somethinginthewoodshed #20 (in which there are night time weirdos, depressed dinosaurs, and NO)
Salut slags,
The woman at the reception desk looks more angry to be at work than I feel for being in South San Francisco on a drizzly March morning. She snaps at me when I don’t immediately present my Kaiser card when checking in, and knocks back a coffee that’s larger than the sodas you get at the movies. As she looks up my appointment details, I glance down at her desk. There is a small, golden, glittery pebble, with the word ‘breathe’ written on it in Comic Sans. I know too much about her, and don’t attempt polite conversation. Briskly, she nods her head to the Neurology Department, and I slink off, hoping the coffee helps.
Dr Mahmood has a kind face. Which is what you want when you’re meeting a doctor who’s going to watch you sleep and take notes. His short, clipped beard is a dazzling white, and he sits just a little too close to me. For once, I don’t really mind. He is easy to trust, and encourages an openness that means within a few minutes of chatting I’ve told him some of the weirdest shit I think about.
To take a step back, I have sleep problems. Any of you who has had the unique pleasure of sharing a bed with me will know this. I snore. It is not charming. I act out my dreams, I sleep with my eyes open, I frequently wake in the night to talk to people who aren’t there. Sometimes, I wake into complete paralysis, in the midst of a nightmare. These are a monthly thing, some sort of demonic neurological menstruation, where my mind decides to shed all of the weird shit it’s been brewing for the past 4 weeks and shoots it all out at once, leaving me lying perfectly still, unable to move, watching a demon creep towards me that is definitely going to kill me. I black out from fear and wake up with my heart rattling to get out and pumped full of adrenaline and cortisol. Sometimes I leap out of bed and run to where I think the door is and smack into the wall. Often when I wake, I think I’ve awoken into death, and have to touch everything to make sure it’s real. It turns out, this isn’t how everyone sleeps?? WHO KNEW.
Dr Mahmood, that’s who. We glide through a checklist of night behaviours. Snoring? Check. Sleepwalking? Check. Hallucinations? Check. Sleep Paralysis? You betcha. Bed wetting? Thankfully not. We begin to build a picture. That these behaviors worsen in times of stress. That I struggle to get my head in order in the morning because it’s been up to so much in the night. As I reel off symptom after symptom, admitting that sometimes I don’t think the world we’re in right now is the correct one because my memories of the other place are so strong and I’ve watched The Matrix too much, Dr Mahmood’s face lights up. He is practically beaming by the end of our appointment, and visibly excited by the prospect of sending me to San Jose to a sleep clinic. He asks “why has it taken you so long to see a doctor?”, and I’m a bit embarrassed. Perhaps naively, I have always accepted my status as a night weirdo as something perfectly normal and just a quirk. Even when I’ve woken up outside my home, with no keys. Or thought my sleeping friend was a cowboy and run into a wall. Turns out these are ‘incidents’.
I don’t think there’s really a cure for being a night time weirdo, but Dr Mahmood is sending me to a clinic in San Jose so I can be observed by doctors while I awkwardly sleep, so they can work out which breed I am. One of my coworkers hopes that there’s some sort of open gallery so that she can come and watch me wake myself up shouting “WHAT? You’re not the pope!!” before ripping the electrodes off my skin and bolting into a wall. Dr Mahmood was visibly disappointed that he wouldn’t be able to attend my study personally, but gleefully informed me he’d watch the tapes anyway. He even thanked me for letting him participate in my care. It’s nice when your neurological tics are someone else’s pleasure.
Wish me luck getting to sleep next week under such strange circumstances, and especially wish me luck managing to fall asleep at 9pm.
No by Anne Boyer
History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, ran away to the desert, stood on the streets in rags, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, walked barefoot through town, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light.
This is the best thing I've read this year. I wrote so many notes on almost every line, relaxed into how glorious it was, felt completely and resolutely delighted in the no-ness of everything and immediately re-read it once I reached the end. Enjoy it, enjoy refusing, enjoy no, especially to capitalism.
And still we ghost, and no-show, and in the enigma of refusal, we find—despite ourselves—that we endogenously produce our own incapacity to even try, grow sick and depressed and motionless under all the merciless and circulatory conditions of all the capitalist yes and just can’t, even if we thought we really wanted to. This is as if a river, who saw the scale of the levees, decided that rather to try to exceed them, it would outwit them by drying up.
The Melancholy of Don Bluth
Ugh. Prepare to have some feelings. If, like myself, you grew up in the late 80's, early 90's, chances are you saw a fair few Don Bluth films. You'll know them for being the Not Disney movies that made you absolutely bawl your heart out with sadness - The Land Before Time, Fievel Goes West, Escape from N.I.M.H.
These are films that don't use a shocking death or loss as a storytelling device, they are films that hold a space for grief, anger, and deep, deep melancholy. I wish beyond measure that I had written this, and cried reading it.
In a recent interview, critic Doug Walker asked Bluth if there was any truth to the rumor that he thinks you can show children anything so long as there’s a happy ending, to which Bluth replied:
[If] you don’t show the darkness, you don’t appreciate the light. If it weren’t for December no one would appreciate May. It’s just important that you see both sides of that. As far as a happy ending…when you walk out of the theatre there’s [got to be] something that you have that you get to take home. What did it teach me? Am I a better person for having watched it?
The Cambridge Analytica Files
Finally, if you haven't yet dipped your toe into the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal that is currently front page news, the Guardian have absolutely outdone themselves in reporting it, and have been doing so since 2015. Carole Cadwalladr has been doggedly pursuing this story with some exceptional investigative journalism, and over the past few days, the shit hit the fan for both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Turns out a data breach of 50million users that is data scraped to build software that swings elections in favour of Bannon and Farage is *quite bad*. In fact, when the Information Commissioner went in to Cambridge Analytica today to begin their investigation, they found Facebook already there. Channel 4 (in the UK) has also been doing some excellent reporting.
This is going to be a fun one to watch burn.
Peace out, sluts
x x x x