Follow @GarethSoye

Tuesday 13 July 2010

Illness, it's a bit of a larf...

A young neighbour managed to make it to my sister's wedding just before she died. She had cancer and was skin and bone in a wheel chair. No one laughed.

My friends dad died last Christmas from Motor Neuron disease. He couldn't do a thing at the end. Stuck in a lifeless body with no control over it. No one laughed.

So why did we all piss ourselves when Gazza turned up to see his 'old mate Moaty' last weekend just before he shot himself?

Gazza is ill. He didn't catch anything (well he may have but that's normal enough in Newcastle), he didn't develop any tumors or bits didn't start falling off him. But he's still a very sick man. Still, it's mental illness so it's funny. Isn't it?

Now I'll admit that his interview with local radio did cause me to chuckle. But there's also an underlying feeling of guilt. Why would I laugh at this sick man but not piss myself when I see Stephen Hawking?

Even last weeks protagonist who caused Sky News to go into such a frenzy of 'news gathering' clearly had issues. See, can't even call it sickness, have to say 'issues'.

Now there's no doubt that Raoul Moat should never have done what he did. The shooting other people bit. But why can't we rationally talk about why he did it?

For our friends who read the Daily Mail this does NOT mean that anyone is trying to excuse his actions. It means that there have to be reasons behind them, and don't you think that perhaps trying to find out what these reasons were, and perhaps therefore preventing something similar happening in the future, might be a sensible course of action?

See I've made a mistake there. Well a couple of them. Firstly I assumed that Daily Mail readers are capable of rational thought and secondly that they are capable of sensible courses of action. Rather than the usual 'lock-em-up' or 'send-em-home' ideas.

Nevertheless shouldn't the rest of us be able to discuss it? Perhaps not.

We've never seemed comfortable talking about mental illness. Dunno why. Fear, maybe? Or perhaps the realisation that somewhere deep in our minds we could have the same 'issues'.

Moat apparently complained at the end that no one loved him and he didn't have a father. Given that his mother said he'd be 'better off dead' you can probably see where he's coming from.

The father-figure or lack of one is something increasingly more prevalent today. There is an increasing number of children who reach their teens without having any male role-model in their lives. Daddy might have never been around, or might have left when he found out he was going to be a daddy.

And of course seeing as all men are pedophiles we can't possibly allow them to be teachers in primary schools.

There's a stigma with mental illness. People don't feel comfortable admitting it. Perhaps it's something to do with the fact that if you said you were suffering from something like MS you wouldn't get many people telling you to 'pull yourself together', which seems to be the super-duper solution to every mental illness under the sun.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. It's difficult even to write about because you fear someone will just make light of it or make fun of you for doing so.

So maybe I should just end on a joke?

Who's going to pay the expenses for that Moat last week?

See what I did there? Now I feel guilty and disgusting for doing it. But I'm mentally ill and unfortunately it causes me to have to think in a million different ways about practically everything I do or say.

And that isn't a joke.

Wednesday 7 July 2010

It's the little things...

I've never liked jugglers. Seriously. They always come across all fucking smug and like they could have your woman any time they wanted. Bastards.

Anyway that's not really the point. Jugglers rely on keeping many balls in the air at once to enable them to keep their powers of woman pulling. They have to concentrate on them all at the same time. What happens if they just look at one and focus on it? Disaster. Balls on the floor and a lifetime of solitude.

Bit like life don't you think?

No? Well let me explain.

Look at a lot of shit that goes on in the world. You probably only have to look outside your window. Especially if you live somewhere crappy, oh I dunno, let's say Aldershot.

Actually Aldershot is a great example. (There's a sentence very rarely used. Unless it ends with 'of a craphole'.)

I'm lead to believe Aldershot has a lot of drug addicts. Like a lot of other places. Now drug addicts cause a lot of problems. Why? Simples. Because they're only focusing on one ball. All the other of life's balls are dropped and everything becomes a mess.

So that's the drug problem explained then. But that's hardly the cause of all of the world's issues is it? No matter what the Daily Mail might say.

But look at the focusing-on-one-ball-juggling-analogy more closely. Can it be used to explain lots of other bad stuff? I certainly hope so, or this blog is going to go downhill very quickly.

How about this; abortion. Now abortion in my view is a horrible thing. I don't like it. I don't particularly agree with it and I'd like to see it never have to happen. BUT, I live in the real world and understand that, unfortunately, it is sometimes necessary.

In America (and in Ireland) there are the anti-abortionists. (I refuse to call them pro-life because that's just fucking stupid. Who isn't pro-life for fucks sake. Apart from some very religious chaps). The anti-abortionists focus all their time and effort into getting abortion banned. Everything else takes a back seat.

I firmly believe that if there were 2 choices for someone to run the country and one of them said he would ban abortion but at the same time he would nuke Brazil then these people would vote for him. "Fuck Brazil, at least there'll be no more dead babies" is quite possibly something that would be said with a straight face.

See, focusing on one ball again. It doesn't really work well does it.

Psychologically wise this is called addiction. People think they know all about addiction. There's uncle Johnny who likes the booze a bit too much. Or that junkie bastard who'll rob your house if you ever leave.

But addiction doesn't have to involve actually ingesting something. There's gambling addicts for example. But importantly there are many many other types.

The religious can be addicts. If some bloke (usually a pedophile) stands up and tells them they must do something like beat themselves with a wet branch of willow, they'll probably do it. Doesn't make any sense whatsoever, but religion tends not to do sense. Mind you it does more sense than whatever that bullshit masquerading as 'atheism' is these days. Those idiots are managing to be addicts to something that they think doesn't exist.

So why would anyone do something so stupid? There's no evidence AT ALL that what they are doing is worthwhile but they'll go ahead anyway. Because their focusing on one ball again. Perhaps it's the ball that some beardy bloke in the sky will be annoyed at them, or perhaps it's the ball saying they'll be re-incarnated as a dung beetle. Doesn't matter, the ability to reason and evaluate all the facts and opinions goes completely out the window. Just the same as the guy who will do anything to get that next bit of white powder.

Then look at the current financial situation. Years spent focusing on the ball of profit. "Yeah, don't worry about that huge debt and shit, buy that big fucking building made of marshmallow, we'll make a killing." (This was actually in the minutes of a meeting at Goldman Sachs. Ok, it wasn't really, but would you honestly be surprised if it was).

So I propose you all become jugglers. Juggling training must start immediately. No more focusing on one ball.

I'm not doing it obviously as I hate jugglers. Along with a lot of other things.