Black-Edged and Borderless: Assignment

Black Edged and Borderless

I was supposed to write about my mental illness last week but procrastination is my middle name and I didn’t get around to it. Another problem is that I am so ambivalent about it. I have a truly weird diagnosis – or rather, diagnoses – schizoaffective disorder and bulimia nervosa although like many bulimics I started out with anorexia – at least that’s what it says on my medical notes. I actually started out with binge eating disorder and ‘progressed’ to anorexia when others commented unfavourably on my weight. So I am like Churchill’s Soviet Union: A enigma within an enigma within an enigma. Basically, I am plain weird. I do weird things, say weird things, think weird things and for all of those weird things I take a bucketful of weird medication. And I hate it. Even those bucketfuls of medication don’t make me ‘like everybody else’. But then as a CPN once said to me ‘You will never be normal because there really is no such thing as normal.’

That made me feel better for about a quarter of an hour.

Some Bloke Called….

…James Purnell is getting tough on benefit claimants (a.k.a: ‘untermenschen’) in an effort to win the votes of Mail On Sunday readers.  He singles out drug addicts for ‘special treatment’.  They will be ‘punished’ if they do not attend rehabilitation programmes.  He read PPE at Oxford. So he’s been there then.  ‘I know the bottom, he says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.’  Heroin addicts are currently weaned off their drug of choice with a substitute called ‘methadone’.  I can think of a more effective treatment: a cocktail of phenobarbitol and an anti-emetic.  A single dose will be all that is necessary and they will sleep the deepest sleep of all.

Mr Purnell, here’s a clue
No matter what you say
No matter what you do
Those Daily Mail Readers
Will never vote for you
So turn and watch the few
Who still believed in you
Walk away, saying, ‘Et tu’.

This could be the realization of a revolutionary’s wet dream. The bloodier the better, I say.

Don’t you know
They’re talkin’ about a revolution
It sounds like whisper
Don’t you know
They’re talkin’ about a revolution
It sounds like whisper

While they’re standing in the welfare lines
Crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation
Wasting time in the unemployment lines
Sitting around waiting for a promotion

Poor people gonna rise up
And get their share
Poor people gonna rise up
And take what’s theirs

And finally the tables are starting to turn
Talkin’ ’bout a revolution. Hold on.
Yes, finally the tables are starting to turn
Talkin’ ’bout a revolution. Hold on.

Rest assured that if you declare war on me I will defend myself. By any means necessary.