Seroquel.
Instant obesity, just add water.
When I was a
kid, I was warned not to swallow chewing gum; that it stays in your stomach
forever and swells up, but they didn’t warn me about anti-psychotic medication.
Well, no matter how fat I look, in my mind, I’m thin. If I
do not look in mirrors or shop windows, or see myself the way others see me I’m
the weight I was before I started taking the wonder drug; I’m 30 kilos lighter.
They say, the more effort you expend, the more calories you
burn. If that’s true, I should lose a kilo most days just getting out of bed. Because
mood stabilisers and anti-depressants can smooth out highs and lows and help
you cope, but they can’t cure you.
So this is not the face of madness,
what you see of me and my tribe from the neck down, this is what madness looks like:
what you see of me and my tribe from the neck down, this is what madness looks like:
Trying to function on Seroquel is like trying to run through
wet concrete. Trying to function on Seroquel is knowing you’ve lost your mind
so you seek it out and destroy it completely. Trying to live on Seroquel is finally
being propositioned by Sean Connery or Helen Mirren – or your age group’s
equivalent – and realising you couldn’t be fucked.
TRIGGER WARNING
Trying to live without medication is leaving a hotel in the middle of
the night because someone MIGHT be watching you through the mirror on the wall,
even though you know they aren’t, but what if they are? Trying to live without
medication is not being able to wash your hands because there MIGHT be razor
blades in the soap, even though you know there aren’t, but what if there were?
And living with madness, medicated or not, is saying “fine” when people
ask “how are you?”, because if you try to explain about mirrors and razor
blades they don't believe you, or you don't "seem mad enough" or they just tell you to get over
yourself.
It's saying "fine" out of fear of the fact that everyone is an expert on mental illness.
It's saying "fine" out of fear of the fact that everyone is an expert on mental illness.
Living with madness is having people ask you “and what do
you do?” and the shame of knowing the answer is “not much”. [I'm a good, kind person is not a socially acceptable answer.]
Living with madness is the embarrassment of being asked how many children you have, and knowing the answer is “none”, because you think the gene should not be passed on.
Living with madness is having unprotected sex with any bloke anywhere, anytime, anyhow, because normal coping methods like cutting yourself or overdosing in back alleys are less appealing.
Living with madness is the embarrassment of being asked how many children you have, and knowing the answer is “none”, because you think the gene should not be passed on.
Living with madness is having unprotected sex with any bloke anywhere, anytime, anyhow, because normal coping methods like cutting yourself or overdosing in back alleys are less appealing.
It’s having the
government tell you to pick two days a week to work and thinking – if you could
just pick and choose which days to be well you would choose to be well seven
days a week [and maybe I could have my sense of humour back?]
This
is not the face of madness, this is the face
of a man who harvested resentment, that’s all. Someone who believed in alternative
medicines, and astrology; someone who loved animals and didn’t eat meat.
Real madness is listening to people pooh pooh
multiculturalism, while they use Arabic numerals to count their money.
Real madness is a culture of bullying kids for being different, then being surprised when they are so desperate to belong somewhere they sign up with thugs.
Real madness is being a nation of basically good people who, individually, would give anyone the shirt off their back, but mostly live in denial about how we are collectively failing each other.
Because every nation is other than the sum of its parts.
Real madness is a culture of bullying kids for being different, then being surprised when they are so desperate to belong somewhere they sign up with thugs.
Real madness is being a nation of basically good people who, individually, would give anyone the shirt off their back, but mostly live in denial about how we are collectively failing each other.
Because every nation is other than the sum of its parts.
Insanity is tolerating the worst parts of this party
because the best of these are crap.
Madness is when racists are the only candidates who seem to have any integrity. The only people we can trust to say what they mean, however appalling it is. The only people who sometimes do say something we are waiting to hear.
Australia has performed well economically while the rest of the world has struggled but,
I repeat, the whole is other than the sum of its parts, and while the country has prospered its people have not.
Too many people have lost their jobs and, losing their jobs, lost their mortgages, and hope.
Too many well people, now unemployed, are sent off to do Mickey Mouse training courses run by corporate mates of elected representatives. [Yes, we did notice how she made her money].
Too, too many tasks that are the responsibility of government have been privatised and offshored: Our money is flowing out of the country in a subsidised pipeline while honest, decent people are being told the age of entitlement is over - by politicians who believe the age of accountability is over.
