Well, not wanting to spoil the mood I wrote about the one real and meaningful experience I’ve had with Twilight.

Edwards Starry Eyes,

Eggs, free range, organic
Juice, apple, organic

There is one item that can not be spoken aloud or silently, it just is. The first time I purchased this I did so with a certain profound reverence. After that it  was everything I could muster to make this a menial task. It never has been.

Rice milk
Almond milk
Ground turkey, kosher

It’s cold out and I have to pull the zipper on my hoodie way up to keep warmth close to my chest, there are also feelings I’m tying up in there and I feel more secure, more protected with my armor all buttoned up.

Bread, sliced
Butter, salted

I walk with purpose into the store, eyes up and sure footed. Had you asked me why I was there that evening I might have replied “lunch items for my kids” or quoted you the price of tea in china…$1.84/25 bags. But I know the truth and I would have bet you knew it too. We can both see through my confident act.

Olive oil, extra virgin
Romaine, hearts

Back and forth through the fluorescence, the coupons calling to me, begging me to stray from my purpose. I hadn’t cared, the first time I read that word, I pretended not to read it again, but I hadn’t really cared and I kept telling myself that, hoping to eventually believe it.

Juicy juice, juice box
half & half

The normal internal dialogue has all but died, yesterday I would have silently asserted that the cookies in my cart are for my wife. Today you know what’s for who, today you see the mess of it all on my face, today there is no good explanation I can give to you or myself. It’s all too obvious.

Lunchmeat
Fruit

I couldn’t get them first, they would have sat alone in the center of my cart and called out to everyone I passed, having gotten them last creates the same effect but adds some altitude because they now sit upon an alter of groceries. Time slows, the checkout line, there is no refuge.

Gum
Mints

Our eyes met. I knew instantly where they belonged, that precious copy of GQ, my saviour. His starry eyes. I placed the blood sucker upon the box of blood suckers and was safe…

So as I ride away on the much easier to manage twitter I know that at some time in the future when I have less to deal with I’ll come back here and actually write something with more depth than 140 characters.

Thanks for understanding.

Anyway, soon enough we wanted to sing her ‘Oh My Darling’ but that song is about a little girl that drowns in a river. I thought singing her that song would be a little morbid so I kinda re-wrote it.

Oh My Darling as sung to my darling, Clementine.

In a canyon, in a cavern, excavating for a mine, dwelt a miner, 49er and his daughter, Clementine

Oh my darling, Oh my darling, Oh my darling Clementine,

I have loved you since I’ve known you, little darling, Clementine

I took you camping in the forest and we had the greatest time, we climbed trees and we chased bee’s and we sang the whole time

Oh my darling, Oh my darling, Oh my darling Clementine

How I love you little darling, precious darling, Clementine

Well we went walking on the beach and we had a real good time, we found rocks and we found shells and we danced in the foamy brine

Oh my darling, Oh my darling, Oh my darling Clementine

How I love you little darling, precious darling, Clementine

I took you skiing on a mountain and we had a chilly time, we had hot coco and some snow fights and cuddled close to warm our minds

Oh my darling, Oh my darling, Oh my darling Clementine

How I love you little darling, precious darling, Clementine

That’s as far as I ever got with it and it was kinda just made up on the spot. One day she’ll be horrified by the real version and I’ll have a lot of explaining to do. But that day is a long way off.

If we were to investigate some other massive corporations we would see easily that it is very rare, if ever, that any would act for the betterment of mankind.

For example, we could take McDonalds and posit that their objective is to feed people. This is false, if feeding people was their sole objective they surely would begin with serving nutritious food. They instead serve incredibly high caloric foodstuffs with very little or no nutritional value at as cheap a cost to them, in order to show their shareholders as big a return on their investments as possible.

I do not believe in the achievement of happiness through chemicals. I do not believe that these companies should be making life more comfortable by selling people drugs. I would sooner see cocaine and heroine legalized because at least there would be some honesty there.

“Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.” –Thoreau

Stress Testing the MOTHERS Act

by Kelly Patricia O’Meara:

It seems these days that everything is a test. Yes, the powers that be have decided that taxpayer benevolence now is contingent upon passing a stress test. But much to the dismay of those being tested, the results may reveal, for example, that the nation’s financial wizards and auto giants are actually bankrupt midgets and unworthy of America’s support.

Given that officialdom has embraced the stress test as a barometer of future viability and success and a determinant for public financing, it seems reasonable to request that other important issues that very personally impact the health and welfare of the American people be subjected to similar stress tests. There is none more deserving of stress testing than the proposed MOTHERS Act.

On the surface, the MOTHERS Act reflects its sponsors overwhelming compassion and empathy for women suffering from alleged mental health disorders resulting from childbirth – often referred to as Postpartum Depression. But when one conducts a brief stress test on important sections of the legislation, taxpayers may find that this costly and sweeping mental health legislation actually fails women of America, but goes a long way in inflating the balance sheets of one of the most lucrative industries in the nation – big Pharma.

For instance, the MOTHERS Act legislation that currently is pending in the U.S. Senate states that the Secretary of Health and Human Services may “make grants to eligible entities…” to deliver essential services to individuals with a postpartum condition. What the legislation doesn’t delineate is who and what entities may receive these grants. Are these “entities” funded by pharmaceutical companies?  Lawmakers have not specified what constitutes an “entity” so it will be impossible to know if there are conflicts of interest between those who develop the screening tools and conduct research and the pharmaceutical companies who most certainly will benefit financially from the increased diagnosing.

Furthermore, no research guidelines have been provided for public disclosure. This is no small issue, given that the Senate Finance Committee recently exposed the conflicts of interest of the top ten psychiatric researchers in the U.S. who had received millions of dollars in pharmaceutical funding. Where is the guarantee that the “entities” are not pharmaceutical front-men?

The legislation also allows for the “expansion and intensification of activities” into the research of Postpartum conditions and “evaluation of new treatments.” This is a humdinger. Despite ever-increasing published data and clinical studies challenging the safety of antidepressants and other antipsychotic drugs, there is no guidance provided by lawmakers to mandate that the public be made aware of the avalanche of scientific data that not only questions the efficacy of the drugs available to mothers suffering from these conditions, but also warning of the dangers associated with currently available “treatments.”

The section of the legislation dealing with expanding the research into the causes of Postpartum conditions is wholly void of any guidelines that insure the validity of the research conducted, and provides nothing in the way of public disclosure or peer-review of research before it is launched in education campaigns. In the real world, research is conducted and submitted for peer review. In this instance, it appears that Congress has learned nothing from the ongoing banking debacle and naively believes that the researchers will be on their best behavior – self-policing themselves. This is a dangerous omission in the legislation, especially since the Senate Finance Committee has exposed the serious conflicts of interest that exist between researchers and pharmaceutical companies.

Making matters worse, much of the legislation revolves around funding national education campaigns about Postpartum Depression, including Public Service Announcements and television and radio advertisements. Based on the current language of the legislation, research will be conducted without peer review – no checks and balances; no one to validate the integrity of the research which then will be used to determine a woman’s mental health status. Given that this research will be used to develop questions or tests for screening new mothers for possible mental disorders, one might find it important to know that the research has integrity and has been validated by the scientific community, free of pharmaceutical largesse. Congress apparently didn’t think integrity of the research is important and there are no provisions to protect women from pharmaceutical driven research.

