Tag Archives for depression

“I know a whole lot. I ain’t gonna tell you nothin’ wrong”: T-MODEL FORD, life coach (Arthur, January 2003)

Originally published in Arthur No. 2 (January, 2003)

ASK T-MODEL FORD

[Note: ARTHUR has traded our former advice columnist, Neil Hamburger, to another publication for a comedian to be named later.]

This issue’s advice columnist is Fat Possum recording artist T-Model Ford, the self-styled “Boss of the Blues” from Greenville, Mississippi. T-Model, who’s been 78 years old for the last four years, has promised to tell ARTHUR’s readers nothing but plain wisdom. 

“I know a whole lot,” he says. “What I tell you, I ain’t gonna tell you nothin’ wrong. If I can’t please you, I ain’t gonna hate you. I’m gonna make you feel all happy. You WILL get happy. If you shake my tree, I’m gonna shake your orchard. That’s the truth. I’m hangin’ like a apple on a tree. That’s why I ain’t fell. Cuz I’m HANGIN’!”

Email your questions to editorial@arthurmag.com 

Q: I’m 18, my boyfriend is 19. We’ve been together a year. We see each other on weekends. My boyfriend is so loving, but I just lie there. We’ve tried going out to dinner, massages, lots of kissing. Nothing works. I like having a cuddle, but I don’t want to have sex with my boyfriend. What should I do?

T-Model Ford: Uh oh. Well, it’s like this: you know, you go out, you kiss, and you hug, well now, that don’t get it. When you kiss, that‘s some dessert to you. If he ain’t interested in, he’ll ask what else to do. He ain’t interested in what she want to do. But now, if he interested in it, and she ain’t interested in it, she can’t change him. But now if he in it and sexy, he already ready, he waiting on her to tempt to do. Now if she don’t tempt to do, and she don’t want to, he can forget her, try to find him somebody else that wants sex. He gonna leave her! Age ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. I looked at bugs and antses. They do it! You take a hog, when she lay a pig, and three days after she lay a pig, the little male pig tryin’ to ride somethin’. That’s what sex is! Sex is ruler of the world. That’s for old–and the young. If you’ve got an old woman and she ain’t sexy, you ain’t got nothin’! You got an old man, and he ain’t sexy, you ain’t got nothin’! If he don’t feel on you, don’t rub on it, he might as well be DEAD. You take an old woman, you feel her, she close her legs up, don’t let you feel what’s down there, you LEAVE her. She ain’t sexy! I’m an old man, myself. I’m 80 years old, I mean, uh, 78 years old now, and right now, I’m sexier than a young man. You hear me!? I’m sexier than a youngun. I’m gonna tell you somethin’. In this week since I’ve been home…I’m gonna tell the truth. I done had sex three times since I been home. Now, can you beat that? I know you can’t. You know why? Cuz this lady woman, she opened her legs and let me feel down there, and rub on it, and I’ll suck on her tittie, but I won’t suck on that other thing. I got somethin’ to put in that other thing! Now, that’s an OLDER woman! Older as I am,… Now how come’n your woman can’t be that sexy? Huh? If a young woman ain’t sexy for you, you don’t need her! You hear me? 

Q: I’m 22. I have a cousin, she’s 21. We’ve known each other for most of our lives. She’s a fantastic person. She’s become really beautiful as she’s grown up. Well, one night three months ago she came round. We decided to stay in, watch a videotape, have a couple bottles of wine. I’m not sure how it happened, but we ended up showing each other what we like our partners to do, and this of course lead us to having sex. Now it was really good. I think I’m falling for her.

I know you is. You need to go your way, and let her go her way. Don’t try it with cousins. Dogs don’t know any better. He wouldn’t have his sister and he wouldn’t have his mama, but if he don’t know better, he’d have the mama and have the sister. You don’t want your name out like that, do you? Put her down, get you somebody who ain’t kin to you. It’s not trouble if you go with your cousin, it’s DOG. It’s dog do that. No human being don’t do that. If he’s a dog, he’ll do that. But if he’s not a dog, he ain’t gonna do that! 

Q: My hair is falling out, and I’m only 23. My hair was perfect up until about four months ago. Now when I wash it, it comes off in my hands. Nobody in my family is bald. I can’t understand why this is happening to me. Is this normal?

