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Showing posts from May, 2009

Dave's Progress. Chapter 29: A Culture of Conformity?

I know I tend to go on alot about how I get bored, bored, bored in this blog. I generally, in the past, put these feelings of ennui down to having experienced a mental health problem which, in many ways, has left me somewhat socially isolated. I am often on my own for large spans of time and, almost without fail, find myself bored. I have been known to fall asleep out of sheer apathy and lack of motivation. Before, again, I have perhaps put this down to "negative" symptoms of the illness from which I am told I suffer, but lately I have been wondering whether this boredom thing goes a little deeper and is perhaps the product of a society which expects us all to be overwhelmingly conformist in our natures. I believe I feel this more acutely than perhaps other people do because I have been, at some point, at a stage where my behaviour certainly didn't conform to the "norm". It was deemed inappropriate, unreasonable- "mad". To use a literary allusion to e

Dave's Progress. Chapter 28: The Spiritual Hangover

OK, it's time to admit it. Sometimes, on the odd occasion, I have been known to drink a little too much. Don't get me wrong, I don't think I'm an alcoholic, but I do think I am prone to the odd binge which leaves me feeling not only physically unwell, but also seems to upset my spiritual equilibrium. It's all a far cry from when, in my teenage years, the odd binge drink was regarded as just part of the fun. And indeed, this great English tradition seems to have gone on and you can see the evidence of it in any major English town centre come the weekend. God knows, even the government is beginning to take note of the effects of this unusually British phenomenon, where you go out to a club and get so pissed that you can hardly stand up, become belligerently aggressive, maybe become over amorous with the opposite sex, and then go home, donner kebab firmly fixed between your teeth, chilli sauce running down that new shirt you'd just bought from Next. As for myself