Truth is, we have a new national curriculum that makes some of the truth optional for students at years 9 and 10. This means in 20 years time there might be a few people in our parliament who know or care about Australia's real history. Few people in our parliaments today think it is urgent or relevant.
Sadly, I won't be the only one dead before anything changes for Indigenous Australia, but the most insane part of this is that it's a collective loss; reflected in our attitudes to each other, our unwillingness to listen, our disdain for our environment and future generations, and a lack of pride in who we are as a nation. If we made the effort to learn about our Indigenous brothers and sisters, we could learn a lot from them.
In most of Australia, suicide is no longer a crime. An enlightened move, we’d think, except the suicide rate in parts of Indigenous Australia is criminal.
When will the past end, and tomorrow begin?
Didn’t Moses keep his people in the desert for 40 years because even he understood, thousands of years ago, that you can’t build a successful community overnight from traumatised, reasonably untrusting generations?
Because he understood, long before the British Empire existed, that a simple "get over it" would just sound like the "fuck you" it really is?
This is the place where every sitting opens with the Lord’s Prayer.
Three out of ten Australians have no religion at all and not all believers are Christians but let’s just suppose, for a minute, that most of the people who sit and talk and belittle each other here in our name, without exchanging many useful ideas, actually believe in this Middle Eastern bloke and what he supposedly stood for.
If he were alive today he wouldn’t be telling us that Muslims have been in this country for nearly 200 years, no worries mate, or that there are over a billion Muslims in the world and if they all wanted us dead we would be dead already, he would be the one telling us that hijabs don’t look right; that they are as ugly and confronting as body fat.
He would be the one assuming fat people don't deserve medical care because they waste their Sennalink money on unhealthy food and won't help themselves.
If he were alive today he wouldn’t be telling us that we can save a million dollars on that already wealthy school’s new arts centre and instead do the Christian thing and help a dozen poorer public primary schools, he’d be the one focused solely on telling us we must choose - that our only choice - is between pensioners and foreigners.
If he were here today he wouldn’t be proposing that if we don’t want people seeking refuge here maybe there's a way to help them where they are.
If he were here today he would be the one framing and narrowing debate and turning those of us, who are already here, against each other. But he is not here today, so why is it happening?
They are crap because they have the mic and they have nothing to say of any interest or importance that anyone wants to hear. They are crap because they have the mic so they don't have to listen. They are crap because they are destroying the environmental and economic and moral legacy of this country's children and grandchildren and subsidising that destruction, the whole time saying "see, we're the good guys, we are not hating our fellow man, we are hating our future man."
To you mainstream pollies I say, being so crap the extremists have the floor is the height of madness... and a total abnegation of responsibility. [I'm watching you, Greens: your website is pretty but the silence is deafening.]
To you mainstream pollies I say, being so crap the extremists have the floor is the height of madness... and a total abnegation of responsibility. [I'm watching you, Greens: your website is pretty but the silence is deafening.]
Madness is when racists are the only candidates who seem to have any integrity. The only people we can trust to say what they mean, however appalling it is. The only people who sometimes do say something we are waiting to hear.
Australia has performed well economically while the rest of the world has struggled but,
I repeat, the whole is other than the sum of its parts, and while the country has prospered its people have not.
Too many people have lost their jobs and, losing their jobs, lost their mortgages, and hope.
Too many well people, now unemployed, are sent off to do Mickey Mouse training courses run by corporate mates of elected representatives. [Yes, we did notice how she made her money].
Too, too many tasks that are the responsibility of government have been privatised and offshored: Our money is flowing out of the country in a subsidised pipeline while honest, decent people are being told the age of entitlement is over - by politicians who believe the age of accountability is over.
Do those in the bigger parties, the establishment parties, really think we don’t know what is happening to us? That when
they take jobs away or allow them to disappear without a trace then tell people to
get a job at lower pay in crappier conditions, we do not know we are being, as psychiatrists would put it,
gaslighted?
Who keeps buried, in libraries, the truth about
pre-colonial, Indigenous Australia?: The permanent dwellings? The respect for
human life that governed the way people conducted themselves? The swift but
certain systems of justice? The trade routes, the baking and the aquaculture? The
land management systems, [incredible given the absence of western style plants
and animals and the challenging ecosystems]?