Taxpayers may also expect that such important legislation would make provisions for some kind of oversight; some government entity that could provide feedback on the success or failure of this mental health campaign. One avenue that may help lawmakers’ determine if these new programs are working is the Food and Drug Administration’s MedWatch Adverse Event Reports. MedWatch collects information about people who have experienced adverse reactions to drugs overseen by the FDA. With the increased drugging that most certainly will occur with the increase in diagnosing, it seems logical that lawmakers would insert provisions in the legislation to annually review Adverse Event Reports collected by MedWatch, especially those relating to drugs prescribed in the treatment of Postpartum Depression. Unfortunately, because the nation’s lawmakers have provided no provisions for oversight, countless numbers of women may be harmed by the “treatments” but will be none the wiser because no protections were provided in the legislation.

There also is the very basic question of why the government is endorsing this sweeping mental health legislation and sanctioning a national advertising campaign about Postpartum Depression when there is no definitive data about the cause of the condition or that it is an objective confirmable abnormality – the scientific standard for disease. Given that there are so many unknowns in this legislation, it seems irresponsible to go forward without reasonable protections in place.

Congress must insure that all research and screening tests proposed and endorsed by this legislation be disclosed for peer-review and consumer input before implementing any screening tests and approving any research to be used in the national education campaign, including Public Service Announcements and radio and television advertising.

Given the documented risks related to the current modes of treatments, including antidepressant and antipsychotics, which are commonly prescribed for Postpartum Depression and documented to cause birth defects and host of other issues in pregnant and nursing mothers, Congress must include mandatory reviews of published research and clinical data on the drugs prescribed for the treatment of Postpartum Depression.

Finally, Congress must protect the integrity of the research by providing strict guidelines to insure that there are no conflicts of interest between the researcher and the pharmaceutical industry.

Without these safeguards, the MOTHERS Act cannot today, or ever, pass a stress test of viability and mothers and their children certainly will be on the losing end of this mental health campaign. Sometimes it’s in the best interest of the people for Congress NOT to act, and until our lawmakers are confident that all legislative precautions have been taken to insure optimum results, this is one of those times.

About the author:

Kelly Patricia O’Meara is an award-winning investigative journalist who authored more than two dozen articles examining the psychiatric pharmaceutical industry during her tenure at the Washington Times’ Insight Magazine. Her articles resulted in record sales of the issues in which they appeared and among the national and international press that have featured her articles are Fox News, the O’Reilly Factor, CBS News, BBC, ABC’s 20/20 and Hannity and Colmes. She is also the author of Psyched Out: How Psychiatry Sells Sickness and Pushes Pills that Kill. Prior to working as an investigative journalist, O’Meara spent sixteen years on Capitol Hill and was the lead investigator in several Congressional investigations. She holds a B.S. in Political Science from the University of Maryland.

Sitting here at Gate 2 waiting for the inevitably unbearable flight to commence.

In this entire terminal there is 1 bathroom. In this singular bathroom there are 5 toilets, 8 urinals and 4 sinks. There was a line coming out of it as I approached and I figured, hey I’m early, I’m gonna keep going past my gate and find a less busy place to take a shit… No such luck, no such luck at all. It seems the airport imagine that the dregs that fly on southwest will cop-a-squat and relieve themselves amongst the filth that they must be used to by now. I traversed the entire terminal in hopes of finding something clean, in hopes of finding something slightly less over run by the mob, in hopes of finding something even just two decibels quieter, a place where my bowel could relax and breathe out this brewing mess. I was not successful.

I am in a slightly more secure Greyhound bus station. Secure from physical threats and bombs hidden in shoes. However there is a chaos and psychosis here that seems terribly dangerous. 

I am in a Disney alley where people have saved for the year in hopes of blowing their nest eggs on a Mickey hat and churros.

I am stuck in a bad acid flashback but I cannot for the life of me remember taking acid and this horror is linked to no false joy that comes to mind.

