On Nodding Dogs, and not being one

I recently bought a collection of  Blessed John Henry Newman's sermon notes from after he became a Catholic -- he wrote full sermons as an Anglican, but only notes as a Catholic. In the introduction, there's a fine quotation from him, saying:

'I think that writing is a stimulus to the mental faculties, to originality, to the the power of illustration, to the arrangement of topics, second to none. Till a man begins to put down his thoughts about a subject on paper he will not ascertain what he knows and what he does not know, still less will he be able to express what he does know.'

And that, in essence, is pretty much the main reason -- other than staying in vague contact with friends -- why I blog, and why I used to blog far more frequently once upon a time under a different name. It's not to vent, and it's not to tell the world what I think. It's mainly to get my own thoughts straight.

Why not a diary, then? Or a private blog? Mainly because this way I know that I'm potentially exposing myself to people who can tell me -- if they can be bothered -- that I'm wrong, or not-quite-right. That forces me to write something substantial, that I think capable of holding up in the face of criticism and disagreement, and should critical comments come, it forces me to listen, and to reconsider. I may well still stick to my original view, of course, but only after listening to those of others. There are few things I believe so strongly that we shouldn't read or look to expose ourselves only to opinions and beliefs that validate our own. In this, I suspect, I'm simply channelling the wise observation in Chesterton's Father Brown story, 'The Sign of the Broken Sword', where his priest-detective says:

'When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else's Bible? A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads his Bible, and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist reads his, and finds we have no arms and legs. St. Clare was an old Anglo-Indian Protestant soldier. Now, just think what that might mean; and, for Heaven's sake, don't cant about it. It might mean a man physically formidable living under a tropic sun in an Oriental society, and soaking himself without sense or guidance in an Oriental Book. Of course, he read the Old Testament rather than the New. Of course, he found in the Old Testament anything that he wanted -- lust, tyranny, treason.'

Or, in short, we shouldn't seal ourselves up in our confessional boxes. Christians should listen to what atheists have to say, and atheists whould listen to Christians, not with a view to rebutting but with a view to understanding. Catholics should listen to what Protestants have to say, and Protestants should listen to Catholics, again with a view to understanding, and, one would hope, ultimately re-uniting. British Conservatives should start their days by looking at the Guardian, and left-leaning Britons should make a habit of perusing the Telegraph.

And then, they should try putting their own beliefs and opinions into writing. It's not as easy as it looks.

(Though it's probably best not to spend more than an hour or so on it, especially if you're busy elsewhere.)

'We may be through with the past...

... but the past ain't through with us.'

So says Philip Baker Hall's character Jimmy Gator in Magnolia, surely not merely the finest film of 1999, but one of the most astounding films in recent memory, up there with The Lives of Others, To Live, and Kieślowski's Three Colours trilogy. If you haven't seen it, and aren't easily offended, you should really rectify this lapse: it's one of the most accomplished and profound films I've ever seen.

I couldn't help but think of it yesterday afternoon, when I checked my sitemeter; I do this pretty often, not to keep track of how many people are reading, but because there are one or two people who I'd rather weren't reading and it's useful to keep tabs.

Anyway, so I checked the sitemeter yesterday afternoon, having come back from a wonderful evening, night, and indeed morning, and saw this:

Sorry, you probably can't see the problematic bit in that, so I'll zoom in a bit closer:

Yes, you're not imagining that. At twenty past eight last night, or twenty past nine in France, someone in France was looking up NMRBoy on the web, and then, having had a good gawk at my comrade in arms' site, crawled right through the google result list to have a look at this site, arriving -- ironically enough -- on a post about Black Dossier entitled 'Is Big Brother Watching You... Even Now?'

On New Year's Eve.

If you know either NMRBoy or me, and are any way familiar with our history over the past couple of years, it'll not be too difficult to guess who's been looking us up, not least because we only know a couple of people who live in France, and one of them was home in England over the Christmas. It'll have been someone who both of us had regarded as a good friend for several years, who was terribly misled by someone into believing horrible things of us, who -- sucked into the madness -- spread nasty lies and rumours herself, and who I haven't heard from since she sent me a nasty e-mail just over a year ago. I first learned of that e-mail not by reading it, but because several friends -- some of whom I'd not heard from in years -- called me to ask whether I'd received it and if I was okay, my erstwhile friend having hit 'reply all' and fired her missive to everyone on my mailing list.

