To my mind, the short answer to the question posed in the title of this post is a short and resounding yes!
However, apparently much of the science says otherwise: ‘Fundamentally, the idea of a general addictive personality is a myth. Research finds no universal character traits that are common to all addicted people.’ [1]
Anyway, I’ve suddenly collapsed into a near vegetative state of depression, over the last few months. Some of the reasons are perennial (lack of money), others more singular (least said, soonest mended).
Amidst all of this, I’ve relapsed into few behaviours (I’m sounding like an amateur naturist, er… naturalist, now) that seem, outwardly, very aulde. One of the common denominators to all these behaviours, is addiction.
And some of the things that characterise the kind of addiction I’m talking about: firstly they compel one to act in ways one knows are foolish and high risk, and two, there’s a kind of hollow joylessness to whatever the indulgence might me.
On that latter point, it has to be said that things aren’t really as cut and dried as that idea might imply. Pleasure can be and is taken in the addictive behaviours. But there’s an underlying sense, sometimes even when unquestionably enjoying the addictive behaviour, that one is acting foolishly.
Why should it be this way? And what makes certain things so compelling that they hijack one’s better judgement? This post isn’t an attempt to really answer such questions. In truth it’s more the sudden realisation that I’ve got some possible addiction ‘issues’ I need to acknowledge and work on.
Looking at all the textual images in this post, which I pulled from the Google image search results for ‘addictive personality’, they almost all apply. Perhaps unsurprisingly?
I’d say that for me there are two or three chief drivers when it comes to most of my addictions: pleasure, relaxation and escape. And the leaning into these behaviours is exacerbated in times of high stress – such as presently – by the desire to reduce or mitigate it.
I like to use my blog as a somewhat candid journal. But it’s neither an outright confessional, nor the best place to air dirty laundry that might best be addressed professionally.
On this last topic, however, I feel I’m being let down in a pretty big way, by the alphabet soup of acronym-heavy mental-health organisations I’ve been alerted to. It’s all pillar to post Groundhog Day assessments, and nary any actual support!
Whisky…
Having inferred above that here is not the place to go into the gory details of specific addictions, I will use one relatively innocuous seeming but actually very insidious example, namely spending.
My re-formulation of Descartes famous dictum, for our times, runs thus ‘I spend therefore I am’. One of histories’ greatest dictators, the unholy axis of capitalism and materialism, has marched into and annexed almost every conceivable aspect of modern life.
And I will often attempt to spend my way out of obscurity and depression with anything from a Gregg’s pizza slice to a book, CD, clothes or shoes.
Anything pleasurable is a form of therapy right now. Model making and little toy soldiers are, on and off, areas of hobbying that I have enjoyed.
I have a ’mini-military’ blog called AQOS (link!). But I’ve kind of petered out posting on there. Partly ‘cause of tech and software issues, and partly just going completely off the boil on that front.
I’m thinking I might concentrate all my blogging in the one place, here. But I’m at a loss how to manage or incorporate the various strands.
Having yet another very rough episode of psychological weather. We were at my sister’s again this weekend. And for the first time my depression was so intense it confined me to the bedroom, and stopped me interacting much with family.
Fortunately Teresa was their to ‘carry the weight’. And dad, bless ‘im, also stepped in, bringing over lunch for everyone, and hanging with Sofi and Ali through a marathon game of (Spanish!) Monopoly!
Not the most exciting book cover!*
[* But a pretty amazing book, in terms of the actual content. Part of a series by i Fabre, of which I currently have three out of four.]
I’d taken a book on Picasso, an Airfix model (1/76 88mm gun and half-track!), and was mostly watching snooker, or sleeping/trying to sleep.
A 1967 tooling, marketed as a Vintage Classic!
Snooker is one of my chief therapies right now. It’s also something bordering, I suppose, on addiction or compulsion. I particularly love the longer games (19+ is a minimum, ideally, but 25-30+ frames? Even better!), like the semis and finals of the World Championship.
