Month: June 2014

Dr Seuss’s Endless Balls

jimdroberts

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Dr. Seuss’s Endless Balls

Progress, consumerism, credit and greed

The pleasure and pain, the want and the need

Liposuction and botox injection

The need to watch porn to get an erection

Alcohol, cigarettes, opium and meth

Hiring a speedboat down the river of death

Waiting in an embassy, break out in a sweat

Suffer a panic attack and oxygen debt

Fast food, French fries, burgers, Big Mac

Type 2 diabetes and a heart attack

Children so fat they can’t walk to school

Run in the playground or kick a football

Desktops, laptops and cellular phones

Murdering Muslims with remote control drones

Using public money to bail out banks

When did we join the socialist’s ranks?

Stem cells, genome and genes mutating

A Repetitive Strain Injury, from masturbating

In willful ignorance we choose to sit and watch porn

While all the time virgin consumers are born

Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors

Makes it possible for me to see visitors

And a head full of Tri Cyclic Anti depressant

Look, I am smiling and acting more pleasant

Genocide, suicide, corruption and coups,

I’m a good citizen because I watch the news

The world is suffering and I know it’s a shame

But I’m going to help out right after the game

Addiction – A Deadly Disease?

Aside jimdroberts

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Addiction – A Deadly Disease?

This is a question I have asked myself recently, twice during the course of 24 hours. First after watching the video I’ve embedded, and then shortly after a situation affecting my wife’s family.

Her uncle went missing, the last time he had been seen he was fishing in a nearby pond. His tuk-tuk was found beside the pond with the keys left in the ignition. By midnight a large number of the local community had gathered around the pond to stare out into the darkness. An air of resignation hung heavily over us, my wife telling me they were expecting he would die soon; at the time I did not understand this sentiment given the situation, I still held out hope. After a couple of hours and several creative search techniques employing the use of extremely long bamboo poles, people started drifting off home to bed. Early the next morning frogmen achieved the inevitable and recovered the body.

So how does a 52 year old man drown in a pond he could have stood up in? My mother used to enjoy telling me ‘all it takes to drown a man is a saucer of water.’ I don’t know how she knows this; I can only suspect her of involvement during World War II in some highly secret, sinister Nazi experimentation. Despite my mother’s wisdom I would still have favoured the man surviving in the chest deep waters of the pond. What reduced his chances of survival was the fact that he was a chronic alcoholic. Not far from death already, he had just been released from hospital and decided to go and do the only thing he liked doing besides drink, fishing. Losing his balance he must have fallen out of his boat into the water, his severely weakened state disabling him from getting out of the pond. It must have been quite a sad, pathetic and miserable way to die, arms flailing until he lost consciousness and the will to live.

Later on in a conversation with my wife she told me that no one in the family was the least bit surprised, if it hadn’t have happened now then it would have happened soon. She then went onto duplicate the argument in the video I had watched less than 24 hours earlier, when she expressed that addiction is a disease that goes far beyond the capacity of willpower. I have never even seen my wife drunk and she abhors all recreational drug use, I was therefore taken aback by her sympathetic views on addiction. She related stories of how her uncle just could not stop drinking, even after expressing his desire to. Skeptics will interject at this point and put forward the willpower argument, but my wife comfortably and freely talked of her uncle’s problem as a disease. One reason I was so surprised by her opinion is addiction was a problem I had suffered but had the opportunity to resolve.

I myself agree with the disease theory, and as a result of a near fatal traffic accident I have not drunk for nearly two years. For me the idea of having a drink with friends, seems ludicrous. There is no way on earth I could stop at one drink, but would proceed to drink until either, I fell over, all the bars were shut, or I got on my motorbike and crashed it into a fastest moving car I could find. I was lucky following my accident, the time I spent in a coma, in the hospital and recovering gave me the chance to realize ‘I can not drink responsibly’, alcohol for me is simply not an option.

Many times I have realized how lucky I was to have the opportunity to learn this lesson, and I wonder, if had this man struggled out of the pond would he have gone on to make the same choice with the same resolve? The margins of fate, that keeps one person alive whilst another dies, are too small to be measured.

As I sat by the coffin, my wife got up and went to sit with a relative but I found it difficult to leave, I could relate to this man like few other people could, his suffering, his wish to take control of his problem but never being able to, the irrepressible desires that drive you to keep drinking and ultimately self destruction. In that respect we were kindred spirits and I knew that our fates could have quite easily been reversed.

Disease or not, addiction not only destroys the lives of the addicts but drags family, friends and colleagues into its destructive maelstrom. People can argue all they want about how best to deal with addiction, but in my experience what a person suffering addiction really needs first is a big piece of luck that allows them to understand why they must stop.

