Year of the Rant. Part Three: Spring Loaded, Spring, 2013

By Lachlan Barker

This is the third collection of posts taken from Lachlan's blog.
The ranting continues, with increasing heat.
Spring is normally the time of renewal and relief.
There's none to be found here!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lachlan Barker
• Release date: Apr 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310840166

Lachlan Barker

Lachlan Barker is an author who lives in Byron Bay, Australia.When not constantly complaining on the internet, he surfs, cycles or works as a gardener.He entered rehab for booze and pot in 2008 and hasn't looked back since.He has been on every continent except South America and Antarctica, and they're next.

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Year of the Rant

Part Three: Spring Loaded

Spring, 2013.

By Lachlan Barker

Copyright 2014 by Lachlan Barker

Smashwords Edition

With thanks to all those who continue to read this rubbish weekly.

Contents

1 - Machine Gunning Gnats

2 - Collingwood, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways

3 - Let me park the yurt and I'll come right in

4 - Filthy lucre

5 - Even filthier advertising

6 - I live in paradise, but I still love a good whinge

7 - A funny man with a dirty surfboard

8 - Superchicken and the Utopia complex

9 - Well this is how 'I' think you should run your network

10 - Isn't it time that John Howard shut up?

11 - There is no news today - except how F%*^ing bad Independence Day was

12 - Showers contracting to the north-east corner

13 - Well, why'd you bloody ask then?

About the Author

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Read the first chapter of Lachlan’s first fiction work – The Destruction of Lasseter’s Road

1 – Machine Gunning Gnats

These shallots seemed happy, they started flowering.

Henry David Thoreau's famous quote is the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Thoreau wrote these words in 1854, and the sentiment is still relevant today.

Together we can paraphrase it to the mass of people to include everyone, but again the essence is there.

When, as I am constantly told to, we compare our lot with those in the third world, we certainly would seem to have the fixings for happiness, yet we in the overfed and apparently overpaid first world are constantly unhappy and perennially running to our therapist moaning about our lot.

This seems to be mostly to do with money, and is best put by Doug Adams.

"This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.

Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

I as you know am perpetually crying poor, yet on a world scale I am well off.

My friend Lloyd, now sadly dead, gave it his spin by saying whatever you earn, you spend.

And it was certainly true that even when I was living in the corporate world of Sydney and earning six figures, I still had to go through the pockets of my pants on Sunday night, scrabbling up gold coins, to pay for pizza.

To counterpoint this, P.J.O'Rourke points out that by having money and using it to make our lives more comfortable, we are living longer.

So is money, or our perceived lack thereof, the cause of our general society-wide, unhappiness?

Well it's unquestionably a factor, it certainly stresses me out when I hear a new noise from the car and immediately jump to the conclusion that the head gasket is going and how god damn much is this gonna cost me?

But then a friend of Lloyd's and myself, Mark, has this philosophy, Are you gonna die today? No, then things aren't that bad.

So what's the point of all this?

Well this morning I am very depressed, and I am not sure why.

Previously I reported being unhappy because I was working too hard.

Well today I have a day off.

Sometimes I am anxious and can't park the car on a hill in case it rolls away and gets damaged, well I can see my car from where I type this and it is completely intact.

I didn't drink heavily, or indeed at all, last night, or smoke any pot, so there is no chemical cause for a Monday depression.

What then is going on?

Some of the greatest minds have tried to describe depression and failed miserably, not because they were bad writers or ignorant of the problem, but simply because..., well already we are in the hopeless mire of trying to talk about depression.

I once asked Paula, my wonderfully knowledgeable therapist if she knew what depression was, and she replied, the whole mind itself is still a mystery.

Thus a small component of a malfunctioning mind is enigmatic to say the least.

However JFK once said of the space race, we don't do this because it is easy, but because it is hard.

So now I am going to add my name to the list of those who have tried and failed to describe depression.

It helps me to write about it, and it may help someone out there who has always wondered if they are down or are indeed, depressed.

I'll start with something I heard on QI, which was; studies have shown that we all have a resting state of happiness.

The example was of two people, one wins the lottery and has more money than they know what to do with and the other is involved in a car accident and is paralysed.

To my considerable surprise, the studies showed that after some time, both these people move back to the approximate level of happiness they inhabited before these events.

Thus the lottery winner, after some months of partying, paying off the mortgage and buying Ferraris, went back to having the same worries as before, and likewise the other, now wheelchair-bound, subject of the study, began to once again concern themself with going grocery shopping and finding a park and whether their children's school was preparing their offspring adequately for the adult world.

Which I found fascinating as my immediate thought would be that both these events would change their lives forever, but, apparently not.

Thus it seems our resting levels of happiness are set in our adolescence, and therefore god help us all, as we all know of the turbulent hormone-fuelled chaos this period of our lives can be.

My primary thought about how to tell if you have depression is if it's mysterious.

That is, if something happens, e.g. the death of a loved one, you will be unhappy, and justifiably so.

Bad as this is, you can hang your low feelings on a readily discernible cause.

But even then it hardly clarifies things because we all know of people who never get over it.

So although a particular event led to someone being down, if said event happened twenty years ago, is the person still justified in being down, or are they, to quote one of the zarking arseholes who parades around under the title of mental health worker, just wallowing in it?

Again, we can't know.

Stephanie Dowrick wrote that depression doesn't cause suicide.

She clarifies by saying that, when a person despairs that their depression is eternal, and then they commit suicide.

To illustrate that she writes: If at some point in your young life a psychological arbiter of some kind visits you and says that you will suffer 800 hours of loneliness in your life, that wouldn't be great, but the upside is that like a prison sentence, you know when it will end.

The problem we all face with loneliness, depression and despair, is that when you are in it, your immediate thought is that this is how I will feel for the rest of my life.

One of the factors in teen suicide I have no doubt, with many a teenager starting to think that they faced sixty more years of this, and couldn't take the pain.

And my main feeling of depression is of a paradoxical world, where nothing, just nothing made sense, and every single thought was diametrically conflicted by the thought immediately after it.

When I was in bed, I didn't want to get up, once awake I never wanted to go to