In one way it is, and in one way it ain’t. You got a worry, and you gets mad and angry, you reach up and get a handful of hair and pull it, break it loose from the roots and leave it there, then when you comb through it, it all comes out! It don’t hurt you. You see what I’m talkin about? Alright. See, I done that myself. I used to get angry with my girlfriend cos she lookin’ at somebody else. Just reach up there and get a handful of hair and pull it, break it loose, and when I comb it, all of it come out! That’s what do that. Or, either you’re sleeping at the foot or the head of the bed, and it’s rubbin’ it so, you can’t get off it, then when you do get off it, it done broke the root of it. And it wear your head bald-headed. He’s worrying, getting angry, he breaking his hair loose hisself. I know it is. You just watch him and see don’t he do that. 

Q: One day I’m happy and my future looks bright and hopeful. Then something unexpected happens, and I’m suddenly depressed and negative. Everybody I know seems to go through the same kind of thing. I feel like I’m on an emotional rollercoaster, up and down, up and down. I mean, is this why we’re alive? To experience this, to be up and down, up and down, is this the way it’s supposed to be?

Not exactly. You worrying about something. You thinking about something you done done, and you worrying about you can’t get to that no more. And it’s worrying your mind. You out by yourself, you wishin‘, if you ever done it, you’re worrying about it now, it’s on your mind, you wants to do it and you ain’t got nobody to do it with. And that’s what it’s doin’. You lay in the bed and think about it, or go out walkin’, sit by yourself, or… Ain’t happy with it? You need to leave it alone. If you can’t live happy, go on by yourself. Don’t let it run your brains up, your pressures up, and have you doin’ somethin’ you don’t wanna do. You feel like you wanna suicide yourself? Get out of that! Quit that! Get round a big bunch and enjoy yourself, that’s what you got to do. Get out with a big bunch and enjoy yourself. Don’t let that cross your mind. If you don’t want ’em, get you somebody that you can have sex with, and get with them. That’ll help it. I know: I’ve been through all up and down that line. See, I had a woman when I was in my young days, and she had me where I couldn’t eat, and I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t work by myself, coz all my mind was on her. And she had another man. Her husband. I took her away from her husband, and he come back into town where I went, and they poisoned me. For him, could get her then. I don’t know who she with, I ain’t seen her since that day. So I’m livin’ happy, and I feel good. Don’t NEVER let a woman get into your brains. When you got a woman and she go to worrying and getting close to your brains… If you ain’t gonna live with ‘em, you better cut out! Catch the first thing smoking going north, and don’t come back. 

Q: In my relationship, I am the gift-giver. During the year and a half that I’ve been together with my boyfriend, I’ve given him many presents. I’ve been very generous. It’s my way of showing that I like him. Yet he hardly gives my anything. That’s important, isn’t it?

It’s important, and otherwise… he USIN’ her. He done like her flesh and he don’t care about her a bit. She givin’ all of her good times to him, she makin’ him happy, but he not makin’ her happy. If he can’t change it, or she don’t want to change it, or if she like it like thataway, he gotta take off hisself and go into some other town. Or some other state. Stay away from her. When she go to writing him, and calling him, she done send a bad mistake. And she wanna call him back, and try to make up for it. But it’s too late! If her buggie don’t like mine, or like his, don’t get mad with him. Let it go. Go on into another town and make you a new life. That’s the way I do. When things don’t work like I want ‘em, and I can’t make ‘em work, I leave town and find me another town. And let the town furnish they own woman and you will do better. Don’t you carry a woman to another town for you to make up. LEAVE that one where you found her, and go to another town and try. You might get lucky. I know all about that stuff! I don’t let one woman stop my buggy from rolling! Let somebody else do it! I won’t wait. But if you don’t, it’ll hurt. It’ll get your mind all messed up. That’s what I’m talkin’ about. 

T-Model Ford’s latest album, Bad Man, was produced live by the genuinely legendary Jim Dickinson and released by Fat Possum this past September. It’s your own damn fault if you haven’t heard it yet. More info at www.fatpossum.com

Maybe ketamine would help?

From Aug 19, 2010 Scientific American:

Ketamine—a powerful anesthetic for humans and animals that lists hallucinations among its side effects and therefore is often abused under the name Special K—delivers rapid relief to chronically depressed patients, and researchers may now have discovered why. In fact, the latest evidence reinforces the idea that the psychedelic drug could be the first new drug in decades to lift the fog of depression.

“We were trying to figure out what ketamine was doing to produce this rapid response,” which can take as little as two hours to begin to act, says neuroscientist Ron Duman of the Yale University School of Medicine. So Duman and his colleagues gave a small amount of ketamine (10 milligrams per kilogram of body weight) to rats and watched the drug literally transform the animals’ brains. “Ketamine… can induce a rapid increase in connections in the brain, the synapses by which neurons interact and communicate with each other, ” Duman says. “You can visually see this response that occurs in response to ketamine.”

More specifically, as the researchers report in the August 20 issue of Science, ketamine seems to stimulate a biochemical pathway in the brain (known as mTOR) to strengthen synapses in a rat’s prefrontal cortex—the region of the brain associated with thinking and personality in humans. And the ketamine helped rats cope with the depression analog experience brought on by forcing the rodents to swim or exposing them to inescapable stress. “Preclinical and clinical studies show that repeated stress or depression can cause a decrease in connections and an atrophy of connections in the same region of the brain,” Duman explains, noting that magnetic resonance imaging shows that some depressed patients have a smaller prefrontal cortex as a result. “Ketamine has the opposite effect and can oppose or reverse the effects of depression” for roughly seven days per dose.

More: Scientific American

THE RECESSION AND HOW TO LIVE THROUGH IT by Charles Potts

Reposted from January 2009—because it still applies… —Ed.

charlespotts_web

January 28, 2009

THE RECESSION AND HOW TO LIVE THROUGH IT
by Charles Potts

[Arthur editor] Jay Babcock has tempted me with the phrase, “It would be great if you wrote something on this subject,” referring to the subject line of his email, “The recession and how to live through it.”

I’ll take the bait. This is more than a recession. This is going to be a huge depression, with the “recovery” way off in the distance.

A recession, per Christopher Wood, desk chair person for The Economist in Tokyo circa 1995, is “a superabundance of inventory, and can be melted off the shelf; a depression is a superabundance of capacity” and takes much longer to get out of. Remember that it took the bean counters in Wash DC a full year to confirm the economy was in recession, and there’s a lot of over-the-counter chatter about how this recession is already longer than the one in, take your pick: 1976-1980-1991-etc. However, look around you and notice the superabundance of capacity. The industrial hind end of Europe, Japan, the US and China plus all else, can easily produce multiple times more automobiles, cell phones, TVs, computers, refrigerators, et al. than anybody with funds can buy.

This is the fourth major deflationary price collapse in the past 600 years. In the three previous price collapses, there was a long period afterward when prices did not recover their pre-fall levels for decades. Prices last collapsed hard in 1815 after Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at Waterloo; the period from 1815-1896 has been called by economists The Victorian Equilibrium. Many things contributed to this low-level stability, but it is sobering to realize there was scant inflation in the United States during the 19th century. (Inflation, by the by, is not necessarily a bad thing. Inflation simply moves assets around the game board from creditors to debtors; it doesn’t actually destroy anything except purchasing power if all you have is cash. In deflation, which we’re going through now, cash will buy a lot. During inflation it is better to have hard assets that increase in value at least at the same rate as cash.)

Will it take eight decades before the world economy is go-go again?

My reference to 1815 isn’t casual. I just re-read David Hackett Fischer’s The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. His book is about the three previous big price collapses: in the early 14th century when the Black Death ended the so called “Middle” ages; then, circa 1492, when prices collapsed during the Renaissance, and we encircled ourselves globally; and the aforementioned 1815. What’s so crucial about 1815 is it is also the date and the event that Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West) identifies as the moment Western culture went sideways and into “civilization,” cf. Napoleon at Waterloo. Fischer’s graphs of how the prices rose and fell, can be superimposed one over another. This collapse we’re in, the big one for the rest of our lives, started 20 years ago in Japan in 1989, has hit Argentina and most of Latin America, Russia twice now, and finally the big fish, the rest of Europe and the US. Even Doha is scaling back!

