Morning World

The good people of the neighborhood were going to work to the backing track of birds chirping their hello’s to each other and the hum of vehicular traffic.

A motorbike rumbled past.

The lady next door pulled up on the road below the balcony.

Another twenty four, wouldn’t mind putting on Etta James’s ‘At last’ or Aretha Franklin’s ‘Natural woman’ but some are still asleep he thought.

They both had excellent lyrics.

He wondered what people in other countries were doing, what were their waking routines but then again they would have representatives here who must generally be doing the same thing as they.

The Morning sun warmed his face, two crows flew by, the butcher birds in full song.

He was still pondering that Shakespeare quote “Nothing is good or bad, thinking makes it so”

Think I’ll have a cuppa and smoke he mumbled to himself as he got out of his chair.

A young lady passed on the footpath below

Morning.

Time

I have come to the realization that while I was not blessed with athletic ability, good looks, a rewarding employment, above average intelligence, a girlfriend and other things, I had something one could consider just or even more valuable..

…time!

I wasn’t built for speed and being quick of wit, in fact I find it downright unsettling not to mention confusing when I have to do a lot of tasks during my day.

I guess that is applicable to everyone.

I see my friends and acquaintances all around me leading such busy, hectic, and time poor lives and I feel guilty that I don’t.

Western society is set up for the workers and working and by that I mean there is a socioeconomic system set up to facilitate this.

Its like Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis, however unlike the movie, even Christianity has been corralled into promoting employment as being somehow Godly.

Every one has become so busy trying to just survive in this world that they can’t think about what they are actually doing and who they are doing it for.

Some people like being busy and thinking nothing while amassing material possessions, I’m far from being religious but One of Jesus’s best quotes was

“Man cannot live by bread alone!”

I mean when all is said and done during your twilight years you might look around and realize that you are actually surrounded by nothing and are completely alone, because you never had the time.

Sunlight

The afternoon early autumn sunlight at my back, the weather turned mercifully cool, thank God for small mercies.

I was reading a blog and the blogger basically stated that they would do nothing but post positive content.

Then I thought about this for a little while, true there is a tsunami of negative content and opinion out there in the wilds of the internet and maybe societies as well and it wouldn’t be a bad thing to be positive.

I then realized that the blogger was constrained by their profession and standing in society and I was so glad I wasn’t, maybe the first casualty of success is the freedom to be honest.

Personally speaking if I had to be positive all the time I’d develop a spastic colon, but to each their own.

I guess you are treading a treacherous mine field when it comes to matters of the mind but one important thing to remember is personal responsibility.

What happened to people having common sense and being responsible for their actions?, actually being adults. What an awfully nasty litigious society in which to live, how horrid having to self censor anything but positive thought.

I guess it’s a winner when it comes to afflictions of the mind but also a sad indictment on society, you see that sort of mind set is spreading to the rest of the world.

Its almost like life is becoming a G rated Disney movie.

Jack Johnson’s song ‘where have all the good people gone’ sprang to mind

He turned, the sun was setting, what a wonderful day.

Depression

I suffer from depression,it started in my later high school years and was untreated until my early adulthood,

The treatment was ad hoc at first and then in my late twenties commenced in full.

During the first couple of years of treatment I was complete, content and happy just another human being in their adulthood.

Then I started having difficulty concentrating and this then to long periods of rumination over all the negativity I had experienced throughout my lifetime.

Life was reduced to being an automaton, just going through the motions an inability to feel positive emotion and be receptive to others and new experiences, it was much like that movie The Truman Show.

Of course I was treated but I soon learnt how to ‘fake it to make it’, I became past master of appearing normal to others and my treating team, on outward appearances I was like any other ‘normal’ person with a slight issue with depression.

The reality was far more acute then what I let on, minutes formed into hours then day, months, years and then pretty much two decades of self rumination, concentration problems, inability to feel positive emotion and access anything other than negative memories and emotions.

