My recently neglected Mac, correspondence apart, must be a convert to an odd idea I have about people and their machines that process data.
Yesterday, feeling it deserved some help with routine upgrades and maintenance, I found Apple had come out with another "security update". No doubt they must inflict these on us, but I hate them. A security update is the task where Mac users need to juggle doing something interesting with keeping an eye on a progress bar that tells you it's "optimising system performance", but notches up the percentage completed scale like a snail on Kilimanjaro.
I did find something interesting.
ReBeL GrrLs.
 You could very soon be in The Lilith Library: "Art, information, history, music, everything you could possibly want to know about Lilith, the first succubus, the first wife of Adam, the Greek Goddess of the Black Moon." It's a big jump from Queen Boadicea to Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa's first elected woman president who took charge of Liberia this year, but that doesn't daunt Olivia Ward on 'Women of Power' -- and with a leg up from Bikini Kill!
However, each topic in its time.
It was notably in taking in "bust" iPods for repair I first made an irrational jump of my own, observing that the difficulty of the task on my desk often seemed to correlate with the state of mind of the distant owner of the music box. I've mentioned this coincidence: how, for instance, one iPod was almost fixed when it decided to behave badly again so suddenly I even asked the friend to whom it belongs if perchance she had blown a fuse about anything around 5:19 pm! She had, almost precisely then.
The standard Mac checks that followed the security update came up with such alarming and irreparable results in tests this'll be my penultimate log entry before a big chunk of computer gets zero-wiped and I reinstall one of the operating systems from scratch. If you don't wish to hear what "/sbin/fsck -f" means doing in Mac maintenance, you're well out of where I subsequently found myself, full of "invalid nodes" and other terms bearing a striking similarity to some neurochemistry ones I've had to swallow in the past week and more.
In sum the Mac has lost its bearings. Putting it right amounts to much the same thing as setting me straight, using a plan I've had to implement since the last column on a bad case of bipolar disorder. If you were to argue there's nothing odd about this "people-data processor empathy" that causes computing devices to put up such a show of solidarity, in light of what we might ourselves be doing to the things when we're "not ourselves", I'd be hard put to prove anything. Still, I've drawn up a big list of more clear-cut "weird stuff" over the years and it sure ain't all me!
zzz
I'm slowly on the mend, though you wouldn't believe it to have heard assessments made this weekend by family and friends who've not seen me or the mess my flat's in since I vanished and then wrote that last column. Once this lot is done, I won't say too much, since a music site will be less than ever about me and increasingly about you as the weeks go by: that's for a very good reason.
The story cut short -- and then a taster of ReBeL GrrLs of the kind Sarah likes (do make sure your pop-up killer is on if you click on a link to a Tripod-hosted fan site!) part of my agenda -- I've declined a long rest in a clinic on the grounds "the cat wouldn't like it and nobody's going to want the cat!"; but more seriously I'm now being helped through a very steep learning curve.
Until a little over a year ago, this was occasionally a blog that apparently was of some use to others in writing as honest as I could then make it about a series of physical and mental ailments I'd never quite put together the way I absolutely must now. It boils down to two things: there's a genetic disease -- the "cyclothymia" McMan's Depression and Bipolar Web sums up pretty well -- and behavioural analysis I've needed to understand myself and my relationships better. By the end of 2004, people thought the latter was over, but last year I failed to remember the reason I was in therapy with the Shaman-Shrinkess I used to mention in the first place lay in the "downers".
By the time I was in the pits of my previous entry, with uncontrollable mood-swings that considerably distorted my perceptions and stopped the music and any logging, while also exhausted way beyond my understanding, I was nearly done for by the latest of what appear to be seven-month cycles and way past cyclothymia too. It's a good job I did stop logging while I was clinically "manic".
The worst thing for me, by far, has been that exhaustion. There's no point in telling you anything unless it's very honest. Everyone I knew well has for ages recommended I "get a life"! Meaning more of one. I even wholeheartedly agreed with them, but the trouble with getting a life -- socialising after work, going to as many concerts as I'd like and easing into a good long-term relationship -- was this had become something others did, and I could neither muster the emotional and physical energy for it nor understand why. Oh yes, manic-depressives are pretty stupid with money too (as you know from me).
It took an astute log reader in the United States, a therapist herself who asks not to be named beyond say KP Sauce, to read between lines here where I've been hinting I'd reached a point where I no longer had the words for what I hear in the music I write about overtly and then network this to my other "music": the music of people's lives, ways and relationships.
It's up to KP Sauce, if she likes, to use our combined skills in her therapeutic practice. Being a journalist, it's my job to sum things up where others would write books full of jargon -- though I do know many would say my columns are book chapters! -- and her job is to treat the kinds of depression I sent her a few pages about, a sort of Dummy's Guide.
Doing that was a very bad idea since it drained the last of my resources, but I did since I'm fed up with reading bullshit and you'll maybe have gathered I am aware of the ultimately self-destructive behaviour people like me adopt to make it very difficult for "normal" ones to help us. Those vicious cycles in ourselves end up causing others just as harmful in relationships we'd rather nurture and enjoy.
Between us and with some professional help here in France, we worked out a plan for me -- and I was delighted when a friend asked: "Your tragedy?!"
Ellie misheard, the word was "strategy". Writing this before I get back to the ladies is part of it. Even a general practitioner as good -- and with as many patients -- as the friend my own has become is too bombarded with data from the pharmaceutical companies about all kinds of new "molecules" to keep up completely.
