October arrived with plenty of sunshine but with a sharp drop in temperature, which is fine by me (I do not enjoy sub-Saharan weather, which is what Greece experiences in the long, oppressive, summer months).
The “crisis” of the last 24 hours revolved around cell phones—and was entirely the outcome of my own confusion about the dastardly Android’s mysteries. The net result was I ended up with a new (Chinese-made) gadget (which replaced my trusty Samsung) that I purchased on the spur of the moment fearing that the Korean solution had gone bust.
In the end, I discovered that the faults I was ascribing to the Samsung were entirely the result of my own clumsiness; the Samsung is now the backup solution and the Peking native is the active set opening me up to rumored global communist Chinese surveillance. Greece is already a helpless part of Chinese imperial expansion via colonial investments; the country’s flooded with Chinese consumer goods, both VAT-taxed and contarband. A proud, beautiful new world, isn’t it! The Ancient Greeks would have been proud.
I’ve been through rough times before but the current debacle makes the past look like a stroll in the park. I’m discovering daily that even the “bad bad” days can be a lot worse than previously thought. The mind is an unforgiving monster that can, and will, break you physically and make daylight appear like the darkest of the dark hours. I now fully understand the horror that overhelmes people, who experience persecution, oppression, and deliberate criminal action.
There’s no real defense against this monster other than trying to keep mentally busy. Scribbling for The Periscope’s benefit is the main mental tool. Reading is another, although my concentration has suffered and it takes patience and persistence to achieve the tempo that was once routine.
The intrusion of Seattle memories is unusually aggressive and non-stop. Day and night scenes as routine and innocent as walking the dog, going shopping, stopping at the pump to get gas, undergoing a physical at the Virginia Mason hospital, or waiting at a traffic light on Fourth Avenue play out like an unbroken video feed.
This incessant flow follows me everywhere—and, especially, when I’m out doing the slightest of errands. That I now live again in the old neighborhood, where I spent the better part of my twenty three years in Greece between 1987 and the end of 2010, when we moved to US, is a major contributor to the severe anxiety that permeates the whole 24 hours, day in and day out.
I have been given plenty of pointers, both professional and well-meaning amateur, on how to cope with this trial-by-fire, but nothing seems to work. I was sadly born with an imagination in constant heated overdrive and this “gift” from Nature is now haunting me relentlessly. I now understand why and how so many people slide down the addiction chute—the bottle and the drugs are waiting right around the corner if your defenses fail even momentarily.
The other major lesson that has emerged from this ghastly disaster is that if you put your fate in the hands of “mental health professionals” you’re, most likely, candidate of morphing into a defenseless, terrified, and utterly confused being.
There’s no “specialist,” with license to prescribe drugs, who would earnestly warn you of the deadly threat of “psychotropic” medication. And in a way, this is understable; if your speciality is toying with human minds there’s very little you can do in accessing the core of the patient’s problems other than incessant “talk therapy.”
Verbal mind surgery is a high-risk unpredictable debilitating game that consumes millions of unfortunates every day. But, when you’re desperate you’re also open to (almost) anything that seems to promise even the slightest modicum of relief. To get a glimpse at what is in store, if you’re caught in the psych medication trap, read this fully and carefully.
I’ve been often accused of living under “phobias”—and the palpable irony of this practice is that those delivering the “phobia” diagnosis were/are, almost always, prisoners of their own convolutions emerging from both “bad” inherited blood and hopeless personal circumstances.
Once you’re involved with this type of person there’s nothing in this world that can rescue you from an inevitable interpersonal, and frequently deadly, crisis. Trying to stave off the inescapable is rarely successful and the blow arrives with accuracy and force.
Further reading
Learned Hopefulness: The Power of Positivity to Overcome Depression Paperback