How to induce schizophrenia
In a continuing series of articles on the egogenesis of a variety of conditions, both physiological and mental, we turn our attention to the psyche. Today: through a process of sheer rage, we can turn ourselves into complete nutcases, with very little effort! Be warned, ranting to follow.
I love our national rail service. Though admitedly it's not really entirely their fault. Well, I'm so bloody glad I got on an earlier train than I was supposed to, since it has taken me a full NINE SODDING HOURS to get home. Yes, that's right. Thank crap I had copious amounts of literature with me, though that may have been part of the problem with the induction of insanity. Anyhow, let's go......
Get to Soton Central to find out that they are actually digging up the line somewhere in Oxfordshire, which means I have to get a bus between Didcot and Brum. Arse. Well, logic forces me to admit that the tracks do need maintenance (lots of it, really) and that Sunday is probably a sensible time to do it when in theory there is less traffic (though to be fair, just as many people travel on a Sunday these days, they should just work at one part solidly and just get it all done rather than fannying about). Anyhow, a smooth trip up through Hampshire, Bershire and Oxon, where we all troop out onto our bus. Oh no, it isnt going to Brum, but only to Leamington Spa, where we need to catch onward trains. Fair enough, and after a trip up the M40 we reach Leam no trouble and on to Brum with only a small delay. No problem, just about a half hour adrift from normal expectation. This is where the trouble begins.
I love Virgin train services. Not only do they waste a good third of every carriage with a fancy walkway affair to no purpose (which they could have used for luggage storage - it's a chronic problem on Virgin trains, no space for luggage, so people have to use the seats, ergo no space for passengers either. Wonderful thinking.), but they also have the worst automatic doors in the history of existence. These I count even worse than Douglas Adams' doors on the spaceship Heart of Gold which thank you repeatedly for using them. No. May the designers rot in Purgatory for eternity (always sounded worse than Hell to me). Ever noticed? They stay open for just enough time for you to get through, but then mercilessly close on anything. Well, this happens with automatic doors a lot anyway - but normally they have a little sensor so that if anything is in the way of the closing doors, they spring back open again. Not these ones. I watched almost everyone get mercilessly clamped in their vice-like maws, since they refuse to open again (even if you are wedged inside them) until you press their little opening button. Which you cant actually press with your hands full of suitcases, surprisingly, so you hold up the entire flow along the train. Multiply this by each and every passenger, and you have a startlingly effective prayer-wheel device for generating low-grade irritability. It's a wonder that more of us dont do a Michael Douglas in that wotsit film and roam about spraying people with shot. I of course could witness all of this, being stuck squated in the carriage-end owing to lack of seats, owing to NO BLOODY SPACE. Nice. Not that I could do anything about it either, since there was no space. Lovely. May the designers be reincarnated as oak-trees containing many, many nests of woodpeckers.
Right, well, On this little trip from Brum I find out we arent stopping at Leeds, but going via Doncaster. No great problem, there's a nice network of trains across Yorkshire for connecting services, but since there is a choice of where to change, I check with the guard who consults his little electronic book and reliably tells me to switch in Doncaster. Anyone see the deliberate mistake here? Anyone? You? See, it wasnt that difficult, was it? What else, but there's an almighty fuck-up with the train system. There should be a steady flow of trains through Donny to Leeds coming from Hull, but they are messing with the tracks out that way too, so all the east-west services are bolloxed. But, and this is the person I am truly, truly annoyed with (and that is the biggest litotes you'll ever read) some git has chucked themselves under an early morning inter-city at Barnet and completely arsed up the service on the east-coast mainline, making every train out of London (and of course, almost all the services north out of Doncaster) hopelessly, hopelessly delayed. Twat. Now this may seem hopelessly heartless of me, to have so little compassion for my fellow human being who felt the need to commit suicide, but to be fair, I have greater compassion for the thousand upon thousand of other people who were arsed about just like me because of their desire for oblivion. Where was their compassion for the rest of us? Completely selfish. They could have just quietly made up some poison ivy tea or shot themselves or gone and visited some war-zone dressed in luminous pink, but no they had to make sure they generated a great deal of stress and irritability. Why dont people think a bit more before they top themselves?