It wasn't until he headed me off to seek help from a new therapist here, since the Shaman-Shrinkess last year retired, that I met a man both willing to give the strategy a go and able to tell me that a mild drug I've been taking since 1997 to regulate a key neurotransmitter, serotonin, had "backfired". Sometime last year.
Those daily pills have for a while been doing me much more harm than good, but the actual symptoms of the previous two seven-month cycles we also then figured out took such different forms when I hit breakdown point weren't similar enough to see the pattern.
Upshot of this? On Wednesday, I started with a new "molecule" and dropped the other from one day to the next -- and with reluctance since the new little green pill has so many nasty side-effects it sounded suspiciously like a sledgehammer, my term for Prozac and the like. It isn't, it's a screwdriver, my mood-swings are manageable, I try to shut up when I know I'm being irrational -- and, goodness me, by yesterday evening I'd even realised this is Easter Weekend!
However, during the initial weeks (I've just swallowed tonight's little bugger), some of those side-effects are bloody sledgehammers all the same. If there's a moral to this, it's that analysis may get you a long way, or it did me. It didn't get me far enough, though, to understand the need regularly to check what you're taking with more than a GP.
I really don't want to go on about a "tragedy" that's my own solution and perhaps nobody else's, but my nature is such that without naïvely imagining for one instant a change in neurotransmitter regulators will suffice, the way I am -- combined with the demands of my job -- mean that to an extent I have to treat manic-depression, which is what it could have become, like I did the booze in 1997. There can be no half-measures. The summer of that year, I gave alcohol the boot, forever.
You can't do that with depression, but you can watch your behaviour patterns and see all those signals I've mentioned missing in time to develop a stronger immune system and remove the vicious cycles in your relationships. Since I logged on April 8, I've sometimes slept 14 hours a day! Last night I didn't, at all. Tonight I shall. It's really one day at a time.
A week ago, I would have flipped if people had said the things about me I've heard today and ... many times before. Some of them were very "tough love" indeed; the job of the little green pill is to help me take them as such. The rest is between me, such people and the therapist, with a fortnight left for slow adjustments to be fit for work.
I rather like next Sunday being Saint George's Day, not since the man is the beatified patron of a nation to which I said "farewell" more than 25 years ago, but because he's said to have had quite a way with stomping on dragons!
Should a remarkable woman in the US come to birth a book as superb as one I'd have done better to assimilate more deeply many years back -- 'Touched with Fire: Manic Depression and the Artistic Temperament' by Kay Redfield Jamison (whom I did remember, along with John McManamy, on April 28, 2003 -- KP Sauce would likely write, as she's spoken to me, of the need to have the "right centre of gravity".
That's where those "core values" -- love, trust and a sense of humour -- are in us all. She has been exceptionally decent to me in extensive calls before we found the therapist down the road because she saw through this place. It seems I'm your typical counsellor in other people's relationship problems by way of the log and when I listen to your music, who pays far too little attention to his own.
Enough already.
zzz
Now hear this:
"It is also quite possible, given the riot grrrl agenda, that if someone like me enjoys it, then it has not been successful. So how can I come to terms with riot grrrl, which seems to threaten my eardrums as well as my sexuality? It is a problem - I was young once too. There is a tendency, perhaps, on the part of those who lived through the sixties protests and even through punk, to feel that we have been there before and to think that we know where the phenomenon is likely to end up."
The next thing you know, John Potter gets almost as bad as me. Because he really likes Bikini Kill. And he seems to reckon he's ancient. And that comes from 'The Singer, Not the Song: Women Singers as Composer-Poets', in 'Popular Music, Vol 13, No 2. Mellers at 80' (May 1994). And it was a present.
A right-on gift!
It was dropped in from The Scholarly Journal Archive (about JSTOR) by another friend who reads this log and is also good at hearing "the singer, not the song". He thought, in his not-so-ancient wisdom, "Nick ... it may be of interest to you."
 Academically, it's an astonishing piece. And for people taking little green pills with several unmentionable risks inherent in them, I'd like to inform that particular guy that I would love more of that stuff. It's gratifying to report that Julie Ruin hasn't put in an appearance here yet, neither have Bratmobile really, and two Bikini Kills albums were already decisively part of my April budget.
There's more besides, to come.
I'll stick to strategy, which means Mylène still comes first, and you've had your first taste of filthy Peaches, so I think we'd all like to know "where the phenomenon is likely to end up". In bed or out of it.
This column is a pain in a week where Sod's Law has done its thing, since I'm largely confined to quarters while Les Femmes S'en Mêlent (Fr and Eng), an annual concert season "dans toute la France" between April 13 and 24.
It's not that I'm jealous or anything! This is France's 9th Lilith Fair...
Do spare me a thought, but no worries please, while I rip my Mac to bits, take to my couch and wonder whether I'll be allowed by maybe next weekend, to do a bit of mixing myself.
I know they don't have beds in concert venues, usually, though what some of these chicks can get up to while still vertical astounds me. If that chum of mine guessed about little green pills and stuff, then he also divined that the bit about libido is fortunately non-applicable.
"May be interested?"
Heck, even Mylène oozes the stuff. I know I have to slow down and don't want any more literal brain burn from thinking too damned fast. How long did you think a fellow like me could keep sex out of the way I mix things up?
Gravitas! That's what we're after.
1:31:05 AM 
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