 

 

Our Digital Disposable and Forgetable World

jimdroberts

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I remember when photographs used to be arranged and posed for. A family photo could literally be an afternoon’s work and until you got the film processed you still had no idea whose eyes were shut, or who wore the expression of having just broken wind. This charm has been removed from photographs, today a mindless idiot (usually with an iPhone) corrals people together, sometimes their friends but also innocent bystanders, in something resembling order and mindlessly keeps pressing a button until they’re satisfied. Yes a chimpanzee could do this, only unlike us the chimpanzee would quickly become bored by it.

Photographs of old were often framed and put upon shelves in living rooms, lounges and dining rooms. From up there the photograph would look down upon their subjects as the passage of time made them balder, grayer, fatter or dead. Old photographs are things passed down from grandparents, a shoe box of memories that encapsulates a generation. A historical reference giving us an insight as to where we came from. Compare that with the photos of today, taken on a phone, posted to Facebook, ‘Liked’ maybe commented on and forgotten in a couple of hours. When this generation begin to shuffle off their mortal coil the best they will leave their grandchildren will be their password for Facebook.

This brings me onto my real peeve. ‘The selfie’ not since masturbation has there been such a popular past time. When I was growing up if I said to my mum “just going upstairs to take a selfie” what thoughts do you think she’d be left with. It  even sounds like your WANKING. It’s so self indulgent it’s like wanking in front of a mirror.

It’s futile to stand in the way of progress and I know the majority of people love this cyberspace, virtual world, social networking, porn infused internet. But I remember when couples carried pictures of one another in their wallets. I keep a picture of my wallet In my wallet, just so if I get hit by a bus those who scrape me off the road will have the opportunity to really appreciate some irony.

Generation [X] a Generation of Ambiguity

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Generation [X]

I am a member of generation X and I’m guessing if you’re reading this then so are you.

We were born between 1961 and 1981. We are the babies of the Baby Boomers, sometimes charmingly referred to as the Baby Busters. We are the fallout from the summer of love, the detritus left behind on the floor after Woodstock, the children of mothers who took just a little too much LSD and forgot to take their new contraceptive pills. Every good party must come to an end, and that end is often a regretful hangover, or in this case us, Generation X.

What are we, what are our characteristics? Commonly used vocabulary attached to Generation X’ers is cynical, apathetic, skeptical, bitter, grunge, goth, consumerism, globalization, conspiracy theorists. What defines us though is that we were the first generation to experience the draw backs of modernity. Mass production, mass consumerism, mass marketing, mass media, all were welcomed with euphoria by the Baby Boomers, but through more cynical eyes all we saw was a post-modern hell. To us it presented a treadmill of consumerism that you had to run like crazy just to stay on but got you nowhere. Sure you were allowed to buy loads of shit along the way, but you never got any further down the road, it never promised to satisfy us like it mesmerized our parents.

Generation X’ers have long been accused of being lazy, underachievers. This criticism seems to be supported when we are also referred to as the McJobbers. A reference to many of the generation being well educated but content to take menial work. I just see this again as being our refusal to get sucked into running in the wheel of greed. What’s wrong with making fries whilst pondering the nature of the universe?

By the 1980’s The Baby Boomers had grown up to become Yuppies or if they were still suffering acid flashbacks they became New Agers. The Yuppies were sold this way of life by the two most iconic post war politicians, Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher. Under their command both the U.S and the U.K lived by Gordon Gekko’s mantra ‘Greed is Good’. Everything the Baby Boomers did was to excess, drugs, greed, sex, consumerism. Whilst they put man on the moon Generation X’ers had the Challenger disaster. They had Martin Luther King and the Black Civil Rights Movement, Generation X’ers had Ricky Martin and Black Monday. While the Baby Boomers were the first generation to enjoy the 24 hour convenience of 7/11, Generation X’ers had the inconvenience of 9/11 to deal with.

What else was there left for Generation X’ers  to do other than adopt a nihilistic persona and to reconcile that everything was bollocks. And how was it fair that our parents took all the drugs, cavorted naked at orgies but the AIDS agenda was pushed on us. Not only did we inherit the hangover of their alcoholic, psychotropic drug rampages, we were now being asked to deal with their sexual diseases.

I might be coming across bitter, many Generation X’ers are bitter because we’ve got so many reasons to be. It’s like we turned up half an hour after the end of an enormous party, and who wouldn’t feel a little put out by missing a whole season called the summer of love. I can assure anyone at best I’ve experienced a week of love, but those baby booming bastards had an entire summer.

It’s too late for us Generation X’ers to make up for lost time. The ship has sailed and we must content ourselves with iPhones and mediocrity. How history will judge us only time will tell, but one thing I do know is that whatever the verdict, Generation X’ers are unlikely to give a shit.