You don't answer me, I won't answer you...

(((03)))

Farrah Leni Fawcett (02.02.47-
06.25.09)

Les yeux bleus noircis

We all need a shoulder to cry on
Once in a while

And there won't be a dry eye
In the house tonight

Blackened blue eyes
I don't care too much for your
Circumstances or you
Situation-wise

I will blossom and die
One day you'll find a real need for love
Or you live with the fear for
The rest of your life

And there won't be a dry eye
In the house tonight

The one thing I hate
The numb and the fake
We all need a best friend
We can trust with our lives til the end

And there won't be a dry eye
In the house tonight

(C:UK)

The Death of "Seem" (or...why you will be writen off) [Redeaux from 09.19.07]

Let me explain something to the lot of you about a certain kind of idiot with which we unfortunately have to share the world. When I see a sentence from that reads: "I can't seem to find..." or "I can't seem to get it to work..." or anything with the word "seem" within it other than it's valid, intended use, I have to Immediately write you off. You don't "seem" to not be able to do something... you aren't. You don't "seem" to not be able to find something...you can't.

The immeasurably high amount the of misuse of this word is a classic example of non-thinking fuck-wads in our society that repeat buzz words because they think that it makes them sound sophisticated when in all actuality, it makes them look like slack-jawed dipshits!

I will not, nor should anyone have to suffer the misuse of this word anymore! If you get an IM or e-mail from someone and they "can't seem" to do something...call them out on their rape of the English language...or better yet...ignore them. This isn't just my opinion, there are other people with IQ's higher than that of a mountain goat who are also sick to death of your thoughtless, lazy banter.

(((03)))

Joseph Preston Amyx

Rest in Peace

(((03)))

Accueillir à la Machine

DFW has second-worst road rage in U.S., survey says...

DFW (not just Dallas) was ranked has having the number two angriest drivers in the nation. It's no surprise at all. You see while other cities make an effort to enforce manners, behavior and courtesy amongst those occupying the roadways, DFW law enforcement concentrates on frivolous and remarkably minor offenses that have the most payout... and that's it.

That's not to say that it's only their fault. Texas as a whole will let anyone and everyone onto the road and not give a tinker's damn about the differences in geographic layout. No effort is made to inform rather than just collect money and move on. The highest percentage of drivers in Texas wouldn't know a turn signal if it bit them in the ass and is aware of other drivers like they're aware that there are actually low calorie meals. They spend every second on the road yapping on a cell phone, most likely with other drivers and can't be bothered with checking to see if they're going to cut someone off or hold up an entire freeway with their monumentally horrible, thoughtless, poor excuse for driving.

There's something else to consider other than the greed of the police and the cities who pay them and more than just the moronic, brainless, careless assholes with whom we have to share the pavement. There are also the dumbass engineers and city planners who cannot be bothered to make even one aspect of driving the least bit pleasant for anyone. Not one row of lights in ALL of DFW is in sync with any of the others. When one light turns green, you can bet that when you reach the next one a block away, it will turn red the second you get there. And this is EVERY traffic light, so most of your time is spent sitting at red lights, AND to make it even more of a pisser, they spend millions to install traffic cameras in order to collect the millions of dollars to pay for the cameras from people who have lost their minds just trying to get from point A to point B. You follow?

So you're damn right we're angry and you're damn right that not one person on any seat in Dallas or Ft. Worth's FINE governing body is going to do jack shit about it. If one or two people get shot in the face over "anger issues" then it's worth the millions the cities make in traffic fines. It's ALL about the the dollars here. So stand upright and smile DFW, we're fucked.
Welcome to the Machine
(((03)))

Les rêves (et le Sommeil) A le Sens

Dreams may not be the secret window into the frustrated desires of the unconscious that Sigmund Freud first posited in 1899, but growing evidence suggests that dreams - and, more so, sleep - are powerfully connected to the processing of human emotions.

According to new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Seattle, adequate sleep may underpin our ability to understand complex emotions properly in waking life. "Sleep essentially is resetting the magnetic north of your emotional compass," says Matthew Walker, director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.

