moonbearzz

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I hate to dream cause dreaming takes energy. It takes work. Sleeping is supposed to be a relaxing affair. I lay down on a bed, it feels great. Next thing I know I have to build a go cart with my ex landlord. 

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Plenty of people drink without becoming alcoholics, but some people take a single sip and a switch trips and who knows why? The only guaranteed way to avoid addiction is to never try drugs. This sounds simple enough and the politicians and zealots who preach abstinence in all manner of things will have us believe that it is simple enough. Perhaps it would be simple if we weren’t all human, the only animal in the known world that is willing to try something new, fun, pointless, dangerous, thrilling, stupid, even if we might die in the trying. The fact that I was doing addiction research at a university in the great state of California was the result of the thousands of pioneers who had climbed into their wagons facing disease and injury and starvation and the great, brutal expanse of land that ranged from mountain to river to valley, all for the sake of getting from one side of this enormous country to the other. They knew that there was risk involved, but the potential for triumph, for pleasure, for something just a little bit better, was enough to outweigh the cost. All you have to do is watch a child ride her bike directly into a brick wall or jump from the tallest branch of a sycamore tree to know that we humans are reckless with our bodies, reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right up to the edge of our lives, which is, in some ways, to live fully. 

-Yaa Gyasi

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Any major illness transforms a patient’s - really an entire family’s - life. But brain diseases have the additional strangeness of the esoteric. A son’s death already defies the parents’ ordered universe; how much more incomprehensible is it when the patient is brain-dead, his body warm, his heart still beating? The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient’s eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon’s diagnosis. Sometimes the news so shocks the mind it suffers an electrical short. This phenomenon is known as a “psychogenic” syndrome, a severe version of the swoon some experience after hearing bad news. When my brother, alone at college, heard that her father, who had championed her right to an education in rural 1960s India, had finally died after a long hospitalization, she had a psychogenic seizure - which continued until she returned home to attend the funeral. One of my patients, upon being diagnosed with brain cancer, fell suddenly into a coma. I ordered a battery of labs, scans and EEGs, searching for a cause, without result. The definitive test was simplest: I raised the patient’s arm above his face and let go. A patient in a psychogenic coma retains just enough volition to avoid hitting himself. Treatment consists in speaker assuringly, until your words connection and the patient awakens. 

- Paul Kalanithi

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Neon 🐈

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From The Chairs are Where the People Go by Misha Glouberman

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From In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

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From Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House

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moments of life <3

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Good for the soul

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In the mood for some Quebecois cinema...