Over Friday and Saturday I watched the intense 2022 World Championship Final. O’Sullivan was beating Trump mercilessly, initially. Trump fought back. But ultimately, whilst it was a bit one-sided, with O’Sullivan dominant overall. Nevertheless, it was still a great match, and an interesting watch.
The end was pretty weird, esp’ so in our buttoned-up conservative British culture. When O’Sullivan clinched the deciding frame, equalling Stephen Hendry’s record of seven wins, he went over to Trump, locking him in a close embrace.
It was clear they were talking to each other, as well. It struck a lot of people, myself included, as rather awkward… almost sexual!? I think that’s a sign of how appallingly neutered our outward emotional lives are.
Remember is a track that’s always spoken to my heart’n’soul, if you know what I mean? I’m not entirely sure why. I guess I might think ‘bout that over the course of this post.
It’s the fifth track on Tide, Jobim’s sixth solo album, recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s legendary studio, and released on A&M in 1970.
Tide itself is interesting, to me at least, for numerous reasons. For example, it has only one of his most famous tracks, opening with The Girl From Ipanema. The remainder are all lesser known.
Right from the first time I heard this album, Remember was my favourite track. There are, I think, several reasons why. First of all it grooves hard, in my opinion. It even has a certain funkiness to it. Not in an obviously JB type way, perhaps. But, well…
The rhythm section – and this track is basically just rhythm section, with only a very light smattering of melody – is brilliant. Jobim is on various keys, including, quite unusually, electric (sounding like a Rhodes or Wurli’?). We’ll come back to his keys playing in a mo’, as it’s, ummm… key to the feel of the track.
Then there’s Ron Carter on bass, Joao Palma on drums, and Everaldo Ferreira on congas. Airto Moreira is credited on percussion for the album as a whole, but I don’t hear him on this number. Carter is an absolute jazz giant, of course. Most famous for his stint in the Hancock/Shorter/Williams Miles quintet. And Moreira successfully crossed over Stateside, getting into the jazz and studio scenes.
A young Joao Palma.
João Palma was a legend in Brazil, and was still playing until he passed away, quite recently. Ferreira might still be playing (I found him – or at least a conguero of the same name – playing some street music on YouTube!). But they’re less known to music lovers outside Brazil, except perhaps the odd devotee.
As a unit they drive the pretty brisk and quite harmonically dense music along with a deft lightness of touch that is simultaneously energetic and laid back. A staple of the ‘samba jazz’ feel, but quite a feat, as you would know if you’ve tried it.
Now we come to Jobim’s playing. It’s totally in the Goldilocks zone. For me at least. Neither too much, nor too little. Just the absolutely perfect balance. And the various sections fall into a few different categories.
What I mean by that is that, after a ten bar intro, with an inverted pedal – a frequent Jobim ploy, the melody atop the chords staying on just one or two notes, as the chords shift underneath – we get very similar 12 bar cycles, all progressing with very similar harmonic/melodic logic, and yet all subtly different.
As a drummer, primarily, and almost entirely self-taught, with little to no academic grounding in music theory whatsoever, I’m probably going to embarrass myself now, by not knowing the correct terminology. But maybe someone in the know will read this and enlighten me?
So, as noted, we start with a 10 bar intro, the top note hanging on a B throughout, as the chords move about underneath. This type of section recurs throughout the piece, including immediately after the first iteration, but in a longer 12 bar form, and with a differing (but from this point on very similar) set of chords anchoring it. Sometimes the top note is the same B as the intro, at other times it’s a lower F.
My workings, from piano to guitar.
These sections are predominantly chordal, and very, very rhythmic. The chord voicings are quite ‘dense’. Easier to achieve on a keyboard than on a guitar (Jobim played both beautifully, oh, and flute!). But on this number it’s all keys and no guitar. Part of my fascination for Remember lies in my desire to do it on guitar! Very minimal and subtle use is made of notes occasionally moving slightly out of sync with the main ‘blocked’ chords.
