quote:

Originally posted by fjp451:
Here is a quaint book that may offer some introspective light and allow for that sense of personal importance everyone needs to experience daily so as to remain safe and healthy.
f

http://books.google.com/books?...#v=onepage&q&f=false

Thanks for the advice, and for acknowledging I have been experiencing a terrible sense of threat and danger, justified or not.

One of the first red flags on the newsgroup was a user who emailed me (about three times before I blocked her) wanting me to
a) read posts from before I came on to see how the group "should" be
b) start my own group

a) I have no interest in taking the It's a Wonderful Life treatment. Sure, it worked for George Bailey, but there are good trips and bad trips. My idea of a bad trip is seeing that the world is not one bit different without me and may even be better. This is not something I have any need or desire to know and in fact will go to lengths to avoid.
b) If I wanted to sit and talk to myself with no response, I could do that at home with word processing. Why would I go online and start a group?

Now luckily, right after this, someone did start another group, and as it turned out, me, her, and my other friend who had problems there, are not the only ones on there--there are about twenty members now and three times that many on the Facebook groups. (I don't know if the other group has acknowledged this or sees us as anything other than silly idiots with schoolgirl crushes.) I thought, great, I can put my more enthusiastic posts on the one Yahoo group and Facebook groups and keep factual questions to the other. Trouble is, they even got hostile to my factual questions, and shoved me off with this, the last message I received (December 31) from the one moderator who would answer before stopping acknowledging me, "Go enjoy busterplus, which was created just for you and is there for you. Please try to see the positive here and not the negative."

1. Doesn't even spell Buster Plus right.
2. It was not created just for me and does not exist as some sort of leper colony to keep me away from the others! The person who started it had intended to create it for some time. I told her to tell them this and she says she did.
3. "Please try to see the positive here and not the negative"--Oh, get real! I begged repeatedly for the listowners to see the positive side of my sincere interest, acknowledge the things I did right, and not take the part of those who were against me. Their only response was that others were bitching and they must be right. My rights don't count for anything in this world.

So the problem is what might be termed minor PTSD (minor in that it is not totally debilitating in every respect.) Every time I hear to "enjoy" anything, even as innocuous as good weather, I cringe and have a flashback, all the time thinking, it would be one thing if they really meant it, but they do not wish for me to enjoy anything, even weather, they want for me to crawl into a hole and die in agonies. This makes me very nervous and difficult to concentrate. The other phrase I keep flashing back on was posted by one of the Connellsville kids, I'm not going to repeat it as I said it didn't belong on this board, but you guys know the one.

It might be different if other things were going extraordinarily well, but they're not.

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Still very sad and upset.

As far as Buster goes, I feel I was being punished for

1) Liking the same thing these others claim to like. Story of my life. Anything was always okay for everyone else, but not if I tried to do it. Even if it was something as innocent as tossing a ball around, as soon as I got into it, there'd always be one kid who'd say, "Hey, who said you could play?" Only time it was all right for me to like something was if no one else liked it, then I had no one to talk with about it.

2. Enthusiastic expression of honest feelings. It was the first time I even felt good (as in out of pain) for nearly a year--WHY were people in such a hurry to end it for me? (Still can't shake the feeling that torturing me is an actual goal for some people and the people who mean me well can't prevent it.)

3. Feel guilty because I can't get it back. Remember Ray's famous Buck Rogers story. He liked Buck as much after he restarted collecting the comics, perhaps even more from having nearly lost and reclaimed him. I think on some level I actually do like Buster as much, but now that I've come to associate him with pain and reprimands it is interfering.

By the way, what certain high school students said regarding my devotion to Ray did not change my feelings to him, but I have winced over it practically every day since then. I can't change what they said or the glaring fact that I don't have a really great comeback to it.

4. Everything else is going to hell in a handbasket. Everyone is dying and I can't do a thing about it. I am very upset that Jonathan Frid is dead and I never got to express to him that he was the first person ever to inspire me to write and draw stories based on his character. I did try to write him a fan letter once, but it was in between the time he went into and came back out of retirement so don't know if he ever got it--also by then I was starting to be cautious about expressing enthusiasm to anyone living in case they might put me down. (But from what I've heard of him don't think he would have.)

5. Pretty soon I will be too old, and too depressed, to take any interest in anything--why try to ruin the few last things I will be able to enjoy?

I am simply losing my grip one finger at a time and despair of anything being done about it. If the cataclysm arrives in December as predicted these problems will seem as nothing (maybe part of what's worrying me.)

quote:

Originally posted by dandelion:
If the cataclysm arrives in December as predicted these problems will seem as nothing (maybe part of what's worrying me.)