I was living a continuation of the same day over and over in a self defeating circle with all my positive memories thoughts, knowledge, self awareness emotion all completely and frustratingly locked away in my brain.

Of course my loved ones did their best but it was taken as a source of of deep irritation for me because I was just making it from one day to the next and it took all my physical, mental and emotional resources just to make it through a day.

I had been treated so long my clinic location had been moved four times and eventually the powers that be decided to put me under the stewardship of my General Practitioner.

All I want to say is that mental illness does not run to a finite time frame for everyone, adherence to time has become more acute in the modern era and everyone is ‘supposed’ to be allowed to be ill and recover ‘within’ a certain allotment of time.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT only really ‘works’ if the patient is receptive or even partially receptive within that three or six month period.

Some mental issues or afflictions occur over a lifetime and need something like palliative care I mean some form of treatment that makes the patient as comfortable as they can be throughout their lives.

A patients enjoyment of life should be a paramount end goal.

The current medications for depression are just basically for one to function on a basic level rather than to a full potential of the person.

That is why substance abuse is a key factor in some patients, because they want to feel, feel anything.

Monday

A gecko sounded in the distance, it was approaching four o’clock in the morning and the birds were still asleep.

The back of his head hurt, he wondered how someone could feel this bad from trying to sleep.

It was the nightmares and uncomfortable dreams, maybe it was his unconscious fears expressing themselves.

A breeze rustled the trees and now he could hear the Indian Myna’s chirping and then a Kookaburra, the breeze again.

It was Monday morning, more birds, he wondered what the good people in the neighbourhood were doing.

He actually loved the silence, humans made so much noise.

He paused to take a swig of his Pepsi Max, satiated for the time being at least.

The possum that lived in the rather large fox tail palm dived back onto its leaves to his left, as it did every morning.

The night ending.

More cars, they were awake with noise. Off to that waking nightmare called work.

The breeze picked up.

He could not even fathom the discipline taken of having to go to work every day,

The sheer force of will to do so.

That’s what amazed him about people, how they did it every fucking day.

Something that he would find totally soul destroying.

Yet that was the reality construct, he just didn’t fit in that world, they weren’t living, they were just trying to survive.

The breeze murmured it’s agreement,

Thank you.

Happy International Women’s Day Ladies!

While reading the Brisbane Times online I came across a story about a beer brewing company called Two Birds, run by women, teaming up with another company in Western Australia to supply peach beer to pubs and clubs for today which is International Women’s Day.

It was about twelve in the afternoon that I read it and then completely forgot about the significance of the day.

I then remembered telling my niece that John Lennon once said ‘Women are the Niggers of the World’ and then I typed it into my search engine and its actually a song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono called “Woman is the Nigger of the World”

It’s a single off their album called “Some Time In New York City” released in nineteen seventy two which the legendary Phil Spector assisted in producing.

Naturally it wasn’t a chart topper although it made it to number fifty seven of the Billboard top one hundred which is better than a hell of a lot of less ‘controversial’ music now and then.

America has had a ‘Black’ president but it seems to me that Women’s rights are just going backward in the bulk of the countries that make up the world.

Women are seen as basically Slaves and are treated as such and most times no better than animals.

There was a Black American woman who helped run the underground railway to funnel Slaves to freedom during slavery and she said afterward that she would have freed many more if only they knew they were Slaves.

Empowerment is not through emulating men and their feats and sports but rather an onus on the men to respect women and it starts from a very young age.

You see I see the popular misconception of masculinity as a form of male dehumanization, by suppressing your sensitivity and emotional intelligence you become essentially a deluded walking penis.

It’s all about RESPECT, the men in the developed nations are under more scrutiny than those in the bulk of the worlds population of men in the developing world,

It is a dreadful tragedy where for women to speak up is a brutal death sentence.

Feminism, First World nations, the United Nations, the governments of these countries and we have failed those billions of women of even the most basic of rights.

