Malt Loaf Saves The Day

Various mental illnesses run in my family, on one particular side. My father is schizophrenic, dissociative, and a number of other things. My grandfather started to decline into dementia at a relatively young age. My uncle was also bipolar. My cousin Simon, whom this post is mainly about, has Aspergers syndrome.

Simon would spend afternoons poring over bus timetables. On one such afternoon, my grandfather snatched the timetables out of his hands. "What on earth are you looking at those all the time for? You know nothing about buses. You don't understand these." He was astounded when Simon was able to recite the timetables perfectly and answer questions about the running times of nearly all the buses that ran in our area.

Simon would also spend hours standing in the street, seemingly staring at nothing. He would always do this with a pencil in his hand, waving it up and down with two fingers. This attracted the attention of various undesirables in the neighbourhood, who singled him out as the estate weirdo and started to bully him. They would ride around him on their bikes, throwing things at him.

One day, it all changed. All thanks to Malt Loaf.

Take a look at the picture of malt loaf on wikipedia. Imagine a very immature person taking a loaf of malt, and shaping it into a rough sausage shape. Perhaps the immature person would make it curl a bit, and taper it at one end. Then perhaps the immature person would leave it to stand for 30 seconds or so in a bowl of water. The malt loaf becomes a very, very convincing looking fake poo. So convincing that poor Simon retched and had to run to the bathroom when he saw the product of the very immature person (who shall remain unidentified) and the malt loaf.

Once Simon had calmed down and we explained to him that the dirty sausage was in fact just malt loaf, we hit on the idea that it could be the answer to his bully problem.

We stuck a lolly stick into the center of it and told Simon to take it with him when he went outside. If he saw the bullies, he was to wait until they rode up to him, then show the poop-on-a-stick to them, throw it at them if possible, or just chase them with it.

That afternoon, armed with the pooh-stick, Simon ventured out into the street to take his usual space-staring stance.

I like to think of what happened next from the bullies' point of view. There they were, ready for another fun filled afternoon of taunting the local mental. After a minute of highly enjoyable taunting, the mental produces what appears to be his own excrement on a stick. Grinning wildly, the mental chases them, pulling bits off the piped waste and throwing it at them.

Simon was never bothered by them again.

Brilliant Shopping

It was great to see in Stephen Fry's documentary, The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, that he too suffers from bouts of Brilliant Shopping.

Brilliant Shopping is perhaps not constrained to people who have bipolar disorder, but seems to come out more regularly in those who do. From a post over at Ladies Who Love Dinosaurs...

This is what I went into M&S for:
Single cream
Onion

This is what I came out with:
2 packets roast beef and horseradish Christmas special crisps
Pomegranate seeds (removed from pith)
Christmas pudding flavoured yoghurt
2 Pink Lady apples (which I wanted because they are pink on the inside)
3 bean salad
Tandoori naan bread
Instant microwave porridge
Single cream
4 organic onions

Sara from My Sad Alter Ego relates...

I got it into my head that I wanted a kite after seeing one in a toy store…and then I kept buying kites that I kept finding, one after another (same day), each one more spectacular than the last. I love those kites.

Brilliant Shopping is that urge that grabs you in a shop - you need to buy these things NOW. You need that DVD boxset. It's £20.00 cheaper online, but you don't care. It's simply not the same if you have to order and wait for it. The actual act of buying it is part of the pleasure.

The "impulse buys" that shops put by the counters for you to peruse while you wait to be served are to tempt the normal shopper.

For us, the entire store is the impulse buy section.

I bought a radio controlled helicopter. I gave the charger for it away to someone who had the same model, but a broken charger. Now I have a helicopter which I can't charge up to use, and will forever sit on my desk at work.

"Oh, you must be really creative."

I was chatting with a Canadian friend and a few people she knows on msn last night. One of them was almost visibly bouncing around the chat, declaring that he was bipolar. He danced around, saying how great it is to be so creative, playing music, writing, painting. Oh, how gifted he is. Oh how lucky he is.

I told him that I, too, am bipolar.

"Wow, are you creative too?" he gushed, "It's amazing isn't it."

