Pets are cuter when they are little (or more about my involuntary holiday).

Again, the names, locations, and quotes relating to where I spent the latter half of February are fudged in order to protect identities. Since they have a policy of there being no photographic equipment being allowed on the ward to protect the privacy of the patients, I have to respect that.

During X-Men: First Class, one of the many accusing-sounding things that Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) says to Professor X (James McAvoy) is that she guesses pets are always cuter when they are little. That, in a nutshell, sums up the reality for autistic or mentally ill adults in today’s “enlightened” society. They spend literally billions of dollars advertising initiatives to “help” the children or adolescents. Sometimes they even throw a dollar or two in the direction of those services or initiatives. And when the initiatives that were too ignorant or cash-strapped to use the right approach inevitably fail, it is the children and adolescents they were supposed to serve, who end up bearing the real cost. As the failure progresses and those children or adolescents become adults, the costs mount. And in cases of severe failure, such as the failure to properly diagnose an individual before their twenty-fifth birthday, the costs borne by the patient become so high that it makes the value of life very difficult to see.

How I spent the second half of February

(A note before I begin: This entry is going to talk a lot about the goings-on inside an acute-care ward within a mental health facility. For that reason, I am going to use aliases and flat-out mess-ups of names in order to protect anonymity and privacy. Please do not ask me who is who, because even if I do remember, I am not going to tell you. Similarly, if you recognise yourself in these writings and would like to be completely blanked out, feel free to comment.)

Suprise of the week: militant gun owners are still morons.

Well, after all of my writings about the hurtful nature of stereotypes and why people use them, I suppose I had to come to this topic eventually. Recently, an individual went to a screening of the new Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises, and shot dead a number of people. Terrible title aside, I do not know what could have possibly motivated this act. I could sit here and make jokes about how Christopher Nolan‘s godawful photographic style (shaking the camera about like an epileptic on meth, to quote Chris Bauer) being the cause, but that would be wrong and in poor taste.

Appreciating the classics: a look at Scanners

Scanners was one of the films that made the film industry recognise David Cronenberg as a unique voice in filmmaking. But by all rights and laws, it most certainly should not have been. In fact, one element aside, what is a unique and interesting story is all but pissed away by several elements that have a uniquely Ed Wood-ian feel to them. In the interests of giving Cronenberg his proper due, I am going to talk about what went wrong first. This will also give a better sense of what went right in the film.

The manner in which Scanners was financed left it open to some serious interference with certain aspects of the production. One such element was the casting of Stephen Lack (pictured) as the primary protagonist, a man going by the name of Cameron Vale. I will not link to Mr. Cranky’s review here because for reasons that have persisted for far too long with a site that is meant to be a commercial enterprise, loading the site usually brings a continuous stream of coding errors. But Cranky points out, correctly, that Scanners‘ claim to fame mostly rests on two things. The first is a scene in which a man’s head explodes (and this scene is awesome beyond words). The other is Stephen Lack‘s performance, which has caused acting tutors all over the world to redefine the art of acting by using Stephen as an example of what it is not. You can defend Stephen in many scenes by stating that his flat, emotionless performance is pretty consistent with how the mentally ill felt whilst under the influence of many of the medications designed to “stabilise” them. Melaril being a particularly cruel example thereof. But Lack is completely emotionless even in scenes where he should be roused to anger, or more.

It is about balance, any way you can

At present, the number of folk who have read my stories is a select few. And the question I get asked most once the questions about why I am not getting them published (which is a topic I am not going to talk about for a while) are done is simple. What are the stories really about?

When I was trying to kid myself that I could succeed at a university course relating to media and such, I had the great fortune to attend lectures by one Geoff Portmann. Portmann, for the vast majority out there who do not recognise the name, has worn several different hats on a number of different productions. The most important of which, for purposes of this discussion was as a director on eight episodes of the Australian government-funded television comedy Mother And Son. What he did on this job or any of the others he has done is not really important to this topic. What is important is a piece of advice that he dispensed concerning the structure of a story. As I have mentioned previously, you introduce characters, explain what they want to accomplish before the story’s end, explain what is getting in their way, and then describe how they overcome that.

What makes every story different is how one goes about that structure. The details, if you will. And the details is where every individual artist, author, musician, or filmmaker puts their personal touch on the material. As you will expect, this is also where the influences of the artist show up.

Although I do not follow the traditional rules of structure, the first novel in the arc I have been working on is an expression of what I will call the stimuli deficit. Every person, regardless of the situation they live in, receives stimulation to all of their senses of varying kinds. One of the first things you learn when you study psychology, especially from a storytelling research point of view, is that our intellect serves our emotions, not the other way around. Hence, much of our actions are concerned with the acquisition of positive stimuli. And in order to do that, we have to defeat sources of negative stimuli in our lives. This is a major reason why there is a correlation between mental illness, child abuse, and drug abuse (among other things). Everything we do, even work or hobbies, revolves around attaining this emotional state we refer to as pleasure or happiness, or preserving it. When we work, we plan in our heads what we are going to do with the proceeds. When we are sick, we think of what we will do when we are well again. When we are told we are going to die, we think hard about making the best use of what time we might have left.

If we were to look at every case of addiction, and I mean the broadest definition of addiction possible, I believe we would find many of the same things that motivate my writing. In essence, I am talking about a deficit between the positive stimuli and negative stimuli in my life. In my case, the difference is so enormous that every time I see a mole in my skin that does not look right to me, I start hallucinating it laughing at me, praying that it turns out to be a terminal cancer, and then recoiling when I remember how excruciating death from melanoma is reputed to be. It might sound cowardly to some to wish for death so fervently. Believe me, I get that. But when your only motivation to live for another day is to see your masculine parental entity dead, you start to feel you need to reexamine your life and whether it is worth the effort to preserve.

Command And Conquer: Tiberian Sun was not exactly a great game, but it did have far superior elements compared to anything that EA Games has come up with for the series on their own. One such element is the presence of a faction comprised of mutants who have begun to physically show the effects of excessive Tiberium exposure. On the surface, such effects come in the form of crystal formations in the skin, similar to the way skin appears to bubble and twist after the prolonged presence of a skin cancer. The reason this is relevant is because these mutants collectively refer to themselves as The Forgotten. That is a good name for anyone who is autistic and was born prior to 1990. The Forgotten. And whilst it sounds “cool” in context of a videogame where society has all but disappeared in the face of an environmental disaster the like of which even the lunatics in Greenpeace cannot imagine, being one of The Forgotten in a real-world situation is about as much fun as a skin cancer removal.

Feeling scared and lonely on top of all these things is a hell I would only wish on the like of Suzanne Wright. Think about it. How would you like to have your only conversations that do not make you feel suicidal occur online or over a videogame that you pay to play, and have constant skin cancer scares? Or be told that they want to cut a gland out of your face, with the potential side effect of leaving one side of your face permanently droopy? At least my proposed solution to the curebie problem in the form of armed combat might entail a relatively quick and painless death for me. I have seen brief flashes of the final months of life for a terminal cancer patient, in this case a woman who was married to one of my masculine parental entity’s brothers. There is a reason no child in the 1980s ever said anything like “when I grow up, I want to be dying of cancer”. And the world that Australia’s who-cares attitude towards the disadvantaged or outright disabled has made entails waiting around to die. Maybe an Australian (read this word in the most sarcastic, Ironside-like voice you can possibly imagine) thinks this an acceptable situation. As a man who believes a society should be judged by the manner in which it treats those who are not succeeding by conventional standards, I cannot think that way about it.

Is it all horror and terror? Well, no. Sometimes, when one looks back over their life and thinks about what it means, one thinks of the people who have inspired or moved them throughout their life. I have already mentioned many of the ones who did this indirectly through their work in the media. People like Paul Verhoeven or Michael Ironside, to name the best examples. But every once in a while, you meet people in person who also make you wonder if it is really possible to be something better. I wrote in a much earlier entry about neighbours I had with the family name Spencer. On the same token, if a gentleman by the name of Shane Curl who was working as a music teacher out of the Windsor area (what used to be the extreme edge of Western Sydney in some accounts) during the 1990s is out there reading this, I would welcome his contacting me, too.

I mentioned balance in my title for this post. Presently, lately, what I am vicariously balancing the woe with is my writing. It is a poor substitute, but it beats the hell out of having nothing at all. Which brings me to a question. If anyone who is reading this crap (I know there must be some of you out there) wish me to post anything I have written here, please leave commentary to that effect. I will see what I can do about it. For now, if you have gotten through this rambling, thanks for reading.

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