reason

PART IV: “Sometimes we get so tired of waiting for a way to spend our time”

March 7, 2019 — leslie dean brown

When they eventually did return our phones, it was under a strong proviso. We had to sign a type of non-disclosure agreement/contract before we could even touch them:

Absolutely no photographs under any circumstances, and especially not of anyone or their face (they made that explicity clear); no social media use at all; and finally not reveal anyone other patients’ identity to anyone, not while inside or even after being released. The nurse eyed the high-dependency ward as they explained the importance of adherence to these additional set of rules and regulations. Non-compliance meant there would be no second chances… no further privileges… privileges revoked… I even think they explained that to us too… I still managed to pop off a shot or two of my bedroom when no one was looking…

And so they are in complete control. It was around this point that I realised that there was literally nothing I could do about my situation. That I was not in control anymore. And that I simply had to accept where I was. From this point on, I think I was more concerned about eliminating this great sense of underlying boredom that I was feeling more than enacting any of my suicidal thoughts.

Even so, I was in such a state of shock, that for several days I didn’t even realise there was an art therapy room! It adjoined the main room, located right next to the kitchen. It was always locked and we had to ask for it to be opened (on the inside, you had to ask for everything). It was very rudimentary, but it was an extra space I could go. I could not look at the acrylic paints (too brightly coloured) or the paintbrushes (mangled), but the coloured pencils were more than satisfactory.

I discovered this beautiful artwork buried under a mound of papers. This was the best art in the whole establishment! Clearly this is someone who is very creative, very talented. This artwork inspired me in a big way. I would very much like to know who drew it.

I started by sharpening all of the pencils because about half of them were blunt — all except black, because there was no black pencil. One day, I began to draw with the pencils. I was drawing on the shittiest paper imaginable. It was more like the paper that you use to wash your hands with after going to the toilet. Yet it felt so good to be finally doing something constructive.

I could feel myself becoming more creative. I mainly drew things that I had drawn before. Because I didn’t have any references to go off (no internet). I drew in little patches. Over the course of three days I added more and more. It had nearly finished and there was a small empty patch at the top left.

The next day they took over half of the pencils away! So I felt like I wasn’t able to finish; I couldn’t, because only half the pencils were left! The thing is, artists like their colours. How can they leave us without the red, blue and black?! Two of them are primaries!

I was forever asking and asserting for them to return the red and blue pencils because there was no red and blue ones left. “The black I can sort of understand because they were not here to begin with”, I proclaimed. A male nurse who was sitting with me said I was getting “agitated” — “I’m not agitated, I’m frustrated”, I quickly contended. I mean it’s a bit like asking a musician to play a guitar that is missing three strings! Isn’t it? He just didn’t seem to get it at all. He told me that it wasn’t a university equipped art room. I knew that. Of course. Still, it bothered me.

It occurred to me later that maybe I could learn something about myself from this encounter. I mean, it seems to me that art is very important to me. For others, it is clearly not. So I realise now that this –art– is something I care about, something I’m passionate about, much moreso than your average Joe.

It dawned upon me that the illustration shown above is a beautiful piece of art –although it only has four colours in it. Well I already knew about using limited colour palettes in art, but not in the sense of having half my palette inadvertently taken away from me. I started thinking about using the tools at hand. I’ve seen popular TV shows where professional photographers are forced to use the crappiest cameras imaginable. And they invariably still come up with fantastic photographs. I was also reminded about something my dad used to say: “a poor workman blames his tools”. From then on, I pretended that the lack of available hues was an intentional choice; for my next drawing, I used just three colours.

Was I being an OCD wanker about the pencils? I don’t know. You tell me. It’s totally okay now though because it made me more aware of what is important to me, my passion, my aptitude, my creative ability, my drawing skill. Some people care, other’s don’t.

One item they returned sooner than the other [electronic] ones was my Illustration book written by Andrew Hall. I was extremely glad to have something like that to continue reading. I guess they don’t see books as any kind of danger to mentally ill people?

One day, I forget which one, I took two packets of biscuits at afternoon tea time. Because there were only three biscuits to a pack! And I thought six biscuits was a fairly reasonable number to eat. One of the security nurses saw me and told me to put it back. I hadn’t even sat down. I swooped around and back it went – back into the same bowl from whence it came! The whole time, they were eyeing us like hawks. This is what I had to endure…

After about four or five days, I had talked to all but one of the patients at length. Mainly because the nurses were essentially too busy for more than a 5 minute chat. At first I didn’t know whether they were violent patients or not. So I was curious about that (for my own safety). But it turns out that they were all such a great bunch of people. All of them.