Then there are the melody sections. Apart from the intro and bridge or middle-eight these follow the very similar sets of chords that form most of the piece. Again, these are 12 bars long. But then there’s the quite chirpy middle-eight (or 16, if we’re being exact), an eight bar section that’s repeated with slightly differing first and second time endings. These are the most song-like parts of this piece.
Unlike many of Jobim’s best known tunes, like Ipanema, Desafinado, One Note Samba, etc, but actually quite typical within his greater body of work, almost every iteration of any given section is very deliberately and very specifically voiced, all slightly differently, albeit very closely linked and always resolving to the same final G6 chord.
I do want to learn to play this number on keys at some point. But my first port of call is the guitar. It’s what I know best, after drums. Plus I think a guitar version could be a nice and different take on what is very much a keyboard piece.
I got the score from an absolutely superb Tom centred website, which has most of not all of his music really well written out for piano. Turning the piano chords into guitar versions that keep the feel of the original is, at least for me, a real challenge. Working from the chord names I start by using an online tool like jguitar.com’s chord finder/creator.
I also frequently use ASD, Amazing Slow Downer, a great software tool, to help me clarify what I’m hearing. With this pretty pacey tune, it was absolutely essential! Certain segments came together relatively quickly and easily, such as the 10-bar intro and the 12-bar sequence that immediately follows it. But others were – and indeed still are – a real mother!
The melody lead parts were the easiest, as working from the beautifully accurate piano chords quickly lead me to appropriate guitar chords. As and when I come to record a version of Remember, I will be incorporating the melody, most likely as a separate voice. But for the ‘fixed note’ sections – or inverted pedal parts (the notes are atop the chords!) – the fairly stationary ‘melody’ is integral to the chords.
As already noted, some of these came together very quickly, others, in particular iteration #(?), or bars ??-??, were extremely challenging. This comes out of the fact that densely voiced chords, easy on keys, can be near impossible on guitar, depending on exactly which notes are concerned.
The fact that the topography of the guitar neck forces one to relocate certain notes to differently pitched positions really alters the sound and feel, and even the ‘width’ or ‘depth’, of the chords. Tricky!
Anyway, I’ve created a chord sheet – actually still a work in progress – for Remember. And the bulk of it is, I’m happy to say, quite satisfactory to me. There is one troublesome segment, already alluded to above. And I’m still working hard to complete that in a satisfactory manner.
And then there’s actually playing it on guitar competently. That also is very much a work in progress! The original is a brisk 183bpm, or thereabouts. If I do get around to doing a guitar based recording – and I very much hope I will – I might opt to take the pace down a little, perhaps even as far as 170-5? We shall see!
One issue is that pesky progression that’s harder than the others – oh, and the middle 8/16 – as both have one or two chord progressions that require left-hand ninja skills I’m going to need to acquire!
My goal is a version on which I play all instruments, poss even a flute doing the melody. Certainly drums, congas, bass, guitar, poss a little keys. But as my flute skills haven’t got a far as making a reliable clean note, I will prob have to either sing the melody, or get someone in to do that icing on the cake bit!
Dr Satan’s Robots, apparently. Staffing call centres world (or galaxy?) wide.
Psychological torture in the everyday, an NHS experience (or three!).
Several times in recent weeks I’ve been in GP Practices, or Hospitals. Although the two recent GP visits are the later experiences, I’ll start with them.
For me, our GP waiting room is a kind of ante-chamber to Hell. The radio station they have playing in the background – coupled with the Covid-19 related spacing of chairs, and the concurrent demise of communal reading matter (something long associated with visits to the doc’s; Woman’s World, Hello!, issues of Giles!?) – is so oppressively and moronically mainstream, and inanely conformist.
It feels like being in a dictatorship of the mind. The Tories have annexed the Sudetenland of independent critical thought, by fostering a plebeian culture of bland mindless consumerism. A singularly soulless state. When I see or hear lockstep unison dance routines in trash online and TV culture, it makes me think of modern ‘Brits’ as a breed of goose-stepping turkeys, marching to their own holocaust.
