The Maroon Diaries

I had plans to spend New Year's Eve the same way I usually do, keeping out of the heat as much as possible, and writing up my Year in Books blog post. But something very dramatic happened that changed not just the day's plans, but an awful lot of my life. Around 4:30 am on December 31st, 2016, I found Mr CJ dead in the garden. This is the story of how that came to be. Followers of this blog will have noticed that I've spent the last several years as a carer for Mr CJ. He had been sick for seven and half years, slowly declining all that time. It started with a headache that wouldn't go away, no matter what. Some months of hospitals and testing later, it was discovered that he had arthritis in his neck, featuring a growth spur that was pressing on the nerves as they exited the spinal column at that point. That meant chronic pain in his head, neck, arms and shoulders, limited mobility in his arms and hands, and reduced sensitivity in fingers that limited his dexterity....

Our Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, wants to cut the national spending on the Disability Support Pension. And fair enough. We're expensive, us sick people. I have no idea how much money the government has spent so far on keeping me alive, but I reckon if I knew the actual figure, even I would find it offensive. It's not just the sick people that are too expensive. He's cutting spending all across the welfare and housing sectors, and making it more expensive to get health care or tertiary education. The nation is in debt and in need. We all have to do our bit. For example, as of next year, people under 30 will not be able to receive any unemployment benefits until they show they have been looking for a job for six months. So if you're in your 20's, and you're on a low wage, you probably don't have much in the way of savings. If you lose your job, or you get bullied and abused at work and can't cope with it, or you get sick and can't get to a doctor a...

It's often not good for me to read books that are detailed descriptions of other people's mental illness. I'm glad that people are writing and publishing this stuff, it's vital for raising awareness in the wider community. But I find it difficult to immerse myself in such a book, to really go there along with the author. It just reminds me that I'm mad too, and of the suffering it causes in my life and others, and brings all that sensitive stuff up to the surface. I really appreciated this comment in this review on Readings - While I would suggest that this is perhaps not the book for those who are currently suffering deeply from mental illness themselves, it would serve as an invaluable resource for the people who work with and care for them. So when I found Madness: A Memoir by Kate Richards in the library I wasn't sure I really wanted to read it. But there was one particular detail here that made me really want to try to read this book - the fact th...

It's a long, hot day. There's been a lot of these lately; it's that time of year. I've had a certain song stuck in my head lately, just because it's called 'One Long Day.' The Summer. Sometimes that word sounds like a prison sentence to me. This is a hard time for me, every year. I don't cope well with the heat. I can't stand the bright sunshine. On days like these, I just have to stay indoors, and stay still as much as possible. If I move around too much on a hot day, that's enough to get overheated and feel terribly sick. So I spend most of these long hot days lying on my bed with the fan on, napping or reading or doing puzzles. I've certainly been getting through a lot of reading lately. Several excellent books have helped make the days fun and exciting, as long as I stay in the book. Then the sun goes down, and it gets cool, and I am reprieved of my sentence once more, until dawn. I can breathe again, I can move again. I have ...

I've noticed that there's a bit of a theme that, when I encounter when reading blogs, fires my anger right up, and I fire off comments in the heat of the moment. And I figure, if there's all that energy there that is going into other people's comments spaces, I should take that energy and focus it on my own blog. The theme is around psychiatrists and the mental health system and how they treat their patients. I don't like it. I don't like it a bit. When making generalisations, I think it's important to be clear about the nature of generalisations, and that is, of course, that they don't fit every situation or individual. There are always abundant exceptions to a generalisation. And so I would expect, even though as a generalisation, I don't like psychiatrists, that I would meet one along the way who was actually quite unobjectionable, or at least that I would know of someone who could tell me, 'Hey, I know this bloke who's a psychiatris...

I got a new tattoo a little while ago, inside my left forearm. It was pretty damn exciting. It's been fifteen years since I last got a new tattoo. This tattoo is a little different to most, in that it has a very practical function. It's a medical alert tattoo. People have been telling me for years that I really should get one of those medical ID bracelets, but I was not at all attracted to the idea. I don't like to wear much jewellery at all except for dress-ups. I find it so annoying and fiddly to have bits of metal or whatever dangling off my person. And they only end up broken or lost and have to be replaced. No, I couldn't put up with it. But then I happened to hear about the relatively recent phenomenon of medical alert tattoos. And I do love tattoos.  So I looked into it. When I started to come across more and more anecdotal evidence that suggested that the people most likely to get a medical alert tattoo are paramedics and ER workers, I was convinced. I ...

I'll measure it for you. Just one room, 3.7m by 4.9m, and 3.9m by 2.4m of verandah space, for the two of us. And miles and miles of bushland outside and beyond. It's a considerable downsize from my previous home, a two-storey, two-bedroom townhouse. It's been a long journey to my new tiny home, which began, rather bizarrely, with getting hooked on an American reality TV program. It was Hoarders , and it was really horrible television, on a really ugly subject, but I was fascinated with this tragic side effect of our culture of consumption - a disorder caused by affluence. I was a bit surprised with myself for getting into a reality TV show, but even more surprised to realise, as I watched more episodes, just how closely I identified with these people on the show, these people who had a hoarding disorder. How much I understood exactly what they were talking about. How very closely they were describing the way I felt about possessions. How very easily I could become one...

How many times a day do you see some advertising in all our varied forms of media that is really stupid at best, or horribly offensive at worst? Probably really quite often, unless you live in a cave in Outer Mongolia. How often do you speak out and try to do something about it? Probably not very often. You might have tried once or twice and become discouraged at how hard it is to find someone responsible for the ad to listen to you. Or maybe you're just so overwhelmed by the enormity of this issue and don't know where to start. I want to give a HUGE congratulations and thank-you-for-fighting-the-good fight to Lucy from the wonderful blog Lulastic and the Hippyshake for her her fantastic response to an incredibly stupid AND horribly offensive ad for Weetabix in the UK. Bonus points for sending Barbie through the mail. Really, have a look, it's gorgeous. I must admit, only twice have I ever bothered to actually put my outrage into a formal complaint. The first time was...

1. Suffer miserably through another record-breaking heatwave. Climate change? - well isn't is obvious ? 2. Wake up after the cool change has come through and have a meltdown, because it's so much easier to have a breakdown about something after the fact, rather than while you're busy coping with it. 3. Try to take it easy but end up feeling sick with over-exhaustion by evening. Become driven to distraction by a powerful craving for something , only you don't know what it is. Something to do with nutrients that the heat sucks out of you. 4. Go through every item in the kitchen, looking for whatever it is that you don't know what it is yet. Find a bag of frozen blueberries in the freezer. Oh, that's it. Or close enough. 5. Wonder what goes with blueberries while they are defrosting. Go through the kitchen again and come up with yoghurt, honey and linseed-sunflower-almond meal. Mix them together in a bowl. 6. Hmm. We're getting there, but it's not...