So now I'm on an achingly slow local service crawling across Yorkshire. I'm also at the limit of my reading. Newspaper long finshed, I've even read the chemistry papers I printed (the fantasticly overblown guff about organocatalysis) and am slogging through the existentialist philosophy at far too quick a rate. This is the perfect combination for crazy, and to be fair I'm not the most mentally stable at the best of times. Kierkegaard may have something to say to people, but when you've been arsed about with travelling, have eaten nothing all day but railway-station shite at overblown prices (people be warned - Tesco's are aiming for the same captive market situation, where you have no choice but to buy the shit at the price they say. Buy independent!), then the last thing you want to hear is about how you need to take responsiblity for you own choices and how truth is subjectivity and other such high-falutin' concepts and stuff. Wonderful for inducing a state of paranoia and frustration and a desire to stab someone, anyone in the eye with scorpion.
Eventually we trog into Leeds, with a rather pretty view across a fairground. This is an incongruous image, since I then find the service (this one actually being on time) just makes it into Leeds to miss any connections for west Leeds, and in particular, Headingley. So I'd have to wait another bloody hour for the connecting service. Under other circumsatnces I'd have quite happily have sat and waited and nursed a snack, but I'd been doing this all day and couldnt face the prospect of another hour with nothing but the Kierkegaard. Desperate situation. I make may way out to look for a bus.
Not to bad, I think, there's a good four routes heading my way, with the slight problem that they just dont bother to tell you where the bus-stop is. Marvellous. Working on the assumption that if I walk towards home, then I'll pass the stop, I head on my complete-anithesis-of-merry way. Only to see the bus sail past me from behind. When I finally reach the next stop, oh joy, I find out it'll be another half hour wait.
Are you forming some conception of my great irritation here? Me? Mister easy-going? Not at the moment. Something to be said for buddhist tranquility and calm, but even the bodhisattvas themselves would have been cracking open tins of Prozac to keep from abject genocide of innocent bystanders. I however had to make do without.
In the end I walk all the bloody way from Leeds station to home in Kirkstall, a good forty minutes trog with a bag full of mind-numbing verbiage and a suit&shoes. And it gives you some degree indication of my instability at this time that I was talking to myself in a geordie accent for the whole, lonely, neon-lit way. Past Yorkshire TV, past the viaduct, past the indian restaurants and the cinema and on and on.....until I reach home, see that my bike is still blissfully untouched and upright, at which moment I nearly burst into tears. And then come and update my blog.
One slight footnote needs to be made. I've been tanking on coffee all day, so the mental state could have been induced by the dehydrative combination of caffeine and ground-up bull's testicles I've been forced to eat. But I prefer to blame someone else, and for want of anyone else, I'm sticking with Kierkegaard. Bloody Danes, always pissing people off.
I love our national rail service. Though admitedly it's not really entirely their fault. Well, I'm so bloody glad I got on an earlier train than I was supposed to, since it has taken me a full NINE SODDING HOURS to get home. Yes, that's right. Thank crap I had copious amounts of literature with me, though that may have been part of the problem with the induction of insanity. Anyhow, let's go......
Get to Soton Central to find out that they are actually digging up the line somewhere in Oxfordshire, which means I have to get a bus between Didcot and Brum. Arse. Well, logic forces me to admit that the tracks do need maintenance (lots of it, really) and that Sunday is probably a sensible time to do it when in theory there is less traffic (though to be fair, just as many people travel on a Sunday these days, they should just work at one part solidly and just get it all done rather than fannying about). Anyhow, a smooth trip up through Hampshire, Bershire and Oxon, where we all troop out onto our bus. Oh no, it isnt going to Brum, but only to Leamington Spa, where we need to catch onward trains. Fair enough, and after a trip up the M40 we reach Leam no trouble and on to Brum with only a small delay. No problem, just about a half hour adrift from normal expectation. This is where the trouble begins.
I love Virgin train services. Not only do they waste a good third of every carriage with a fancy walkway affair to no purpose (which they could have used for luggage storage - it's a chronic problem on Virgin trains, no space for luggage, so people have to use the seats, ergo no space for passengers either. Wonderful thinking.), but they also have the worst automatic doors in the history of existence. These I count even worse than Douglas Adams' doors on the spaceship Heart of Gold which thank you repeatedly for using them. No. May the designers rot in Purgatory for eternity (always sounded worse than Hell to me). Ever noticed? They stay open for just enough time for you to get through, but then mercilessly close on anything. Well, this happens with automatic doors a lot anyway - but normally they have a little sensor so that if anything is in the way of the closing doors, they spring back open again. Not these ones. I watched almost everyone get mercilessly clamped in their vice-like maws, since they refuse to open again (even if you are wedged inside them) until you press their little opening button. Which you cant actually press with your hands full of suitcases, surprisingly, so you hold up the entire flow along the train. Multiply this by each and every passenger, and you have a startlingly effective prayer-wheel device for generating low-grade irritability. It's a wonder that more of us dont do a Michael Douglas in that wotsit film and roam about spraying people with shot. I of course could witness all of this, being stuck squated in the carriage-end owing to lack of seats, owing to NO BLOODY SPACE. Nice. Not that I could do anything about it either, since there was no space. Lovely. May the designers be reincarnated as oak-trees containing many, many nests of woodpeckers.