And several of the elderly folk in the room are tapping their toes!? As if it were some form of harmless music. A nice sound!? Or even more outlandishly, an art, or craft, designed, perhaps, to uplift and expand, or at least beautify the immediate surroundings. But wait, this is in fact the sonic wallpaper to billions of cellular prisons, made with computers, to formulae dictated by returns on investment, designed to control, crush and enslave, not to enlighten or liberate.
The Godawful radio station polluting the GP’s airwaves.
Airheaded five-minutes-of-fame intoxicated wannabes queue for mile after mile, desperately hoping to be the kind of fantasy cyphers everybody is constantly told they want to be. All whilst drowning in endless rounds of addictive self-soothing endorphin hits, counted in ‘likes’ and ‘tweets’.
And what an ugly and tawdry world this muzak creates and adorns. A world of institutionalised blandness, built with mass-produced tat, always aiming about as low as you can go.
Not long before the two recent doctor appointments, where my ears and my soul were tortured by the crassness of modern popular culture, I visited Peterborough Hospital. The whole visit lasted six and a half hours (plus near enough 30 mins – or more [due to roadworks!] – either way, getting there and back).
Peterborough Hospital, not so much a ‘noble edifice’ as an essay in the dismal ugliness of modern social architecture.
I was seen by a ‘CRISIS’ team psychiatrist. And a fairly lengthy interview was conducted. l left the hospital in the firm belief that I was being referred for further help from the crisis team. It’s only been later on that I’ve learned that – prob’ as a result of this meeting (or poss a follow up meeting, at ours a few days later, with a guy whose name escapes me now?) – I am NOT being referred to the Crisis team for further support. This in itself is shocking.
Then, on this most recent call, today, this John Skeels character, who I don’t warm to at all (in fact he winds me up something chronic!), not only reiterates the point about the removal from Crisis support or intervention, but goes further. Blandly telling me I won’t be getting CBT either!!!
I thought I’d understood that Dr Joyce and the lady I saw in A&E were both assuring me I would get some immediate ‘talk therapy’ style support. So far, far from that, I’ve had to endure Groundhog Day style repetitions of cross-questioning, or ‘profiling’, from an alphabet soup of seemingly related yet also not related mental health bodies!
Raking over all this shit continually, without ever actually addressing it constructively, rather surprisingly – NOT! – actually worsens things!
Skeels started out seeming to suggest an initial assessment was due to happen on the call/day. But later on he instead offered a telephone appointment assessment – I’m losing count of how many times I’ve been in this situation: four, five, or more? – with a lady (Hannah Jones?), on 6th April!
My angry protestations about how awful this has all been – passed from pillar to post, continually repeating myself, whilst getting no actual support or help – finally persuaded him to bring the date of the assessment forward a bit: it’s now due 27th April. A week away, instead of over two.
Turn that shit down!
So I’m now back to square one, ringing my GP and FRS (the First Response Service, aka 111, option 2), and queuing for aeons listening to Muzak and so-called A-I bots, telling me my call is oh so important (hence the interminable wait…*) and my queue position is ‘over a barrel’.
* Maybe they’re building suspense, to further heighten the appalling crash that comes when you eventually end hours of calling and realise, more often than not, you’ve achieved exactly fuck all. Except, perhaps, ramping up stress levels a bit more. The exact opposite of what’s needed!
Pretty piano music plays – on a short repetitive loop (isn’t this a black-ops torture technique?) – and I’m told ‘your queue position is, three’; we approach fifteen minutes, for the entirety of which time my queue position has remained three!!!
WOW… at about 15:02 in to the call, I’ve gone from position three to two! I hope I don’t have to wait 15 minutes for… oh, I’m #1 now! 15 mins for one place, then just one for the next!?
Once I’m connected, will I get anywhere? Dr Joyce told me to contact the surgery if need be. And I feel need is very much be! As feck all is happening via CRISIS or LADS or whomever… ah, finally, a human being.
INTERLUDE
So, twenty minutes waiting, two minutes talking, and in the end only verbal assurance that I’ll get call from Dr Joyce on Thursday coming. Hopefully that will happen.