So while it may not be optimal or anywhere near for you ladies in the first world just imagine the horrors of being a woman in the third world.

As a lighthearted aside -The Y chromosome is weaker than the X chromosome so don’t worry ladies sometime in the future there will be no men.

Dad

The totality of a Port Moresby night would have fallen the warm humidity of the thirty three degree day still lingering and there dad would sit,

His back to the wooden timber stairs leading up to the bedrooms under a suspended light bulb cloaked in a paper Japanese lampshade.

He was shirtless and only clad in a lap lap from the waist down,which is basically a piece of material tied at the waist, and was tuning the portable radio to radio Australia.

It was a ritual after dinner that Dad would have cooked,he would be smoking back then he smoked three packets of cigarettes a day and consumed a lot of instant coffee.

It was the early eighties and throughout our young lives we never had a family television set so the radio and coffee and eventually cigarette fueled conversation was our way of passing the time till we had to go to school or work the next day.

I started smoking after age nine when dad busted me having a Consulate in the back yard and said he’d prefer it if I didn’t do things behind his back and I’ve been smoking ever since.

Dad well he wasn’t your average dad, freedom was very important to him and he was loath to impose rules on us as children preferring us grow wild and free.

He did mention something about being Bohemian in the sixties but I have a limited idea of what that entails and he had a kick ass bookshelf among st other things there was a copy of The Naked Lunch by William S Burroughs.

I made the fatal mistake of trying to read it later on in my teen years, I’m still scarred by that little misadventure.

That’s a little snippet of how I remember him, even though we didn’t have much at the time it was one of the most memorable periods in my life.

There were times when we didn’t have food and dad would disappear off into the darkness, clad only in his lap lap of course, and materialize an hour or two later with a can of vegetable soup.

It taught me that he would do anything for us children and something is always better than nothing, I think if one goes through adversity together it creates an unbreakable bond.

He always did say to me, “Son you can live as a rich man or live as a poor man” it was his way of preparing us to be able to live either way and he was right.

Dear Australia

Dear Australia,

Thank you for everything that is good about you from the entirety of my young adulthood until now.

It was tough during high school and we may not see eye to eye when it comes to issues of race and your treatment of the First nations Peoples but I’m still here.

During my life here I have traveled up and down your east coast from Sydney to Cairns by coach and air, I’ve been to your wonderful outback like Broken Hill, Lightning Ridge and Lake Mungo.

I’ve seen the wonderful wide open spaces all around Central Western New South Wales I’ve gone skiing in winter at Victoria’s Mount Bogong.

Ive done Outward Bound in the forest and rivers outside of Canberra,Ive gone body surfing at Bondi Beach and Newcastle’s beaches,Ive drunk more than my fair share of Victoria Bitter when I had mates.

I’ve been up Centrepoint Tower in Sydney as well as the Opera House, Botanical Gardens, Kings Cross and Hyde Park I’ve been to Parliament House in Canberra and gone hooning in a hatchback with mates at the Mount Panorama racetrack in Bathurst.

I’ve been to Toowoomba here in Queensland, Wivenhoe Dam, Mount Cootha and the Art Gallery, the Gallery of Modern Art , Southbank, Maroochydore, Sunshine Coast the Gold Coast Tweed Heads, Burleigh Beach.

I’ve walked, been driven and caught public transport all around Brisbane and it’s suburbs and here I am.

I am so grateful for the treatment I have been given by your wonderful healthcare system, your wonderful climate and wide open spaces and Parks in which to recuperate and get well.

Not forgetting the wonderful people along the way from whatever, age, race, creed, religion or sexual orientation.

It’s the everyday people that make the difference,

From the check out ladies at the local supermarket to the bus drivers,

The other people walking along the street,

The local Tailor, people at the car wash,

The infirm on their mobility scooters,

Thank you from the bottom of my undeserving heart.

Signed, Judas Escargot.

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