Who still teaches us in our schools, if we learn anything at all, that Aboriginal religion is only “myth”?
Who maintains the silence about successful farms, snatched by white governments? Houses cared for only to be bulldozed? Endless lessons in the pointlessness of trying?
Who doesn’t want us to hear about heroes like William Cooper, who went to the German Consul in 1938 after Kristallnacht to protest the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany ?
Who still teaches us in our schools, if we learn anything at all, that Aboriginal religion is only “myth”?
Who maintains the silence about successful farms, snatched by white governments? Houses cared for only to be bulldozed? Endless lessons in the pointlessness of trying?
Who doesn’t want us to hear about heroes like William Cooper, who went to the German Consul in 1938 after Kristallnacht to protest the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany ?
Rather than celebrate someone who stood
for something, who threatens a city council for not celebrating
Australia Day on the one day of the year that commemorates illegal occupation,
the declarations of war that followed, the cultural genocide, the stolen
labour, the stolen children, and the ongoing, deliberate, perpetuation of
ignorance?
This politician from this political party, who uses his political appointment to assert Australia Day should be apolitical:
This politician from this political party, who uses his political appointment to assert Australia Day should be apolitical:
Truth is, we have a new national curriculum that makes some of the truth optional for students at years 9 and 10. This means in 20 years time there might be a few people in our parliament who know or care about Australia's real history. Few people in our parliaments today think it is urgent or relevant.
Sadly, I won't be the only one dead before anything changes for Indigenous Australia, but the most insane part of this is that it's a collective loss; reflected in our attitudes to each other, our unwillingness to listen, our disdain for our environment and future generations, and a lack of pride in who we are as a nation. If we made the effort to learn about our Indigenous brothers and sisters, we could learn a lot from them.
In most of Australia, suicide is no longer a crime. An enlightened move, we’d think, except the suicide rate in parts of Indigenous Australia is criminal.
When will the past end, and tomorrow begin?
Didn’t Moses keep his people in the desert for 40 years because even he understood, thousands of years ago, that you can’t build a successful community overnight from traumatised, reasonably untrusting generations?
Because he understood, long before the British Empire existed, that a simple "get over it" would just sound like the "fuck you" it really is?
This is the place where every sitting opens with the Lord’s Prayer.
Three out of ten Australians have no religion at all and not all believers are Christians but let’s just suppose, for a minute, that most of the people who sit and talk and belittle each other here in our name, without exchanging many useful ideas, actually believe in this Middle Eastern bloke and what he supposedly stood for.
He’s supposed to represent a God of love. A God, the Bible
tells us, that is present in each and every one of us, so that whatsoever we do
to each other, we do to Him.
I say,
Fuck the poetry of Suck-It-Up Beatitudes;
I say,
Fuck the Platitudes that just highlight Un-Christ-Like Attitudes;
I see,
given what they do or fail to do,
they don't think very much of their Parliamentary Christ-God at all.
I say,
Fuck the poetry of Suck-It-Up Beatitudes;
I say,
Fuck the Platitudes that just highlight Un-Christ-Like Attitudes;
I see,
given what they do or fail to do,
they don't think very much of their Parliamentary Christ-God at all.
This not the face of madness. This is the face
of a man who harvested resentment, that’s all.
If he were alive today he wouldn’t be telling us that Muslims have been in this country for nearly 200 years, no worries mate, or that there are over a billion Muslims in the world and if they all wanted us dead we would be dead already, he would be the one telling us that hijabs don’t look right; that they are as ugly and confronting as body fat.
He would be the one assuming fat people don't deserve medical care because they waste their Sennalink money on unhealthy food and won't help themselves.
If he were alive today he wouldn’t be telling us that we can save a million dollars on that already wealthy school’s new arts centre and instead do the Christian thing and help a dozen poorer public primary schools, he’d be the one focused solely on telling us we must choose - that our only choice - is between pensioners and foreigners.
If he were here today he wouldn’t be proposing that if we don’t want people seeking refuge here maybe there's a way to help them where they are.
If he were here today he would be the one framing and narrowing debate and turning those of us, who are already here, against each other. But he is not here today, so why is it happening?
Living on anti-psychotics is like trying to run through wet
concrete. But trying to live in the real world, unmedicated, now that would be
just plain crazy.
.
.