The corporations and us.
After that tortuous call to my GP (is there any other type these days?), it’s time to join the FRS ‘virtual (aka very real) queue’. This time it’s a more ambient synth and percussion loop.
A little later… So far it’s just (just, JUST!?) been a little over five minutes queuing. And what will this call achieve? I’ll basically be telling them nothing’s happened, and they’ll want to go over everything again, for the umpteenth time. Leading to? Well, thus far, absolutely feck all, in terms of actual support or help!
Gaaarrgh! Gnashing of teeth, wailing, and tearing asunder of a sack-cloth and ashes!
Some more time later… It’s sixteen minutes and counting, on the FRS mental health crisis line. Wonder if folk have topped themselves whilst queuing? It seems the kind of purgatorial – or plain Hell-ish – way to make a depressed person feel even worse.
There’s nowt for making you feel the worlds’ sense of your true value than being made to wait aeons by a robot, before being allowed to interface with an understaffed, under financed and ridiculously complex (due to being dismembered in pursuit of private profit) system.
Nye Bevan would be apoplectic with rage, at seeing what Tories (and even New Labia) have done to his beloved and ought-to-be-cherished institution. It would just confirm for him the truth of his assertion that Tories are, indeed, lower than vermin.
Twenty-two minutes and counting… Jeezuzzz on a fucking pogo-stick!!! I’ll have lost the will to live by the time… oh, no, hang on, that was why I was calling in the first place!
Some time much, much, MUCH later… Well, it was over thirty minutes wait in the end. But when I got through the guy on the call – which lasted about an hour – was good.
I’ve subsequently also had a call from The Sanctuary, an offshoot of the mental health charity MIND. Spoke to a guy named Simon, which turned out to be quite helpful. That call was about 65 minutes! So much time on’t phone!
FOOTNOTE
One of the worst things about this hellish modern way of going about things is that it makes me so angry and querulous that by the time I speak to someone, I’m in a towering rage. A la Saxondale, perhaps?
Tintin & co marvel at giant butterfly and wineglass.
Capt. Haddock, disgusted, refuses to look at cut-glass that doesn’t contain whisky!
I’m now whoring myself out on every front.
The only significant think I did today, other than sleep loads, was this flyer/postcard design. If I get enough pupils, across the several areas: drums, guitar, art, English, etc. Who knows, I might still be able to make a living?
Tasty!
I’m not in the least religious. But ne’ertheless, I say Gawd Bless, my Mrs! She’s cooked a triffick dinner, again.
We love this guy! Check out Jason, The Cloud Gardener, here. We discovered him via the BBC’s Gardener’s World.
Vid
His story is inspiring. I love the bit in his BBC slot where he talks about nurturing a ‘broken’ plant, and how that helps him with his own mental health.
We need to really green our domestic spaces. It’s a challenge, as ours are very dark gloomy indoor spaces, which tend to kill plants!
Yet more snooker therapy. And boy-oh-boy, does Ronnie deliver!? He’s pulled out some classic 147s, from his first awesome five minute jobbie (below), back in 1997, to this!
‘Absolutely sensational’ enthuses the affably avuncular John ‘JV‘ Virgo. And one cannot disagree!
I’m pretty sure all, or at least nearly all of us, have experienced the grim horror that is queuing on a call to a large organisation.
Currently I’m severely depressed, and I’m often required to call the NHS. I love and treasure the NHS. But under Tory and New Labour misrule, it’s being turned into an impersonal impenetrable block of granite.
I’ve just received a letter summarising a meeting I recently had with an NHS functionary. In this letter are numerous factual errors. Some trivial, some less so. They need correcting.
I’ve emailed about these concerns, and hope to hear back. But I’m not holding my breath.
What I would far prefer, and I’m sure I’m far from alone in this respect, is a brief conversation with an appropriate person, in a position to remedy the situation. What I most definitely DO NOT want is to waste precious time, energy, and – no doubt – money, listening to robots and Muzak. Only to get absolutely nowhere. Oh, except a little closer to my grave!
