Thought Progression.

I was going to make a post today on why memories are worthless. I didn’t do so because as soon as I started putting the words together I realised that it’s actually a surprisingly complex question. I realised that there are different sorts of memories; that some are useful and some aren’t, while in the case of others it all depends on how you look at it. And that led me to consider, very briefly, whether I should analyse the different types of memories and then enumerate them using bullet points. I decided against it because that’s the sort of thing which young people and academics do and I’m neither. The IQ is willing but the will is weak.

So then I progressed to the connection between guilt and regret, and that one was easy. Regret is irrational but guilt is part of the learning process. That’s that one done.

And then I remembered how relaxed and positive I was last Tuesday, and how the opposite was true on Wednesday. I wondered whether I might be bipolar after all (which somebody suggested in a blog comment once, only I still used the old term ‘manic-depressive’ and thought that ‘bipolar’ might be the post-gay term for homosexual. My reply must have made me look pretty bloody silly.)

From there I went onto the reason why I have always declined to take anti-stress medication. It’s because life is feeling; feeling is life; without feeling there is no life, and I never found zombies anything other than laughable. (The same applies to Daleks, come to that.) Perception is the whole of the life experience. Subdue it and you might as well be Madeline Usher.

And all this led me to the final question: Is Munchausen’s Syndrome contagious? If it is, you see, I could do with catching it so I could find all these bloody visits to doctors and hospitals delightfully pleasant instead of being driven by them into a pit without a pendulum.

That’s three references to Edgar Allan Poe in one week.

Another thing I realised today was that none of the adults to whom I was exposed as a child – parents, teachers, youth leaders etc, etc – ever seemed to notice that I was subtly different from the other kids.

Off to watch more X Files now. Looking for loopholes.