Hope

Is this the first step on the way back to sanity?

Slave

As has been mentioned here a few times before, I am a junkie. I have the mentality of an addict, and when I am about to become hooked on something, I frequently need to approach it with an almost 12-step mentality, if I am not to fall pray to it. It makes sense that such an inclination runs in families, seeing how my brother was a slave to alcoholism all of his adult life, almost up to the point when he died just after his 43rd birthday.

Still, I do not get hooked on everything. And not even some of the classics. For example, booze doesn't seem to be a problem for me. But smoking is. Or would be, if I hadn't gone to some pains to stop using it when I was sixteen. I think my saving grace was that I hadn't smoked for more than a couple of years, but it was still an effort. Other smoking or snorting or shooting up has not been a problem, simply because I have been too scared shitless to even try most of it. However, I was addicted to what I gather is the worst of them all, caffeine. That took a long cold turkey back in '92 or '93, and I have stayed away from the stuff ever since. Of my current masters, chocolate probably remains the most powerful, and insidious. I have spells every other month or so, where I just can't stop eating it. I wake up in the morning and have to load up on candy bars. I can therefore not wait to get to the gas station, beacause I know that I cleaned out any scrap of chocolate in the house the night before. Same thing with ice cream. There are these recurring periods when I have to have my daily pint, preferrably of Ben & Jerry's. At least there, I actually do have a warning sign I sometimes pay attention to: The day I have had two pints, by myself, during that one day, is usually the day I manage to start a successful ice cream cold turkey. Which may last a couple of weeks, or even a few months.

Somewhat less corporal, but no less consuming, are addictions such as my movie/DVD spouts, my road biking periods a.k.a. my marathon years a.k.a. the fight for my brown belt (also known as the karate-kid-with-several-broken-bones period), back in the day my computer games insomniatic weeks on ends, latent workaholism, and my ever-present news addiction. That last one actually never seems to really subside, it just varies in intensity from glancing over headlines twice a day to an all-out, full-blown ride through news media on five continents, followed by bouts of depression over the cruel brutality in the world and my inability to do much about it. Those rides can last all through the night, several nights in a row.

Now if I could only get hooked on moderation.

Fourth

Network [1976]

One of the best movies. Ever. This is the movie Robert Murdoch was watching when he got the idea for the Fox "News" Network. This is just so incredibly well written. Which is enough for me. I mean, the acting is good. Really good, actually. But the movie is just a solid delivery of text. Wonderful, spine-chillingly fabulous text. But that is it. There is minimal action or physical movement of any kind. Basically because there is no room for it. Hell, it is a Sidney Lumet film. I mean, 12 Angry Men took place almost entirely in one room. Plus it isn't needed. The lines are king. One result of that is the timelessness of the film. Look past the 70's hair-dos and bell-bottoms, obsolete technology etc. and you have a movie that could have opened yesterday. And it would have been received as a timely wake-up call. A fresh critique of TV's kiss of death to society. Or as one character puts it in the film: "You are television incarnate, Diana, indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. The daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split-seconds and instant replays. You are madness, Diana, virulent madness, and everything you touch dies with you." But there is another pillar holding up the movie. Another aspect of society getting a whooping. The conglomerate. The corporation. The Network. Actually, the movie is more about how big business corrupts television than about how television corrupts people and their society. Kind of like Syriana, which I really look forward to seeing. I'll end with a quote from the Network's chairman of the board. This says it all: "There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale."