Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

Stuff I’m doing.
Stuff I’m thinking about.
Stuff I’ve seen online and feel is worth sharing.
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Notes from Tuesday 10 March

A bald middle aged man with a white beard is sitting on the ground eating a banana. Two rabbits look up at him hopefully.
Your author and his children.

Status:

Had to go to the doctor’s for a mental health checkup for my paroxetine prescription. Slightly annoying as I could have done it over the phone but we’re all about the in-person these days.

I’ve been on antidepressants on an off all my adult life and mostly see them as a crutch, something to take the edge off and allow me to function. They’re never going to “cure” me, because that’s not their job (at least not for me). They just reduce the quantity and severity of the bad days.

After I’d done a bit of therapy I decided to try coming off them in 2024, the logic being I wasn’t depressed, I was living as an autistic person and my coping mechanisms were fucking me up. But now I was getting some help with that maybe it would be good, or at least interesting, to take the stabilisers off and be “myself” for a while. With the doctor’s support I weaned myself off, just in time for the second dose of Covid with full-on chronic fatigue this time. Within 6 months, and after a disconcerting run of panic attacks, I was back on them again. Ah well.

As the song goes, anti-depressants are so not a big deal. Of course I’m on them. My situation is intermittently quite depressing.

In other news, I fixed the wobbly banister rail on the stairs. It was installed by Fi’s parents, so many decades ago, and the screws had become loose. As always, it’s the sort of job that should just take 10 minutes but which feels unachievable at the moment. So I paced myself and spread it out and it wasn’t a problem. Remove a screw, have a rest, drill a hole, have a rest.

Overnight listening:

Reading:

  • Unfit, Unpaid - In a lot of ways I’m very lucky with my post-Covid chronic fatigue in that I’m being seen by an NHS specialist who can confirm to any skeptics that, yes, I’m unwell. Many people aren’t. This is by a friend of a friend who has had Long Covid for six years now and it’s depressing reading.
  • Plain-spoken performance art: A conversation with Laurie Anderson - An interview from 1982, although it’s not marked as such and I got half-way through before realising. Partly because I’m dense but also because her ideas back then are evergreen. ‌"I also modified violins so they worked like tape instruments. I mounted a tape head on the bridge of the violin, and on the bow, instead of horsehair, there’s a strip of recorded audiotape, so you play that back and forth over the head. That allows you to create sounds that are backwards as well as forwards."
  • The view from RSS - a nice look at how a newsletter compiler uses the internet. What I’d love to see is a load of narrated screen recordings from internet people about how they use their computers to do stuff. I’m sure it’d be fascinating.

Watching:

Telly: