making it to 6:30

i love the new (to me) blogger "stats." i can know, for instance, that someone from denmark is at present looking at the strange compline piece i wrote last week.

i am not alone! someone else is awake, online, and, quite likely, given his present activity, also suffering!

my mdvip go-to guy will field a call from me in one hour, as i figure that 6:30 am is a decent enough time for phoning in what is clearly a quasi-emergency. i've had my index finger primed for button-punching since, oh-h-h-h, roughly 1 am.

at roughly 1 am, though, i was hysterical. not "kind of" hysterical, or "hysterical" in a literary sense that has nothing whatsoever to do with gender bias. no, i mean: hysterical, as in, freud would be both bored and delighted.

there has been an onslaught of "oh god... oh god oh god oh god." i whined, in a particularly ugly whining voice: "heeeellllppppp me... oh god oh god oh god... heeeellllppppp me."

fred, sworn to take care of me, has managed to slip into his old ways and spend most of his time deeply asleep.

what is really irritating? oh god... oh god oh god oh god? well, that would be fred's insistence that he'll do whatever i decide to do. as in: drive us to the emergency room/department... or fill my water bottle... or feed the felines... or tie a knot in the warbling tongue of la bonne et belle bianca castafiore.

as she practiced her best, and only, aria last evening, how could i not feel... oh god oh god oh god oh god... that i was being mocked?

"ah, je ris de me voir si belle dans ce miroir?" i mean, really? as the muted dulcet tones of moi -- barfing and moaning, moaning and barfing, in full-fledged feminine hysteria -- served as bad moravian background singing from just outside detroit? pure mockery, pure mockery.

don't touch my sentences. any of them. attribution, even spelling, might be a bit off, but i am writing, clearly, from my death bed.


wow. i just plugged in "female hysteria" over at dear, dear wikipedia (and if you haven't been moved by jimmy wales to help out with a few bucks, what are you waiting for?), and i am stunned.

Since ancient times women considered to be suffering from hysteria would sometimes undergo "pelvic massage" — manual stimulation of the genitals by the doctor until the patient experienced "hysterical paroxysm" (orgasm).

yes, okay, [oh god oh god -- yaddayadda] so i was tossing around terms with which i am not really familiar. my connaissance of freud came from literary criticism classes at berkeley. worse, those classes were in french. what did make freud of acute interest, at the time, was the influence of that neer-do-well, jeffrey masson.

wow, that was a long time ago. what were we so riled up about? we filled auditoriums just to hear the guy, and this was when both foucault and derrida (as well as derri-da-da's son) were essentially in residence.

[it's later and i am rereading this, despite my eyes inclination to cross.  we heard him because he was "happening" at the time, because he'd published the assault on truth, was fired from the freud archives, had a libel suit ongoing against janet malcolm of the new yorker.

whatever. i am in pain, and laughing doesn't help matters any -- as it jiggles jiggly-prone body parts and, well, that hurts. still, for you, dear reader from denmark --(prince hal? hal? is that you?) -- we will share the aforementioned wikipedia's introduction to dr. jeffrey masson.

to whit, to woo:

Dr. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (born March 28, 1941 as Jeffrey Lloyd Masson in Chicago, Illinois) is an American author, residing in New Zealand. Masson is best known for his conclusions about Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. In his book The Assault on Truth, Masson argued that Freud may have abandoned his seduction theory because he feared that granting the truth of his female patients' claims that they had been sexually abused would hinder the acceptance of his psychoanalytic methods. (Several Freud scholars have disputed the traditional story that Freud's seduction theory patients reported having been sexually abused in early childhood, the basis on which Masson built his case.) He is a vegan and has written about animal rights.

oh god!  if you were in any way involved in what *must* be called the BROUHAHA (mwa ha ha ha!) surrounding his book, Assault on Truth, and the postpublication rock star tour, you must read the wikipedia entry for dr. masson.  Curious as to what... well, as to what happened to masson? where did he go, what did he do, in that post assault on truth phase?

Since the early 1990s, Masson has written a number of books on the emotional life of animals, one of which, When Elephants Weep, has been translated into 20 languages. He has explained this radical change in the subject of his writings as follows:

“ I'd written a whole series of books about psychiatry, and nobody bought them. Nobody liked them. Nobody. Psychiatrists hated them, and they were much too abstruse for the general public. It was very hard to make a living, and I thought, 'As long as I'm not making a living, I may as well write about something I really love: animals.'

my favorite comment over at amazon for when elephants weep was: "i loved it but it was way too anthropomorphic." mwa ha ha!
 
ouch.  ouch.  oh god.

and then, of course, it must be said: more power to him.

and thanks to him, my essential weirdness, an inspirational unknown visitor from denmark, the influence of anti-nausea medication, and high anxiety?  it is 6:28 am.  made it!