They weren't impressed. The terms 'witch' and 'sad cow' were used.

So yes, I think it'll have been her. Not for the first time either. That's just my opinion, granted, but I'm pretty sure it's right.

Oddly, I don't bear any grudges about what happened a year and a half ago, although it took me a very long time to forgive her behaviour. In truth, I just feel sorry for her now, and think that in some ways she was as much a victim as we were, having been misled as she was, her protective tendencies having been so cruelly twisted, having been tricked into turning on people who had seen her as a friend. Seeing her crawling our blogs on New Year's Eve brought that powerfully home.

I was off at a friend's house, sharing in the most entertaining New Year's celebration I've enjoyed on Irish soil in years, while far away in France she was hovering on the internet checking to see what we'd written. Didn't she have anything better to be doing with her time, on New Year's Eve of all nights?

I keep thinking to contact her, to ask after her -- because recently she did something which I admire, and which I wish her luck in -- but I reckon there's a danger that might just pour fuel on near-dead embers.

Let sleeping dogs lie, and all that.

Shyness is nice and shyness can stop you...

Well, having emulated Amanda and done a quick test, it seems that my blog isn't suitable for children. Apparently there are far too many mentions of death, torture, and hell on it. Oh well.

For what it's worth, yes, I'm aware that this Ratings Sticker ought to have been red, but I've become accustomed to this blog being rendered entirely in shades of grey. And you guys have probably gotten equally used to squinting at the screen. If you haven't, you obviously haven't watched Bladerunner or Angel nearly enough, and should remedy the situation by either watching said film and show, or by highlighting any chunks of text with which your feeble eyes might be struggling. Try it. It works.


Anyway, I was a bit disturbed to read an article today, in between working and telling people not to worry about how, about how - to a certain extent - the field of psychiatry has been corrupted by pharmaceutical corporations in search of new markets and applications for their products. I couldn't help but be troubled by the story of how, back in 2002, GlaxoSmithKline recruited a famous Miami Dolphins running back to confess on the Oprah Winfrey show that he suffered from crippling shyness.

In this instance Cohn & Wolfe [The PR arm of GSK], whose other clients have included Coca-Cola, Chevron Texaco, and Taco Bell, was using an athlete to help create a belief that shyness, a common trait that some societies associate with good manners and virtue, constitutes a deplorably neglected illness. Given the altruistic aura of the occasion, it would have been tasteless to have Ricky Williams display a vial of Paxil on the spot. But later (before he was suspended from the football league for ingesting quite different drugs), a GSK press release placed his name beneath this boilerplate declaration:

"As someone who has suffered from social anxiety disorder, I am so happy that new treatment options, like Paxil CR, are available today to help people with this condition."

This isn't to say that depression isn't a real and truly debilitating condition, but I don't think it's unreasonable to argue that it is overdiagnosed nowadays, and this tendency to overdiagnose is almost certainly exacerbated by clever marketing by pharmaceutical companies. In the U.K. this has reached a point where national figures seem to indicate that as many as six million adults of working age suffer from depression at any one time and where in England 31 million prescriptions for antidepressants were issued in 2006 alone! Can so many people really be seriously ill? Isn't it possible that some of them are just, well, sad? After all, when an overstretched health service means that countless diagnoses are made in just a few minutes, there's a fair chance that more than a handful of them are wrong, surely?


There was a fine article in the Irish Independent a few weeks ago, reprinting an old interview from the Telegraph with the late Dr Anthony Clare. Somehow I've contrived to never hear Clare on the radio, but I've found Depression and How to Survive It, his popular analysis of clinical depression - and indeed manic depression - co-written with Spike Milligan and illustrated with reference to Milligan's own illness, to be fascinating, enlightening, and utterly harrowing.

As I was saying, the interview is certainly worth a look, not least because in attempting to explore what constitutes happiness, he says a lot - implicitly or explicitly - about sadness, depression, and unrealistic expectations. And under pressure he gives a seven-step guide to life.

"Okay. Here goes. Number one: cultivate a passion. It is important in my model of happiness to have something that you enjoy doing. The challenge for a school is to find every child some kind of passion -- something that will see them through the troughs. That's why I'm in favour of the broadest curriculum you can get.

"Number two, be a leaf on a tree. You have to be both an individual -- to have a sense that you are unique and you matter -- and you need to be connected to a bigger organism -- a family, a community, a hospital, a company. You need to be part of something bigger than yourself. A leaf off a tree has the advantage that it floats about a bit, but it's disconnected and it dies.