A recent study by Walker and his colleagues examined how rest - specifically, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep - influences our ability to read emotions in other people's faces. In the small analysis of 36 adults, volunteers were asked to interpret the facial expressions of people in photographs, following either a 60- or 90-minute nap during the day or with no nap. Participants who had reached REM sleep (when dreaming most frequently occurs) during their nap were better able to identify expressions of positive emotions like happiness in other people, compared with participants who did not achieve REM sleep or did not nap at all. Those volunteers were more sensitive to negative expressions, including anger and fear.

Past research by Walker and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, which was published in the journal Current Biology, found that in people who were sleep deprived, activity in the prefrontal lobe - a region of the brain involved in controlling emotion - was significantly diminished. He suggests that a similar response may be occurring in the nap-deprived volunteers, albeit to a lesser extent, and that it may have its roots in evolution. "If you're walking through the jungle and you're tired, it might benefit you more to be hypersensitive to negative things," he says. The idea is that with little mental energy to spare, you're emotionally more attuned to things that are likely to be the most threatening in the immediate moment. Inversely, when you're well rested, you may be more sensitive to positive emotions, which could benefit long-term survival, he suggests: "If it's getting food, if it's getting some kind of reward, finding a wife - those things are pretty good to pick up on."

Our daily existence is largely influenced by our ability "to understand our societal interactions, to understand someone else's emotional state of mind, to understand the expression on their face," says Ninad Gujar, a senior research scientist at Walker's lab and lead author of the study, which was recently submitted for publication. "These are the most fundamental processes guiding our personal and professional lives."

REM sleep appears to not only improve our ability to identify positive emotions in others; it may also round out the sharp angles of our own emotional experiences. Walker suggests that one function of REM sleep - dreaming, in particular - is to allow the brain to sift through that day's events, process any negative emotion attached to them, then strip it away from the memories. He likens the process to applying a "nocturnal soothing balm." REM sleep, he says, "tries to ameliorate the sharp emotional chips and dents that life gives you along the way."

"It's not that you've forgotten. You haven't," he says. "It's a memory of an emotional episode, but it's no longer emotional itself."

That palliative safety-valve quality of sleep may be hampered when we fail to reach REM sleep or when REM sleep is disrupted, Walker says. "If you don't let go of the emotion, what results is a constant state of anxiety," he says.

The theory is consistent with new research conducted by Rebecca Bernert, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Florida State University who specializes in the relationship between sleep and suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and who also presented her work at the sleep conference this week.

In her study of 82 men and women between the ages of 18 and 66 who were admitted into a mental-health hospital for emergency psychiatric evaluation, Bernert discovered that the presence of severe and frequent nightmares or insomnia was a strong predictor of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. More than half of the study participants had attempted suicide at least once in the past, and the 17% of the study group who had made an attempt within the previous month had dramatically higher scores in nightmare frequency and intensity than the rest. Bernert found that the relationship between nightmares or insomnia and suicide persisted, even when researchers controlled for other factors like depression.

Past studies have also established a link between chronic sleep disruption and suicide. Sleep complaints, which include nightmares, insomnia and other sleep disturbances, are listed in the current Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's inventory of suicide-prevention warning signs. Yet what distinguishes Bernert's research is that when nightmares and insomnia were evaluated separately, nightmares were independently predictive of suicidal behavior. "It may be that nightmares present a unique risk for suicidal symptoms, which may have to do with the way we process emotion within dreams," Bernert says.

If that's the case, it may help explain the recurring nightmares that characterize psychiatric conditions like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Walker says. "The brain has not stripped away the emotional rind from that experience memory," he says, so "the next night, the brain offers this up, and it fails again, and it starts to sound like a broken record ... What you hear [PTSD] patients describing is, 'I can't get over the event.' "

At the biological level, Walker explains, the "emotional rind" translates to sympathetic nervous-system activity during sleep: faster heart rate and the release of stress chemicals. Understanding why nightmares recur and how REM sleep facilitates emotional processing - or hinders it, when nightmares take place and perpetuate the physical stress symptoms - may eventually provide clues to effective treatments of painful mental disorders. Perhaps, even, by simply addressing sleeping habits, doctors could potentially interrupt the emotional cycle that can lead to suicide. "There is an opportunity for prevention," Bernert says.

