As I’ve written before, having a blog of a sustained length over time that can dive back a decade with in situ thoughts and facts-of-mind on the record makes for a wonderful repository that allows a certain grabbing back into what we thought we knew then in order to compare it against the modern treachery of The Now.
Continue reading → The Medication Generation: Searching for Perfection and Enlightenment
We know most of my friends are still medicated and, the other day, I was concerned when I read an article claiming that most depressive people on daily maintenance medication will have seven major episodes over the arc of their lives. The demarcation between depressive events was notched as major changes in medication. Some of my young friends have had only a couple of events. Some of my older friends are deeper into their modes of seven.
Irina Werning is a SuperGenius photographer who has found her niche. She looks for old photographs and then updates the images years later by re-staging them with the same people in the images while simultaneously preserving the tone and substance of the original shot.
Filed under the category of TMI — Too Much Information — is rocker Bryan Adam’s recent revelation that his teen anthem, “Summer of ’69” isn’t a nostalgic look back at a quiet, more romantic time in his life, but rather an ode to honor the “69” sexual position.
Continue reading → Bryan Adams and the Summer of '69 Sexual Position
Melancholia is a necessary part of the swing and sway of everyone’s life, — but the author is especially susceptible to the dangerous wants of the warp and woof of melancholy.
Why is this so and where does that tempting blue pit hide its warrants?
Every new project begins in fear and ends in death.
An author always wonders if their idea is ever full enough or sustainable enough to engage an outside mind; then, when the process is over, the divinity of creating new life on the page ends in the quiet and small death of the author’s hopes and dreams as the final period is placed on the page.
Today we live in perpetual
moments of melancholia that now define our modern lives. We do not live in a state of regret, but we live with an ongoing consciousness of things we have lost. How do we handle the recognition that, over the last four years, so many precious things have been forever stolen from us?
We have lost our sense of sanctuary. There are no safe places. We cannot find protection in schools, mosques, churches, or even with each other. We have lost our right to privacy.
We walk the streets and we are watched. We enter public buildings and we are required to provide ID just to remain in the building.
We surveil our neighbors. People different from us — in color and tone and financial stature — are our silent enemies and are ripe for the reporting. We have lost our joy to depravity.
We have lost our Melancholia and our Black Bile and we’re the worse for the eradication. We now seek happiness through the pit of a pill and the trough of psychotherapy instead of actively working to remove ourselves from despair and founding ourselves in happiness and contentment even though they can never truly be achieved.
It is that struggle to raise our bodies and our thoughts that makes the life worthy of the living. Melancholia has a rich and deadly history in the mark of humankind and no other state of being has been rendered so beautifully in art than that of the Melancholic mind. It’s fascinating how “head on hand” is the rich semiotic used throughout antiquity to indicate this mournfulness of the memory for the living:
Continue reading → The Necessity of Melancholia and Black Bile
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