The woman at security gave me a hard time about my hat and glasses, that I don’t have hair in the picture on my drivers license and finally that I had two tickets. When I explained that I’m a big guy and don’t fit in one seat she said, jokingly I thought, “you’re not that big.” This went back and forth until I realized she wasn’t kidding, it wasn’t a compliment, a nice way of saying “well for a lardass you look ok pal!”, but rather she wanted a different reason, an explanation for the extra seat. I finally told her I didn’t like to touch people I didn’t know. To this she rolled her eyes but gave me back my tickets and allowed me to pass.

Sartre describes in his play No Exit, Hell as other people - and I must say I suspect that he was on to something. 

My wife asks me why she so enjoys laughing at my pain? 

It’s human nature I think. Mostly there is the joy felt in witnessing the suffering of another because we can then gauge the non-suffering of ourselves or the reverse - we can relate to it and thus have a comrade in suffering. It’s an exchange of sorts. I suffer and you either realize that you are not suffering as bad and are relieved or you see that you are not alone in your sufferance and are also relieved. I get to vent, thus relieving my own pain and misery and hope that you as well are suffering or that you realize how bad I really have it. It’s an exchange. Reciprocity.

Delayed and delayed and delayed and Gate 2 becomes the nightmare, where before there was only potential. The stewardess that would normally take your ticket without looking at you and allow you to pass from place to plane has begun “song trivia” so as to subdue the forming mob, the crowd, the dregs, the masses…. I am trapped and my extra ticket doesn’t buy me an extra seat in the terminal. It will buy me a foot and a half of relief for two hours of hell and headaches and stiff backs.

The Australian boy has moved, changed seats 6 or seven times. I find him staring at me from a new area of the room every 5 or so minutes. There are no open seats anywhere and yet he seems to be constantly in a new one. I signed his “diary” right under the title “day 1.”. Perhaps he decided to give the diary a go after spotting me, it is noteworthy after all. Other good times to begin documenting your life, graduating from high school, getting married, first experience with pregnancy and hell if you haven’t started, meeting that fat guy from that one show that you vaguely recall, PERFECT DAY TO START A JOURNAL! He pleasantly moved on only to play musical chairs or perhaps it was all just in hopes of finding a better angle to view me.

A smallish Asian woman approached me asking if I was “Ethan?” She seemed meek and all things standard with smallish Asian women. However, upon my admittance of identity she became almost clown like in the way people from the Mid-West can sometimes seem. “I’m Nadeeens friend!!!!!” The American Mid-West smile and gesture is cartoonish in its expressiveness. She explained that she and her husband were on their way to Orlando, their stop in Albuquerque is just that, a stop, for a Disney cruise with her father, its his 70th birthday after all!!! “SO HE GOT TO PICK!!!!” And they would be doing this with her sister and her sister’s kids. There was some disdain for children expressed.  The husband did all of his “talking” to me while looking at his wife. I must say that as they announced, for the first time, that the flight was delayed I felt gratitude because these two demons decided to return to the bar for a sweet flight anesthetic.

My bowel is in a state. I fear standing.

Some time passes and the inevitable takes place.

Have you used a public restroom and felt like you needed to take a shower and scrub your entire body? Has it been worse than that? You feel like your clothes need to be washed and your shoes probably thrown away? It was worse even than that. Not only do I need to throw away my shoes, wash my clothes in ammonia and bleach and scrub and scrub and scrub the first 3 to 4 layers of skin right off my body, not only that, I am probably in dire need of antibiotics at this point. I would say with  93% honesty that I was wading through the muck and mire of physically and mentally diseased people. It was as though people had dropped trow and wantonly sprayed the bathroom down with fecal matter in an attempt at recreating a Jasper Johns. When satisfied with the shit visual they went to work on the floor. The standard “wet floor” sign that seems to be an airport men’s room must was only misleading because it had gone so far beyond the point of merely being “wet.” I mean would you call the Pacific Ocean “wet?” A yellow hazard sign with the word “swamp” in red would have been vastly more to the point.

And so here I sit contemplating staph and the clap and also any mental defects, for if it was present in there, I’m sure I got it…

THANKS, but NO THANKS