The new findings highlight what researchers are increasingly recognizing as a two-way relationship between psychiatric disorders and disrupted sleep. "Modern medicine and psychiatry have consistently thought that psychological disorders seem to have co-occuring sleep problems and that it's the disorder perpetuating the sleep problems," says Walker. "Is it possible that, in fact, it's the sleep disruption contributing to the psychiatric disorder?"
Dreams (and Sleep) Have Meaning
By Tiffany Sharples, Time Magazine

Brûler comme une flamme

Never thought our love would last for so long
Time and time again I thought that you would be gone
Still we kept love hanging on
I guess it's meant to be
That your heart still belongs to me

And now we've stood the test of time
We survived
I asked for hope and a chance
You gave the key to your heart
You used to say that I'm not sincere
I'm gonna prove that you're wrong
I'm never gonna leave your arms
Should've realized before
Your love's worth waiting for

Don't you know that
It's our love that's burning
Burning like a flame
And you know that
It's out love that's never gonna change
'cause every time I touch you
You just make me go insane
Don't you know that
It's our love that's burning

Our love burning like a flame

Like a fantasy in the dark
You were gone
I couldn't say the words
That you wanted to hear
But baby, now that I see the light
I feel it's burning so bright
So let's stop wasting all this time

(D)

Le Porter le deuil de Ma Maladie Mentale

"The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life."

~ Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces."

~ Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1925)

"Much of what is labeled mental illness simply reflects our ‘unwise’ deployment of defense mechanisms. If we use defenses well, we are deemed mentally healthy, conscientious, funny, creative, and altruistic. If we use them badly, the psychiatrist diagnoses us ill, our neighbors label us unpleasant, and society brands us immoral."

~ George Eman Vaillant
The Mourning of My Mental Illness
(painting by Armand Désiré Gautier)

Third Storm of Rosemeade

Damage aftermath at my apartments from the tornado chaos that was last night

(((03)))

Chercher au Ciel

(((03)))

Qu'un Idiot Croit

He came from somewhere back in her long ago
The sentimental fool don't see
Tryin' hard to recreate
What had yet to be created once in her life
She musters a smile
For his nostalgic tale
Never coming near what he wanted to say
Only to realize
It never really was

She had a place in his life
He never made her think twice
As he rises to her apology
Anybody else would surely know
He's watching her go

But what a fool believes he sees
No wise man has the power to reason away
What seems to be
Is always better than nothing
And nothing at all keeps sending him...

Somewhere back in her long ago
Where he can still believe there's a place in her life
Someday, somewhere, she will return
What a Fool Believes
(MM)

"After an inferior man has been taught a doctrine of superiority he will remain as inferior as he was before his lesson. He will merely assume himself to be superior, and attempt to employ his recently-learned tactics against his own kind, whom he will then consider his inferiors. With each inferior man enjoying what he considers his unique role, the entire bunch will be reduced to a pack of strutting, foppish, self-centered monkeys gamboling about on an island of ignorance. There they will play their games under the supervision of their keeper, who was and will always be a superior man."

~ Anton Szandor LaVey (04.11.30 - 10.29.97)

John Arthur "David" Carradine (12.08.39 - 06.04.09)

Revêtu avec les Sous (an excerpt from a forthcoming short shory by Matt Amyx)

My pockets were lined with pennies when they found me in the ditch outside the Turner house on a dew-covered Wednesday morning. Apparently I'd been there a few days and the pennies had stained the insides of my pockets and outsides of my jeans a dull greenish-blue. And, oh yeah... I was pretty dead.

The thing about the person who killed me was, he wasn't a bad guy. I'd been acquainted with him for several years and never known him to act out or give anyone any reason to think he'd be capable of ending another person's life. And then he did. Lesson learned.
Lined with Pennies
(((03)))

Låt den rätte komma in

Oskar, a meek 12-year-old boy, lives with his mother in the Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg in the early 1980s. He is regularly bullied by his classmates, and spends his evenings imagining revenge. One night, he meets Eli...

Eli eventually discovers that Oskar is being bullied at school, and encourages him to stand up for himself. This inspires Oskar to finally stand up to his tormentors...

(((03)))