The powers that be with their printing presses will print money and throw it at the wall until enough of it sticks. Some activities will appear to return to normalcy. But you shouldn’t wait for the influx of money to turn deflation into inflation, just as you shouldn’t wait for the bailout to trickle down to you. Unemployment is going to increase and stay high for some time. Challenging moments are upon us.

My advice in hard times would be the same in good times: find something you love to do and master it, become as good as or better at it than anyone has any reason to be. Look up the people who do it really well right now. Study the masters. A musical instrument, a physical activity, painting, movies, art of all kinds, the writing of poetry or other books, whatever makes you feel better about yourself and contributes to our well being. Try enough things until you are satisfied that your fascination with the subject will lead to mastery. Six or eight hours of focused effort a day should suffice. I think this is reasonable advice, coming from an old man who has squandered most of his life by being interested in too many things to master any of them.

We don’t exist as individuals; we exist as the sum total of our relationships. You’ll need all the friends you can get, so be honest, fair and generous in your dealings with other people. Don’t be afraid to ask for help or take unseemly risks. The future does not belong to the risk aversive.

It will be difficult to get rich in the onrushing hard times, but it will be easy to get poor or poorer. Watch where your money goes. Make sure you get good value for it. Avoid buying things you don’t really need. Add value to your activities by putting forth effort. Expect others to do the same.

Spend time with children and if you have children of your own, take the time to understand the world from their point of view.

Assets are things that have to be used up creating additional assets. Almost without exception, your biggest asset is your time. I could have gotten rich teaching a seminar I created called “Seize the Day,” essentially a series of sensory exercises to stimulate your imagination to take over and live your own life. But I preferred life in a small town and didn’t want to see the inside of every airport and convention center in the country.

Maybe it’s time to skip the addictions, look up old friends, or visit long-lost relatives. Life is a gift of such presurpassing value that we sometimes hardly notice. Learn to appreciate simple things, the taste of water, the odor of flowers, the great way gravity contributes to your ability to walk and run.

Some of the things people love to do and do well don’t pay that much: poetry for example. Nobody really gives much of a fuck anymore if you can understand the world and set it to music. You have to feed yourself, and if a family, contribute to their well-being. You may find yourself bearing an overload of dissonance, earning your daily bread and wishing, as the Colorado poet and painter Joe Lothamer said, “I dream of being a janitor.”

Every changed circumstance contains opportunities, which accrue to the first people to recognize them. Since circumstances are in constant flux, there is a steady stream of opportunities. Learn to spot them and make them your own.

Keep the basics in mind. People will still be buying food even if the rest of the consumer economy blows completely up, as it so richly deserves to. Heal the sick, wake the dead, feed the hungry. Food shelter and clothing. Eat slowly and chew your cud well.

Biographical info on Charles Potts.

Previously in Arthur:

“The Dope From Muskogee” by Charles Potts

Muntader al-Zaidi named Arthur Magazine “Man of the Year” 2008; Charles Potts salutes al-Zaidi with new poem, “Balls Out.”

“A Case of Cheney Paranoia” by Charles Potts

Poem in Arthur No. 5

“Spasm Empire” by Charles Potts

CHARLES POTTS & SUNN 0))) AT ARTHURFEST 2005 – video footage

Great news: Playing in the dirt increases serotonin levels in your brain!

The results so far suggest that simply inhaling M. vaccae—you get a dose just by taking a walk in the wild or rooting around in the garden—could help elicit a jolly state of mind.

You now have a new reason to make mud pies — and lick the spoon if you feel like it! A recent study has revealed that ingesting soil bacteria (or Mycobacterium vaccae) not only makes your immune system more capable of handling allergens like bee pollen and cat dander, but also increases the release of serotonin into your brain. This means that playing in the dirt induces a natural happiness high that could help to combat depression, bodily pains and other common ailments. So don’t give in to washing your hands multiple times an hour in fear of catching the next swine flu — go stick them in a pile of dirt instead!

Read more about this exciting news in the article “Is Dirt the new Prozac?” from Discover Magazine.