There's a cataclysm coming in December?!

quote:

Originally posted by Doug Spaulding:

quote:

Originally posted by dandelion:
If the cataclysm arrives in December as predicted these problems will seem as nothing (maybe part of what's worrying me.)

There's a cataclysm coming in December?!

You mean they haven't informed you? You are behind the times, my friend...far, far behind.

quote:

Originally posted by dandelion:
You mean they haven't informed you? You are behind the times, my friend...far, far behind.

I gotta get out more.

If there's a cataclysm coming, better to stay inside! Hide under the table!

You will need at least a cellar...and possibly flotational devices...so make sure your cellar has a good way out!

quote:

Originally posted by philnic:
Hide under the table!

I thought that was for an earthquake. Or was it a door arch? Sigh - I'm so unprepared.

The "under-your-desk" technique has been long in use:

c. 1950's http://eriniseclectic.files.wo..._war_school_desk.jpg

21st century http://www.sfgate.com/blogs/im...nderDesk2350x287.jpg

Yeah, I was going to ask Phil if those old "Duck and Cover" Civil Defense films made it to England, or if only Americans were so silly.

We didn't have "Duck and Cover" (although they are quite well known, having been shown on TV in documentaries and clip shows). What we DID have during the darkest days of the Thatcher-Reagan years was "Protect and Survive": the British public were to be advised (in the event of an all-out nuclear war) to make a refuge out of a door and hideout until the radiation had faded away. I don't think we were meant to ever see these films until the apocalypse, but scratchy film copies were leaked and endlessly mocked.

Shocking but ridiculous at the same time. Examples here:

http://nationalarchives.gov.uk...mpage_casualties.htm

quote:

Originally posted by Doug Spaulding:
...I thought that was for an earthquake. Or was it a door arch? Sigh - I'm so unprepared.

As you're on the left coast these days, I would have thought you'd have the earthquake thing thoroughly worked out. It's not a question of "if", you know; it's a question of "when"!

(When I went to Tokyo last year, I stayed in a hotel about 8 stories up. We had a minor earthquake in the middle of the night, of a type they have in Tokyo about once a week. I had always expected an earthquake to rumble or to shake me up and down - but the Tokyo buildings are designed to cope with the tremors, and I found the hotel room gently sliding from side to side. It was like being on a water bed. But I wouldn't want to be there when The Big One hits. Or when Gojira rises up out of Tokyo bay.)

quote:

Originally posted by philnic:

quote:

Originally posted by Doug Spaulding:
...I thought that was for an earthquake. Or was it a door arch? Sigh - I'm so unprepared.

As you're on the left coast these days, I would have thought you'd have the earthquake thing thoroughly worked out. It's not a question of "if", you know; it's a question of "when"!

(When I went to Tokyo last year, I stayed in a hotel about 8 stories up. We had a minor earthquake in the middle of the night, of a type they have in Tokyo about once a week. I had always expected an earthquake to rumble or to shake me up and down - but the Tokyo buildings are designed to cope with the tremors, and I found the hotel room gently sliding from side to side. It was like being on a water bed. But I wouldn't want to be there when The Big One hits. Or when Gojira rises up out of Tokyo bay.)

I've been in so few here, and the largest was a gentle rolling. For a moment I thought a large truck was idling nearby.

I found Florida hurricanes far worse! And far more often.

"...for more powerful, more beautiful by far than all the eons of sadness and cruelty and desolation which had come before, was that one, tiny, crystalline second of laughter. 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.'"

End of The Little Drummer Boy (1968), written by the late, and great, Mr. Romeo Muller, which never fails to raise a tear.

Thank you, Mr. Keaton, for being the most beautiful (mortal) creature God ever put on this earth (baby Jesus excepted.) No matter what, they can't take that away from me!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: dandelion,

Well, I came out to you guys about the Asperger's Syndrome so you might as well know about the other thing. For years I thought I had Clinical Depression but now that I've read up on it I believe I have what's called Chronic Depression or Dysthymia. That means I feel crummy most of the time and the times I feel good are the exceptions, not the rule, to the point where feeling good is abnormal and something to really note. By "chronic" I mean this became a permanent condition sometime around 1970.