Right, well, On this little trip from Brum I find out we arent stopping at Leeds, but going via Doncaster. No great problem, there's a nice network of trains across Yorkshire for connecting services, but since there is a choice of where to change, I check with the guard who consults his little electronic book and reliably tells me to switch in Doncaster. Anyone see the deliberate mistake here? Anyone? You? See, it wasnt that difficult, was it? What else, but there's an almighty fuck-up with the train system. There should be a steady flow of trains through Donny to Leeds coming from Hull, but they are messing with the tracks out that way too, so all the east-west services are bolloxed. But, and this is the person I am truly, truly annoyed with (and that is the biggest litotes you'll ever read) some git has chucked themselves under an early morning inter-city at Barnet and completely arsed up the service on the east-coast mainline, making every train out of London (and of course, almost all the services north out of Doncaster) hopelessly, hopelessly delayed. Twat. Now this may seem hopelessly heartless of me, to have so little compassion for my fellow human being who felt the need to commit suicide, but to be fair, I have greater compassion for the thousand upon thousand of other people who were arsed about just like me because of their desire for oblivion. Where was their compassion for the rest of us? Completely selfish. They could have just quietly made up some poison ivy tea or shot themselves or gone and visited some war-zone dressed in luminous pink, but no they had to make sure they generated a great deal of stress and irritability. Why dont people think a bit more before they top themselves?
So now I'm on an achingly slow local service crawling across Yorkshire. I'm also at the limit of my reading. Newspaper long finshed, I've even read the chemistry papers I printed (the fantasticly overblown guff about organocatalysis) and am slogging through the existentialist philosophy at far too quick a rate. This is the perfect combination for crazy, and to be fair I'm not the most mentally stable at the best of times. Kierkegaard may have something to say to people, but when you've been arsed about with travelling, have eaten nothing all day but railway-station shite at overblown prices (people be warned - Tesco's are aiming for the same captive market situation, where you have no choice but to buy the shit at the price they say. Buy independent!), then the last thing you want to hear is about how you need to take responsiblity for you own choices and how truth is subjectivity and other such high-falutin' concepts and stuff. Wonderful for inducing a state of paranoia and frustration and a desire to stab someone, anyone in the eye with scorpion.
Eventually we trog into Leeds, with a rather pretty view across a fairground. This is an incongruous image, since I then find the service (this one actually being on time) just makes it into Leeds to miss any connections for west Leeds, and in particular, Headingley. So I'd have to wait another bloody hour for the connecting service. Under other circumsatnces I'd have quite happily have sat and waited and nursed a snack, but I'd been doing this all day and couldnt face the prospect of another hour with nothing but the Kierkegaard. Desperate situation. I make may way out to look for a bus.
Not to bad, I think, there's a good four routes heading my way, with the slight problem that they just dont bother to tell you where the bus-stop is. Marvellous. Working on the assumption that if I walk towards home, then I'll pass the stop, I head on my complete-anithesis-of-merry way. Only to see the bus sail past me from behind. When I finally reach the next stop, oh joy, I find out it'll be another half hour wait.
Are you forming some conception of my great irritation here? Me? Mister easy-going? Not at the moment. Something to be said for buddhist tranquility and calm, but even the bodhisattvas themselves would have been cracking open tins of Prozac to keep from abject genocide of innocent bystanders. I however had to make do without.
In the end I walk all the bloody way from Leeds station to home in Kirkstall, a good forty minutes trog with a bag full of mind-numbing verbiage and a suit&shoes. And it gives you some degree indication of my instability at this time that I was talking to myself in a geordie accent for the whole, lonely, neon-lit way. Past Yorkshire TV, past the viaduct, past the indian restaurants and the cinema and on and on.....until I reach home, see that my bike is still blissfully untouched and upright, at which moment I nearly burst into tears. And then come and update my blog.
One slight footnote needs to be made. I've been tanking on coffee all day, so the mental state could have been induced by the dehydrative combination of caffeine and ground-up bull's testicles I've been forced to eat. But I prefer to blame someone else, and for want of anyone else, I'm sticking with Kierkegaard. Bloody Danes, always pissing people off.
posted by J at 7:00 PM
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