“Twice a day for the last 32 years”: DAVID LYNCH on meditation, by Kristine McKenna (Arthur, 2006)

Originally published in Arthur No. 20 (January 2006)…

The Whole Enchilada

David Lynch was 27 years old and depressed. Then he started meditating…

By Kristine McKenna

In person, David Lynch bears only the vaguest resemblance to the image most people have of him. He is, of course, an artist of extreme complexity, but he’s not a weirdo, and the people who work with him adore him because he’s respectful and appreciative of their contributions to his art.

Lynch has been working under the radar on his latest film, Inland Empire, for quite a while; it commenced principal photography two years ago in Lodz, Poland, and features Polish actors Karolina Gruszka and Krzysztof Majchrzak, along with Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Harry Dean Stanton and Justin Theroux. It will be his first digital film, but it won’t be his last as he loves the freedom digital affords. “Film is over for me,” declares Lynch, who’s thus far handled the financing of Inland Empire, which is being produced by his longtime partner, Mary Sweeney.

I’ve been interviewing Lynch semi-regularly for 25 years now, and each time I see him I’m struck by his ability to retain the best parts of his personality; he remains an enthusiastic, open and very funny man, and he never fails to tell me something useful and inspiring. I spoke with him this past summer, ahead of his fall speaking tour of universities to promote the work of the new David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace…

Arthur: You’ve said in the past that your daily meditation practice is what enables you to maintain such a high level of creativity. What was going on in your life at the point when you were able to commit yourself to meditation?

David Lynch: I was 27 and I was in the middle of the first year of Eraserhead and things were going great. I had this unbelievable place to work—the stables at AFI—I had all the equipment I needed, I had people helping me, I had money to do it, and it was like a dream come true, yet I wasn’t happy. That saying ‘happiness comes from within’ started making sense to me and meditation seemed like a good way to go within. I’d always thought yogis sitting cross-legged in the woods were wasting their time, but I suddenly understood that all the rest is a waste of time. Meditation is the vehicle that takes you to the place where you can experience the unified field and that’s the only experience that lights the full brain. It’s a holistic experience and it’s not a foreign place—it’s a field of pure bliss consciousness and it’s the whole enchilada. People think they’re fully awake when they wake up in the morning but there are degrees of wakefulness, and you begin waking up more and more when you meditate, until finally one day you’re fully awake, which is the state of enlightenment. This is the potential of every human being and if you visit that unified field twice a day, every day begins to feel like a Saturday morning with your favorite breakfast, it’s sunny, and you’ve got the whole weekend ahead with all your projects that you’re looking forward to doing.

There are many types of meditation; why did you pick transcendental meditation?

I lucked into it. My sister was doing it, then one day she mentioned it to me and I don’t know why—maybe it was the sound of her voice and the time that I heard it—but bang! I said I’ve gotta have that. Transcendental Meditation is the way of the householder in that it allows you to stay in the world. Some people like the recluse way and want to go into the cave, and there are mantras that will take you right out of activity and put you into that cave. But transcendental meditation is a way of integrating these two worlds and activity is part of it. It’s like dipping a white cloth into gold dye; you dip it and that’s meditation, then you hang it on the line in sunshine and that’s activity. The sun bleaches it until it’s white again, so you dip it and hang it again, and each time you do that a little more of the gold stays in the cloth. Then one day that gold is locked in. It isn’t going anywhere no matter how violent the activity, and at that point two opposites have been united at a deep level. In the west people think yeah, like I’m really gonna give up my dental practice and go to the cave, but you don’t have to quit dentistry. Meditate before you go to work and you’ll start liking the people that come in and you’ll start getting ideas about dentistry. Maybe you’ll invent something and get into the finer points of a cavity and honing that bad boy. Things get cooler.

If you were running the world, what’s the first thing you’d do?

I’d get people going on consciousness-based education. Stress levels in children are going way up and there are so many bad side effects to stress. Kids are on drugs, they’re overweight—they are not happy campers and being a kid should be a beautiful thing. Kids take to meditation like ducks to water. The so-called knowledge we try to cram down their throats is useless and that’s why there are things like cheating—it’s all a bunch of baloney. It’s a sick, twisted, stupid world now. It’s ridiculous.

What’s America’s problem?