After speaking to an older, wiser nurse for almost 15 minutes, I was able to turn the experience around and look at it for what it really was: an acute rehabilitation center. She recommended trying to take what you can from the experience, to ask “what can I get out of it?”.

The next meeting was my third assessment, with two psychiatrists present, one of them new. Number three psychiatrist was a female and I really opened up to her about my childhood. I was to be released “either tomorrow or the day after”.

By this stage, I was talking to new people and slowly improving (my psychologist had previously told me I was too isolated). I was going to bed and waking up at the right time. I was eating a wider range of foods than before. But most importantly, I was talking to other people who shared the same views as mine. I was not alone. In fact I decided to stay a few extra days.

All in all I stayed a total of eight days inside that pyschiatric hospital ward. Others had been in there anything from one day, to one month (and in one case, five months). Towards the end of my penultimate day, the same porky pyschiatrist came into my room and asked me the exact same question, just like he had asked me the week before. This time, I answered ‘no’. No I wasn’t suicidal.

The good news is that I do feel more optimistic upon exiting the facility. My motivation level is improved. I haven’t had any further suicidal thoughts. Maybe the lesson here is that we shouldn’t be so quick to make generalised assumptions about how our future lives are going to turn out?

No one came to pick me up from the hospital, but I was well enough to catch the bus home. I must say that my newfound sense of freedom felt very strange after being locked up for more than a whole week. I was waiting at the bus stop and wondered whether to buy a snack for the journey home. In the end, I decided not to. Just knowing that I could buy something without having to ask anyone anything made me smile.

I did some further reading about that place a few weeks later. And it turns out that no one has ever died in that facility. Not for any reason. So maybe Mister PorkFace was right after all? Maybe it was a safer place to be after all, if only temporarily?

And when you said that no one’s listening
Why’d your best friend drop a dime?
Sometimes, we get so tired of waiting for a way to spend our time

Axl Rose, Coma GNR.

Let’s talk about the Qantas corporate identity.

May 10, 2018 — leslie dean brown

Should I say it? Should I say it? I’m going to say it.

Illustration by leslie dean brown. © 2018. All rights reserved.

See, I think this is the problem with *some* big corporations. They spend so much on graphic design to make their corporate identity/image visually impeccable (which is good) but then they go and do totally nasty shit like this to ordinary hard-working people. My question is, why risk jeopardising your consumers’ perceptions of your brand?

It’s not like the passenger had a crystal vase in her luggage, is it? Your airport ground staff ran over her bag with the airport vehicle! It’s not fair to expect people to take out travel insurance when they are YOUR mistakes. If it’s your fault, fix it!

Absolutely shocking customer service! It’s not acceptable at all. Would you have treated someone in 1st class this way? I think not.

Designers take years or even decades to finetune their skills, and yet your customer service staff go and ruin most of the hard work that everyone else is doing to make your brand appear fantastic! Sorry, but it’s not right. It’s not right at all and it has got to change.

For me they have betrayed not just their customers but their designers as well. You know, we try so bloody hard to improve a brand’s corporate image. Don’t we? We study for years and years and years to try and work out what works best. But if companies are going to treat their customers this way –like shit– well, more people are eventually going to see straight through the design façade. And the worst thing that can happen is when customers lose their sense of trust with a business. Thoughts? Or are most designers simply too scared of losing their own clients to say it like it is?

“Great design is like a powerful antiobiotic which helps to ward off the disease of nonprofessionalism; the mistake that even the largest corporations make today is to forget that to rely on design alone will hasten the disease’s immunity, rendering the drug ineffective. Without the aid of fantastic customer service, no matter how big you are, customers will see you as an amateur.” – leslie dean brown

Quite apart from the whole quality/benefits issue, the whole reason people trust the larger bands in the first place (rather than dinky little mom and pop stores) is because customers know that most of the time they can get refunds or exchanges on their merchandise.

It just makes designers’ lives more difficult when they act like corporate bullies… eventually consumers will see straight through the ‘design’ factor and it won’t be a ‘cool’ brand anymore.

I’m not afraid to say that in this case, you are operating like little Ferengi: “Once you have their money, never give it back”. I travel Qantas. But this is just not cool, Qantas, not cool.

A much closer look at confederate statues:

August 19, 2017 — leslie dean brown

Upon closer inspection, this is what a conferederate statue looks like. It’s the metal, magnified a hundred times:

Why are statues so important to some people? Honestly. It doesn’t actually ‘repreresent’ anything either, does it? It’s what the sculptor chose to ‘represent’. He could have equally constructed a cube standing up on one edge to represent the past.