I didn't really know how to respond. Yes, in a certain, very narrow band of hypomania, I can produce incredible things. My mind races and things flow in such a way that I'm frustrated the rest of the time when I cannot summon it at will. I cannot sit down and say, "Today, I will be brilliant. People around me will be in awe." But there again who can?

The creativity produced by hypomania and the lower bands of mania, for me at least, are fractured and frustrating. So many thoughts. So many brilliant thoughts. Woe betide you if you do not instantly agree with all of them. Ideas and plans racing faster, falling over each other to get out of my head. I know a million riffs and can play them perfectly, but cannot string together a song and play it in its entirety. I have a thousand ideas and themes that I can interweave into the best novel you are ever likely to read, and yet I cannot finish the first sentence. I can focus on a concept with extreme clarity, and know my understanding is thorough, but I'm wrong. As wrong as can be. Yet, I cannot see it. Everyone else is an idiot, but they can't see it. Only I, with the gift of manic clarity and creativity, can.

Although we never see Marvin's manic state in The Hichhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, some of his expresssions ring oh-so-true.

"Reverse primary thrust, Marvin." That's what they say to me. "Open airlock number 3, Marvin." "Marvin, can you pick up that piece of paper?" Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper.

Putting up with the clown

This is really a post to say how random chance has operated in my favour, placing me in a profession where a certain amount of quirkiness is tolerated, and sometimes actually encouraged. This suits me quite well. Sometimes, the quirkiness is all I have.

So here's a tribute to the people who put up with me, especially my Emma, who says, "well, that's just my Mike!"

Some Things Mike Did

Ended most of his sentences with “Thaaank you! In a fabulous way!” because of this video :



Played Human Bowling (grabbing a coworker’s chair while they are still occupying it and running down the center of the office with them hanging on to the chair for dear life, then launching the chair as far as he can).

Wasted an entire pad of PostIt Notes by tearing off each one and either making an unflyable paper plane out if it, or rolling them up quite tightly, bending them into a right angle and spinning them around, making them tap rapidy on the table. (This has happend more than once.)

Changed one of his co-workers keyboard shortcuts to pop up the hilarious message "I AM GAY" then laughed uncontrollably for about an hour when it was pressed.

Performed rather weak, puerile and insulting "impressions" of people, generally while a co-worker is on the phone trying to speak seriously to one of those people.

Replied, rather unhelpfully, to the question, "Why isn't the server working?" with the answer, "Because [hosting company] are gimps."

Hilariously referred to LloydsTSB as Lloyds-Wee-S-Poo for quite some time.

The list goes on and on. From fits of laughter to weeks of silence. From calm, sane council to paranoia. From simple code that transforms the way people work, to thinking that putting a picture of a fish on a website is the BEST IDEA EVER. So thanks to everyone that puts up with this.

About this blog, me, and other things

If you've stumbled onto this blog via some search engine or link that offers no real explanation of what you're about to see, you're probably thinking, "What on Earth is this all about? It's all very random - as the youth of today are wont to say."

Here comes an explanation of sorts.

My name is Mike, I'm 20-30ish and have bipolar disorder. Sometimes I am unable to sleep for days with these oh so random thoughts racing around my head. Sometimes, I get very deep and ramble about many subjects at once, dancing from one to the other with the thinnest of connections. Sometimes I just need to get everything out of my mind before it forces things out of my head that I want there.

And I've just forgotten what I wanted to write next. That's extremely annoying.

Oh yes, I remember now.

Medication. As I have had sung to me on occasion, "Medication's what you need." But I've always refused, run away, lied about it and generally done anything to make the subject go away. I know how I can be. The people around me know how I can be. It can be controlled. I'm scared that if I entrust my mental state to some faceless chemical that I'm going to lose control. It might take away who I am. It might make me unmanageable. Fear of the unknown. Fear of regular blood tests. Fear of leaving the bathroom light on and the extraction fan will be going all day, burn out and force me into a lifetime of showers that leave the handle of the door too wet to turn, trapping me in the bathroom, dying of water poisoning - the first case in history of death by osmosis. Ok, so I took that a bit far. I shouldn't just keep typing whatever comes into my head.

Or maybe I should.

That's what this is all about. Some kind of therapy, an outlet, my own personal stream of unconciousness.

Join me for the ride.

Join me!