. Look what we have done with the powers of the Gods. With free time. When a man got any leisure time in the 18th century he invented a thing, or at least named it, whether it was the origin of species, or oxygen. And now what does one do with it? We have more of it than we can put to use and fun is getting to be too much of a chore. With the power of the gods to capture time and freeze it into images, we get average doughy mothers taking 400 pictures per hour of their normal average and superfluous children (99 percent or more of the species could be wiped out tomorrow by plague or meteor with no harm- and strike that- even large good. Those who remained would pollute less, be forced to breed with those unlike themselves, and live lives of stimulation and interest, and would represent in some way, a stronger gene pool, as something in them would have spared them) in fields of tulips where hundreds of other average doughy mothers did the same thing all day. Curse you Deguerre (modern inventor of the photograph by accident- and yet we celebrate him?), how happy children were before the strange device of cameras was known! How free children could run, not being stopped every few feet a Tulip Festival to pose, which leads to a lot of damned egotism that does harm (especially in those children who grow up to be ugly and unpopular; its like a tease- when I was six people like me! They think).
And though health obsessed, your average American will not walk a quarter mile to a grocery store or restaurant or gym, where they will walk on a treadmill, wasting electricity that for all you know or care, comes from feeding tigers through mesh strainers. (This would not stop you from using it. Nor would learning it comes typically from burning coal, which is mined dangerously by family men (in America) and by small children (in some but not all, other places.) Do you care? Of course not. Hey I'm using electricity to write this too, but at least unplug your appliances when not in use and try not to have a light on it you could just open the blinds hey? Americans are disgustingly fat, dress pathetically, never take their eyes off screens, are news obsessed but know little of what is going on at any given moment, retain less, know no history, understand less, barely pay attention enough to vote in elections, bitch constantly, drive recklessly, buy homes they cannot afford, did not build, take pride in that, sneer at anyone who likes to read, learn, or exercise (a favorite question I get: why are you on skates? As if there is something shameful to being good on wheels and not driving everywhere or doing something fun that requires skill), who have little will power, are slaves to their stomachs, to many companies, are hive minded, cowards who perform in their lives no military service and look down on those who do, yet insist on trumped up military spending, and I could go on and on. I doubt the founding fathers would have gone on with their experiment if they knew their eloquence and philosophy would give way to text messages of 140 or less characters and a public who cannot handle basic math.
And look what we do with everything. Free time. Destroyed. We fritter it away. Four generations back, your family was probably illiterate. Now you can read, and the highest art you utilize it for is Tom Clancy, if that. The farmer who slaved away to make your life possible down the line would smack you, if you could get textbooks and manuals and novels out of his hand long enough for him to notice you. Flight! Sweet! Weekend trip to Vegas! That's putting it to good use. Fire? Prometheus was chained down for stealing it from the gods to bring it to man. Why? Were they unjust, selfish? Ha. The gods knew just what they were doing. Look around at your neighbors. You think anything beautiful or potent can go unharmed in our care? Is not sullied? Or that fire has done us good? We are helpless in the dark, afraid all the time, and outside of professional athletes who could crush Roman gladiators easily, are weaker than other humans have been. We have comforts and the most average slacker can lounge about more than the highest Pharaoh ever managed, and can be more comfortable, for being free of flies. But he does not even know it. Don't point it out. He is too busy being a loser, feeling down. Fire has made us soft, but not much better. All right, we are not animals. And an interesting book "How Fire Makes Us Human" suggests that cooking food is a kind of pre-digestion which allowed more tissue to go to our minds and brains, as our intestines could shrink compared with primates who have to process raw and dangerous foods. Okay, but we are moving in the wrong direction. Our machinery is better but we let it rust. The gods are still furious that fire was given to us. Had Prometheus stolen it for himself, and used it to read at night, to cook his own food and develop a fine pallette, he would be in the stars with them. But he made the mistake of thinking the masses deserved what they would not reach for themselves, that they would put to good use what he would put to good use. Free time should be earned. It is a travesty how many hours I have had to waste in lurid cubicles. But there is no tragedy in most people having to rot in lurid cubicles. And democracy was a fine experiment but the problem with voting is no one cares a damn for it when they feel it is a right. Make someone fight for the vote, they treasure it, they follow the issues deeply and weigh their decision. We ought to take the vote away from everyone. That would fix America. Because every average Joe would get pissed off enough to pay attention and take the power back. But that will have to wait for another day and another (bad) essay.
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