Saturday 17 May 2003

Pic of the day: The sign says "Dyslexia galeri". Which is even better in Norwegian than in English, because the Norwegian word "gal" means "insane" (or if not about humans: wrong, incorrect). A "galeri" would then be a place for breeding insanity, not that the word is ever used.

Now officially neurotic!

Yes indeed. As I switched programs to start writing my daily diary, I immediately found myself gasping for air. Perhaps it is revenge from my subconscious because I had the temerity to mention it before. Or perhaps it is God's punishment, trying to make me repent. (From journal writing?? And working? Somehow, I don't think so.) Perhaps it is simply a generic stress symptom. (After all, typing is kinda like working, and work was where this showed up first.) Perhaps it's my mid-life crisis! That would be kinda cool.

Carl Gustav Jung, the renowned psychiatrist, went pretty much insane around this age. He had long imaginary journeys in his inner self, and long conversations with imaginary people who brought various words of wisdom from the collective subconscious. Then again, Jung had a wife and a girlfriend to take care of him. I don't.

***

Speaking of journeys with imaginary people, I'm trying to write some fantasy fiction again. There has been very little of that lately, as I have tried to save my hand. Whether the lack of fiction is a good thing or a bad thing, I do not know. Before, I felt this need to write, almost like an instinct that could not be denied in the long run. But lately this is less pressing; I think the epic fantasy computer games take off some of the pressure. The need to create new characters there may be the same thing.

But on the grand scale of things, fiction is just a more polite word for lies, and lying is not considered a good thing in itself. Unless I have a message I cannot get across in any other way, I should probably not do it. But for most of my life, I guess I wrote fiction mostly for myself ... it was a message I could not get across any other way, from my subconscious to myself. And that, at this time, might be just what the doctor ordered. (Actually in the past the doctors have recommended a regular sex life and moderate amounts of alcohol. These were all Norwegian doctors, of course.)

Anyway, spent the end of Norway's national day writing on my Lost in Magic novel, so no more diary today.