Hopes Completely Dashed

Citizens are assembled in Mexico. And I don't mean that they are demonstrating or something, they are built there.

Parts arrive from the far side of the border, Paradise, where the finished product as well as the junk is rushed asap to overflow the shelves of the malware state.

However, if you want to move your item, it has to take that detour to South. There's nowhere like day care. And Mexico is day care.

"Your infant should be baptized in the fountains of horror!" one minister (see: a Servant of the Lord) bellowed, while I was trying to sleep.

"Or else you can kiss your fort goodbye. Not to mention your old lady, those whining kids and your own skinny ass! Wasting all ammo on ghosts."

He lowered his voice a bit. "These people," he said, before becoming one with the vapors of the night.

"They are savages!"

@

It is quite a dangerous game, outsourcing the Evil is. In the end, you might drag a Monster out of its slumber. A different kind from the one you had in mind, but a beast just the same.

She said I should have told her. Told her what, exactly? That I'm a pervert and a degenarate? Oh, allegedly. That's the word that does wonders in these circles.

Get Mother of Goo converted, and I promise you, it's a date.

The title of this entry is from the most illuminating review I have ever read of anything. You can find it here.

How Sarajevo Saved Me

The mailwoman brought me a book, and made me shut up, for a while at least.

PUTTING EVERYBODY DOWN, VERBALLY OR OTHERWISE, IS JUST ANOTHER SAD SYMPTOM OF DEPRESSION - WORSE THAN SAD. IT'S PATHETIC.

If I'd stumbled upon this book a little bit earlier, maybe things wouldn't have turned out the way they did. Then again, maybe they would.

John Falk tells a true and touching story about a battle with a beast that appears in different forms in different worlds. Depression plays havoc usually in countries with a relatively high standard of living, while war rips apart everyone in its path, especially the poor.

A single memoir, Hello to All That, manages to produce firsthand testimony from both frontiers, witnessed by the same guy.

One morning at the age of 12, Falk woke up with only one desire left in his body: to go back to sleep. And the feeling - of nothing, which enfolds him so that he very nearly becomes nothing - won't go away.

His family gets worried, of course, and does everything in its power to help. To no avail. The boy sees no point in doing anything. For a while Falk grinds his teeth and goes through the motions, pretending everything is dandy. Finally, he really is incapable of doing anything. He spends most of his hours in a supine position, reading at night, sleeping the day away.

Enter doctors, enter shrinks, enter antidepressants, which, after many attempts, seem to take effect.

But the damage is done. The boy has lost over a decade of his life. "There had been a point in my life when my biggest ambition was simply to make it to the next minute", Falk writes.

He needs to live. He needs to reconnect with the world, with people. So he packs his bags, cooks up a story about being a correspondent for NBC Radio and boards a plane to Sarajevo.

It is August 1993.

___


Somehow, today, unable to bear one more piece of news about the financial crisis, I appreciate Falk's move even more. Also, there's the story of Anthony Shadid, which I stumbled upon yesterday.



Hello to All That: A Memoir of Zoloft, War, and Peace
By John Falk
Picador, 2005



http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hello-All-That-Memoir-Zoloft/dp/0805072187/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327005405&sr=8-1