I've tried to sustain the good mood when it happens but always end up being reprimanded for being overenthusiastic or something. That's what got me in severe trouble the last three times (2006, 2007, and 2011.) Buster startled me into feeling good for two whole months. It might have lasted longer had someone not thrown a cold, hard bucket of cruel reality on me, which someone always does, but anyway it served to vividly highlight my usual state of mind. Just before discovering Buster in October it had lasted so long and gotten so bad I came to a conscious realization that I was just going to have to learn to live with it as it wasn't going to get better. Then I was so shocked by its getting better I wanted to share it with people interested in the same thing, who of course were the first ones to go on the attack. Someone always has to take it upon themselves to let me know I don't "belong," that I am not as "good" as everyone else there and must be shunned. Now, every time someone "ducks" me like this, I go under, and then I come back to the surface, but the trouble is the surface is of freezing water--when I want to be out of the water and in a warm, cozy place.

This was always the way when I was a kid, I was never allowed to "stay happy" and it didn't "just happen" that it stopped, someone always felt called upon to do something to stop it--presumably to let me know how hopeless I was and that I should "shape up" and not feel happy as I hadn't "earned" it. (See John Prine's song "Illegal Smile." A lot of people didn't "get" the song and thought the "illegal" part referred to drug use. I totally get that song.) I really need Ray's "demon not afraid of happiness." The only thing that worked to some extent was the decision, at age 10, to become a world famous author. (When I say "world famous," A. A. Milne was the first example I used--this was a couple of years before I discovered Ray.) I really believed this and every time I thought of it I felt better. I did this in 1971. At the time it seemed a kid's high career goal. Now to me it looks like sheer self-defense against the steady stream of attacks against my existence which are so constant they pretty well comprise my existence.

I've never had a "major depressive episode" in the sense that I've heard of people just taking to bed and staring at the ceiling and I've never gone that far, but I've always been an "optimistic depressive," in feeling that something had to break the cycle and that I or something else would bring it about. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate people's attempts to cheer me up, but as for setting me on a completely different course, that only seems to work for the bad stuff as I can't sustain a good mood long enough to accomplish anything.

Anyhow, I do feel a major depressive episode coming on and short of a miracle no way to offset it or ward it off. Last night I dreamed I was on board the Titanic. The dream was extremely long and as detailed as the James Cameron film, but none of the characters or events were from the film, it was all original. I hadn't got into a lifeboat or even gotten a life belt, and I knew that anyone who stayed on the ship was going straight to the bottom. I found this thing that would float, it had small holes and was a crappy excuse even for a kid's toy in a wading pool. I couldn't find any new tape and was trying to stick it together with old used tape. This big scary dude came in and tried to take it from me, but I got away. Anyhow, long story short (and it was long) I knew if I stayed on the ship I was doomed, but if I jumped in the water it was a long way down and I was probably also doomed. I looked far down into the water and everyone I saw there was already dead or at least limp. So in the end I stayed on the ship.

I'll close with my favorite little quote from Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe:

"What was the matter?" said Ben, scowling at him. "Did the other boys make fun of you?"

"Yes," said Eugene, in a low voice.

"Why did they? You mean they didn't think you were good enough for them? Did they look down on you? Was that it?" said Ben savagely.

"No," said Eugene, very red in the face. "No. That had nothing to do with it. I look funny, I suppose. I looked funny to them."

"What do you mean you look funny?" said Ben pugnaciously. "There's nothing wrong with you, you know, if you didn't go around looking
like a bum. In God's name," he exclaimed angrily, "when did you get that hair cut last? What do you think you are: the Wild Man
from Borneo?"

"I don't like barbers!" Eugene burst out furiously. "That's why! I don't want them to go sticking their damned dirty fingers in my
mouth. Whose business is it, if I never get my hair cut?"

"A man is judged by his appearance to-day," said Ben sententiously. "I was reading an article by a big business man in The Post the other day. He says he always looks at a man's shoes before he gives him a job."

He spoke seriously, haltingly, in the same way that he read, without genuine conviction. Eugene writhed to hear his fierce condor prattle this stale hash of the canny millionaires, like any obedient parrot in a teller's cage. Ben's voice had a dull flat quality as he uttered these admirable opinions: he seemed to grope
behind it all for some answer, with hurt puzzled eyes. As he faltered along, with scowling intensity, through a success-sermon, there was something poignantly moving in his effort: it was the effort of his strange and lonely spirit to find some entrance into life--to find success, position, companionship. And it was as if, spelling the words out with his mouth, a settler in the Bronx from the fat Lombard plain, should try to unriddle the new world by
deciphering the World Almanac, or as if some woodsman, trapped by the winter, and wasted by an obscure and terrible disease, should hunt its symptoms and its cure in a book of Household Remedies.

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