"The people who are best protected against certain physical diseases -- cancer, heart disease, for example -- in addition to doing all the other things they should do, seem to be much more likely to be part of a community, socially involved. If you ask them to enumerate the people that they feel close to and would connect and communicate with, those with the most seem the happiest and those with least, the unhappiest.

"Of course, there may be a circular argument here. If you are a rather complicated person, people may avoid you. If, on the other hand, you are a centre of good feeling, people will come to you. I see the tragedy here in this room where some people sit in that chair and say they don't have many friends and they're quite isolated and unhappy, and the truth is they are so introspective they've become difficult to make friends with. Put them in a social group and they tend to talk about themselves. It puts other people off.

"So that's my third rule: avoid introspection.

"Number four, don't resist change. Change is important. People who are fearful of change are rarely happy. I don't mean catastrophic change, but enough to keep your life stimulated. People are wary of change, particularly when things are going reasonably well, because they don't want to rock the boat, but a little rocking can be good for you. It's the salt in the soup. Uniformity is a tremendous threat to happiness, as are too much predictability, control and order. You need variety, flexibility, the unexpected, because they'll challenge you.

"Five, live for the moment. Look at the things that you want to do and you keep postponing. Postpone less of what you want to do, or what you think is worthwhile. Don't be hide-bound by the day-to-day demands. Spend less time working on the family finances and more time working out what makes you happy. If going to the cinema is a pleasure, then do it. If going to the opera is a pain, then don't do it.

"Six, audit your happiness. How much of each day are you spending doing something that doesn't make you happy? Check it out and if more than half of what you're doing makes you unhappy, then change it. Go on. Don't come in here and complain. People do, you know. They come and sit in that chair and tell me nothing is right. They say they don't like their family, they don't like their work, they don't like anything. I say, 'Well, what are you going to do about it?'

"And, finally, Gyles, if you want to be happy, Be Happy. Act it, play the part, put on a happy face. Start thinking differently. If you are feeling negative, say, 'I am going to be positive,' and that, in itself, can trigger a change in how you feel."

The professor slaps his hands on his desk and laughs. "That's it."

"And it works?"

"Well, it's something for the fridge door. Try it and see."

I don't think there'd be room for that on our fridge. There are too many magnets on the cursed thing. Let's just say that you wouldn't want to be our kitchen with facial piercings.

Honour is like the hawk: Sometimes it must go hooded.

Yes, I'm back, though this time I'm wearing a disguise. It makes sense, after all, especially on this most cloak-and-dagger of days.

Why blog again?

Well, I'd never wanted to stop with my old blog, in which I'd invested far too much of myself over the years, but having my erstwhile boss spend hours on it day in day out in a desperate and deranged quest for dirt to damage me with rather removed its charm. Not that that would have made me stop, especially since there was nothing there I wouldn't have happily seen published in a more traditional medium, but it did rather take the fun out of things. So I struggled on without enthusiasm, until Spring, when I decided that having so many of my thoughts available to the world at last probably wouldn't help me when I left my academic cage in search of gainful employment.

So I entered some code so that it would slip under the radar of pretty much every search engine, and I had it wiped from the caches of Google and Yahoo, and then, eventually, I made it invitation only. But with only four or five readers a day, well, it just hasn't seemed worth the effort, and has been dying a slow death over the last few months.

And that may be for the best.

I've been missing blogging, for all sorts of reasons, and I've been thinking a while of stepping back into the waters. Hence this. Look, I know I'm not fooling anyone. The Thirsty Gargoyle is a fairly transparent bit of wordplay, after all, and if you know who I am to start with then the whole disguise is kind of redundant.

But even so. My name will not be here, and I'll be doing my damnedest to blur a few other issues.

I'm going to try to post every day, but whether I do or not, I'll have one simple rule.

It's a wordlimit. 500 a day. That's the deal. If I go over it, I'm not going to waste time editing it down to 500, but I'm going to pretty much make sure 500 is my limit. That way I can happily babble online, but not waste any time in doing so. 500 is nothing, after all.

In case you're wondering, by the way, this post's title is from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' magnificent Watchmen. It's a book I've been thinking of a lot lately, especially in terms of its Juvenalian tagline, and that fine Nietzschean quote at the end of chapter six:

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster,
and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

There are times when I worry. Like tonight. The term 'sting' has been used.

