The madman in the dungeon speaks

Most people react to mental illness with one of two responses: the write-off and the blame.

The write-off is: This person is crazy. Crazy people are other. Crazy people do scary things. Normal people can't communicate with crazy people. Crazy people don't get better. Perhaps craziness is contagious? Stop all association.

The blame is: That person is really messed-up and neurotic. That's a character flaw. People with character flaws need to change their character. If they don't or can't, they're morally lacking. People whose neuroses don't get visibly better are not trying hard enough or not doing what they are expected to. People who are having big problems but are not in an approved therapy program or taking approved drugs are not dealing with their problems. These people could be okay if they did things differently and were more like me. If they don't get better on my schedule, they're probably not trying very hard.

In the first case, people refuse to see that the very disturbed and ill person is even of the same species, and treat the sufferer as a wild animal or demon.

In the second case, the ailment is transferred from the medical to the moral sphere and then can be turned into a judgment. This shows a lack of empathy.

I get the impression that a lot of people see a neurotic problem and think of it like one of their own difficult days. They wonder why the person with the problem can't overcome it the way one overcomes a headache or a crappy day at work, and just move on. Somehow, being told that it's not that simple doesn't penetrate, even when it's a professional with experience who's doing the telling.

Trying to improve a head problem is like this for me: I have this huge tangle of fuzzy yarn and bubble gum and nuts and bolts and sleeping kittens and sharp spiky things, about the size of a cow. My job is to untangle it all without cutting the yarn, losing nuts or bolts, or hurting any kittens. I slowly untangle bits of yarn, occasionally setting aside a bolt or freeing a kitten or cutting myself with one of the sharp spiky things. This goes on for years.

Occasionally someone will wander in and ask when I'll be done, or explain that I'm doing it wrong. Some of them shake their heads and walk away mumbling about how fucked I am. More rarely I can pay someone to sit down and work on the project with me.

It's not clear if I'll get much of this untangled before time's up. But I didn't make this tangle, you know. None of us did.

Modest proposal: Triangle Square

Our local failing shopping center in Costa Mesa, Triangle Square (love the name), has been flailing for years. Their rent is high, they put the supermarket in an unattractive basement, and they've been shedding tenants including: The North Face, Whole Foods, several restaurants, Virgin Records, and their anchor Nike Store. It's a ghost mall now with the exception of a couple of remaining stores, a pretty good sushi place, and a beer bar for assholes called The Yard House.

Since the only people who can afford to remain there are selling retail alcohol, they've decided to fill the whole damn thing up with bars and restaurants. The place is pretty much a block of concrete between three streets, with layers of retail spaces on top of layers of parking lot. How to set this up?

I have an idea!

Towering above the complex will be a huge water tower-like structure. This will contain tens of thousands of gallons of top-shelf alcoholic beverages, probably setting some type of Guinness record. There will be a permanent rotating light on this structure, and ad logos for the liquor companies. It will be called something whimsical like "The Drunk Tank" or "Well Well".

On the top floor of the mall there will be some very swank bars, like the horribly named "Sutra" night club that's there already. High cover charges, velvet ropes, mortgage brokers and their trophy girlfriends. Drinks will be $10 or so.

Each floor below will have a less expensive and less fancy set of places: a TGI Friday's and a National Sports Grill in the middle, a Red Robin and a Shooterz further down, and at the bottom a shitty beer bar with bad pool tables. On one corner of the bottom level there will be a hipster bar that will be just as bad as the beer bar, but will charge as much as as the top shelf places.

The genius part is this: every level below the top is actually drinking the urine produced one level above. As the rich bro's and ho's piss out their Grey Goose and Dom Perignon, it gets filtered and realcoholized and served as Absolut and Sam Adams down below, before finally turning into Jim Beam and Coors Lite at the bottom. The hipster corner of the bottom level will get it as PBR.

I'm off to get venture capital now.

bruised orange (chain of sorrow)

1. Chicken restaurant puts on calendar of cows in armor.
   
   
2. FTC finally gets around to investigating gasoline profiteering. Mm-hmm.
   
   
3. It's only a very small nuclear power plant radioactive water leak. Everything is fine.
   
   
4. Visiting Motor Trend online? If you're not a subscriber you have to watch not an ad banner, not an "interstitial", not a "premercial" even, but an ULTRAMERCIAL!
   
   
5. Post a pic of a dead Iraqi, get free porn! Wow, it's like we decided to do the Vietnam war over using Apocalypse Now as a model!
   
   
6. My mother remembers her father grabbing her and her brother from the movie theatre and dragging them home because of the great Anaheim flood of 1938. (She grew up in Santa Ana and was born in '29). Yeah, we have floods here in the O.C. too.

Pyramid of Blogs

Someone mentioned "voip blog" on irc and we were joking about what that meant, like maybe cold calling people to blog at them. I made some crack about getting all sorts of stereotypical blogger types (geeks, subculture victims, etc.) and telling them they're doing VOIP blogging but actually having them do coldcall telemarketing. What to sell? Well, blogging itself! I thought we could have them sell "blogging kits" that included all kinds of useless crap and promised big profits from a home-based business. Ho ho ho. I even wrote celeb testimonial copy:

Hi. I'm Cory Doctorow. Many of you know me from my blog posts such as "Disney Dolls Again" and "Creative Commons Dog Toys". Many of you have asked me: how can I be a Top Blogger? Well, the people at Blog Professionals Kit in a Box have a great answer.

Of course I'm way the hell behind:


BLOG IN A BOX!

You can get your very own copy of Blog In A Box right now for a Very Low Special Introductory Price of just $37 $27. This is an amazing value we are offering you. Get your hands on a BRAND NEW product that we believe will exceed our expectations with flying colors due to the increased attention blogs are getting for just a fraction of the regular price of $67. Remember that with just One Sale, Blog In A Box pays for itself! But you don't have to stop there. Make it really work for you by selling it over and over turning it into a profit pulling machine!

Boy howdy! This is going to be even better than selling GRIT: America's Favorite Newspaper was back in fifth grade!

There's always room.

A very good thought from the Slacktivist: there's always room.

"Never again" is a normative statement, not a descriptive one. It is a commitment, a pledge -- not a statement about how things are, but a statement about how things can be if we work to make sure that it is so.