It’s locked in an old, ignorant way of thinking. Things are pretty low right now but lots of people are working to enliven that field of unity in world consciousness. John Lennon described meditation as “melting the iceberg,” and when that heat starts coming up some people love it, but it can be too much for some people and they fly apart. So, it’s gotta come up gently—it has been coming up pretty gently, too, but the bunch running the show here in America are working overtime in a negative way.

How did you interpret 9/11?

You don’t get something for nothing and America’s been up to a lot of nasty business for a long time. But Maharishi [Mahesh Yogi, founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement] says instead of fighting darkness you should just turn on the light, so let’s turn on the light and start having fun.

What makes you angry?

There’s an increasing amount of censorship in America and that is not a good sign. It really makes you wonder what’s going on with this country.

Is man on the road to extinguishing himself?

No. Quantum physics has verified the existence of the unified field and Vedic science understands how it emerges—in fact, Vedic science is the science of the unified field. There’s a whole bunch of trouble in this world but the way to get out of it is there; just enliven that field of unity. It sounds like magic but it’s science—it’s the real thing and the resistance to it is based on fear. But it’s not something to be afraid of—it’s us.

Your beliefs are deeply optimistic, yet many people find darkness in your work; how do you explain that?

Films and paintings reflect the world and when the world changes the art will change. We live in a world of duality but beneath it is unity. We live in a world of boundaries but beneath it it’s unbounded. Einstein said you can’t solve a problem at the level of the problem—you gotta get underneath it, and you can’t get more underneath than the unified field. So get in there and water the root then enjoy the fruit. Water that root and the tree comes up to perfection. You don’t have to worry about a single leaf if you get nourishment at that fundamental level.

NO MONEY DOWN: Rushkoff on the rigged credit system (Arthur, 2008)

NO MONEY DOWN
by Douglas Rushkoff

Illustration by Arik Roper

from Arthur Magazine No. 31, Oct 2008

I poked my head up from writing my book a couple of months ago to engage with Arthur readers about the subject I was working on: the credit crunch and what to do about it [see “Riding Out the Credit Crisis” in Arthur No. 29/May 2008]. I got more email about that piece than anything I have written since a column threatening to defect from the Mac community back in the Quadra days.

Many readers thought I was hinting at something under the surface—a conspiracy, of sorts, to take money from the poor and give it to the rich. It sounded to many like I was describing an economic system actually designed—planned—to redistribute income in the worst possible ways.

I guess I’d have to agree with that premise. Only it’s not a secret conspiracy. It’s an overt one, and playing out in full view of anyone who has time (time is money, after all) to observe it.

The mortgage and credit crisis wasn’t merely predictable; it was predicted. And not by a market bear or conspiracy theorist, but by the people and institutions responsible. The record number of foreclosures, credit defaults, and, now, institutional collapses is not the result of the churn of random market forces, but rather a series of highly lobbied changes to law, highly promoted ideologies of wealth and home ownership, and monetary policies highly biased toward corporate greed.

keynote_ban.jpg

It all started to make sense to me when I attended Learning Annex’s Wealth Expo earlier this year—a seminar where teachers of The Secret, the hosts of Flip This House, George Foreman, Tony Robbins and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan [pictured above in banner from Learning Annex website] purportedly taught the thousands in attendance how to take advantage of the current foreclosure boom.

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IT BEARS REPEATING: Rushkoff on the credit crisis (Arthur Magazine, May 2008)

“Riding Out the Credit Crisis” by Douglas Rushkoff

from Arthur Magazine No. 29/May 2008

There’s two kinds of people asking me about the economy lately: people with money wanting to know how to keep it “safe,” and people without money, wanting to know how to keep safe, themselves.

Maybe it’s the difference between those two concerns that best explains the underlying nature of today’s fiscal crisis.

Is what’s going on in the economy right now really worse than anything that’s happened in the past few decades? Are we heading towards a bank collapse like what happened in 1929? Or something even worse?

On a certain level, none of these questions really matter. Not as they’re being phrased, anyway. What we think of as “the economy” today isn’t real, it’s virtual. It’s a speculative marketplace that has very little to do with getting real things to the people who need them, and much more to do with providing ways for passive investors to grow their capital.

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