But it seems to me that a leap of faith is needed. The tide can yet be turned.

Wish me luck.

Before I Begin: A Disclaimer

The point being: don't take this too seriously. I've no plans to do so, after all. Some of it will be completely made up.

If you have serious issues with anything, and don't want to leave a comment, you can always e-mail me: the 'Contact Me!' box should work for the likes of Outlook, but just doing a mouseover will enable you to see my address. If I get any facts wrong, or anything like that, please do let me know. Even Homer nods, as they say.

Comments are more than welcome, of course, so please, get stuck in. Nothing nasty, of course: I've had problems with that sort of thing in the past!

Update

There have been a few people since I've started this blog who've somehow read this disclaimer as meaning that nothing here is to be taken at face value, and that it's never meant seriously. That wasn't quite what I was going for when I originally wrote this, and obviously the blog has grown since then anyway.

Use your judgement: it should be pretty obvious when I'm talking about something with my serious hat on.

And on comments...

On comments, as of today -- 23 December 2011 -- I've decided that I'm not going to post any purely anonymous comments. Please, if you're commenting at least give some kind of a name or handle to prevent threads from getting complicated. I'd rather people use their real names, of course, as that's always best, but I understand that that's sometimes impractical.

Disagreement is fine. Intelligent and informed disagreement is better; genuine engagement is always good, and I like smart people who disagree with me in a smart way.

Clear irrelevance, uncharitable pedantry, and abuse, on the other hand, probably won't make it to the page.

Stand, and Unfold Yourself!

Hello. Look, I don't mean to be curmudgeonly and unduly suspicious and stuff, but I'm afraid that too much Prison Break and the events of the past year have rendered me a fierce suspicious fella altogether.

So, I'm kind of curious, and wonder whether one of you could help me. Who's reading this on an Opal Telecom connection? IP address, just for the record, being 89.241.214.195, and apparently being in the UK, but using google.ie not long ago - so someone from Northern Ireland, perhaps? I have half an inkling, but I'm afraid that when I get six hits in two days -- 14:52 and 01:36 today, 23:32 and 21:42 and 20:01 AND 17:41 yesterday -- well, I get a bit edgy. I know, you might just be bored, and desperate for whatever pearls of wisdom I might feel like bestowing.

The thing is, this sort of thing bothers me, has done since the start of the summer when I was still living in halls. Things got very weird then, when I had one person checking my site for hours at a time, and often several times a day. Five times at least once, with visits at 02:51, 05:05, 08:10, 19:06, and 23:21! When stuff like that happens, it's hard not to get upset, and it leaves an imprint, I'm afraid.

So do me a wee favour, Opal 89.241.214,195. Send me an e-mail, and let me know who you are. Friend or foe, basically. Just put my heart at rest.

(SMP -- or sitemeter paranoia -- is an occupational hazard of blogging, I'm afraid. I guess it's because unlike other say telly or the papers, when you're online you can get a pretty good idea of your readership. Unfortunately, it's a frustrating picture, as it doesn't tell you quite what you'd like to know. I guess it's like looking through a fogged up window.)

Little Brother is watching you. He's just forgotten his glasses.

Well, Really

'It's ridiculous,' commented the good doctor when I spoke to him last night

What? Well, at five past five yesterday afternoon I had a visitor on the site. Now generally, I like visitors. They're good to have. Friends, regular readers who've never met, people chancing upon the blog seeking terms of intoxication or whatever - all these are good things. But people who just check up on me? People who scour the site looking for things to hold against me? No, I don't like that. Unwanted attention, I'd consider that, the sort of thing that certain universities deem harassment in the policies they supposedly follow.

So yeah, 17:05 yesterday afternoon, I get a visitor. From the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, no less. Someone doing research, you might think? No, don't be silly, obviously someone skiving. After all, who doing legitimate research at the French National Library, on computer athena3.bnf.fr with an IP address of 194.199.4.103 if you're interested, would seriously be interested in doing a Yahoo search for 'gregorian ranting'?

I think someone needs to get a life. And to stop spying on mine. Their attention - if it's who I think it is* - isn't wanted. And that's for the record.

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* I might be wrong, and if you feel a bit upset by this, wondering what you can possibly have done to have offended me, just e-mail me. I'm often contrite, and rarely bite.