When I look at this statue (albeit a pictorial replication on the internet), I see bronze metal that has developed a green patina. It’s sort of in the shape of a horse. With a man riding it. And a hat. I don’t see so many monuments with the riders wearing hats. Is the hat what makes it important? :-/

If you were to look at this monument closer in real life, much closer, under a microscope say, you wouldn’t see an effigy of Robert Edward Lee. You wouldn’t see any flesh and blood. You wouldn’t see his soul or anything else. You wouldn’t see anything to do with the history of slavery or Charlottesville. Or Virginia. Or anything to do with confederate-anything.

What would you see? You’d only see the metallic grains of the original alloying elements, copper and tin. Even underneath the patina, polished back to its original lustre, it’d look a lot like this under the microscope. A bit like the featured image above.

Right?

In other words, in material terms, it has bugger all true value. Well maybe it’s worth US$2 to 3 per pound. Here.

That sculpture is also going to disappear anyway in a few million years. What possible difference does it make now?

Why would you want to honor a statue about slavery? Why?!

Well that is my perspective on confederate statues. [Read more…]

The value of NAT and ENV shares on the the global stock exchange.

August 18, 2017 — leslie dean brown

Here’s the kind of thing you see when you hang out on LinkedIn for a while:

RECAP FOR THOSE I LALA LAND THE MARKET HAS BEEN ON FIRE BECAUSE OF TRUMP UP 2500 POINTS IN 6 MONTHS MOST IN THE FIRST 60DAYS NOW OMG DOWN 200 BECAUSE OF THE SPIN OF WORDS BY THE MEDIA…THE TRUE AMERICAN ENEMY IS BLM OBAMA CLINTONS AND THIS F… UP MEDIA GIVE TRUMP A BREAK AND SUPPORT HIM STOP WASTING HIS TIME DEALING WITH THE STUPIDEST PEOPLE ON THE PLANET AND THERE BS STOP THE HATE NOW WE ARE ONE AMERICAN — Mike Pienciak

And here is my response to that:

Did you see the stock price for NAT shares though, since Trump got in? NAT shares are down. Way down. And when I say NAT, I don’t mean “Nordic American Tanker Ltd” on the NYSE. I mean NAT, on the global stock exchange, the GSE.

ENV shares are down too! Once again, I don’t mean “Envestnet Inc”. I mean ENV, on the global stock exchange, the GSE.

And isn’t it telling of business today that NYSE:ENV and NYSE:NAT do not represent nature or the environment? Quite the opposite. In actual fact they represent gas pipelines and supermax oil tankers, respectively.

Every time the Nasdaq, the S&P, the Dow jones go up, GSE:NAT and GSE:ENV invariably go down¹. Way down. I think it’s because we don’t know any other way.

Maybe the only reason the stock market “is on fire” is because Mr. Trumpet wants to abolish the EPA? Maybe it’s very telling of business today. That while stock markets are, as you say, “on fire”, the Earth is figuratively burning up also.

The trouble is this: when GSE:NAT and GSE:ENV go down, all other stocks will soon follow. This should be like a law already.

It’s not all about the stock market. Do you know WHY there is not stock market on planet Mars or planet Venus? Because there is no breathable atmosphere. So maybe “business at all cost” types should consider that before their next next trade? You know, invest in something other than money?

If you could measure the worth, the market capital of GSE:NAT and GSE:ENV, it would put the rest of the worlds’ stock exchanges to shame. If we had to pay for these services, humanity would be bankrupt. Bankrupt I tell you! Bankrupt!

Traditional economic stock markets are all but a meaningless evaluation. All of them incorrectly report the true value of the Earth’s assets. If our environment cannot even be maintained, then one must ask the next logical question: just how ‘sustainable’ are “sustainable business models”?

By the way, I’m not here to make friends. I’m not here to get more connections. Or leads. Or clients. I’m here to make people think. Clients will always be there, biodiversity won’t. 2c

Oh and it is ‘their’. The word you are looking for is their, not there.

The only constant is change.

March 17, 2017 — leslie dean brown

Today I’d like to talk about change. We live in a changing world. And yet most people seem to be very afraid of change…

When people talk about ‘change’, it’s usually on ordinary time scales: milliseconds, seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months and years.

Unless you’re a scientist, you rarely talk about change on timescales involving decades, centuries or millennia. Do you?

I’ve noticed most people don’t like change. People get all anxious whenever anyone speaks of change. We get anxious about changes outside of our control. We get anxious too about changes that are self-imposed.

Here’s the thing: most people are afraid of change when it is too great for them to cope. So they block it out, go into denial and distract themselves by doing something else like watching TV. [Read more…]