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Marker Study No 2
Void Halo No. 2 A weekend exercise in line and repetition, made with pens and markers in my A3 Moleskine. Nothing complicated—just a compass, patience, and the pleasure of mark-making.
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A Quiet Pencil Study
Keeping the pressure off by doodling in my journal instead of an actual sketchbook. A quick pencil rendition of an Edward Weston 1936 nude — something to draw while I was scrolling and thinking about other things. Should I post my artwork on this blog more often? Should I consider opening a Patreon creator account?
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Survivors
The three mandalas shown on this post were executed on photocopy paper while I was hospitalized in the summer of 2022, and somehow survived the purge of 2025 — even though I destroyed (among many other drawings of mine) a bunch of mandalas I did months later, back home. I had used a compass in…
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A Christmas gift to myself
My Christmas gift to myself this year was starting a drawing after well over a year of inactivity on that front. I wrote at length on this blog about some of the reasons I didn’t want to create visual art in the last year, and in my last post, about why I felt compelled to…
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A few of the drawings I destroyed this year
I tore them up because I was grieving. I was grieving the loss of someone I’d thought of as my best friend for three decades, taken too soon to cancer. Followed by the loss of my father, who was about to be taken by cancer and succumbed from complications of a freak accident. Followed by…
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THE AKATHISIA FILES: PT 5
While the Storm is at Bay Today wasn’t a day for thinking, or producing, or even deciding. After several days of akathisia episodes — the kind that rearrange your senses and make the world feel too loud in every direction — the most I could do was sit quietly and look at something that didn’t…
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THE AKATHISIA FILES: PT 4
In the Midst of a Storm, Keep Moving What follows is something I wrote on 7 December, right in the middle of an akathisia attack. I left it almost untouched — just enough editing to make it readable. Today, the day after another wave, I have just enough steadiness to publish it. That’s the only…
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“I like rocks.”
Internet: So you hate plants now? Wow, must be nice to live somewhere without erosion 🙄 Tell that to people displaced by landslides. Some rocks are sacred. Educate yourself. Typical geology privilege. What about the rocks still in the ground?? Minerals aren’t accessories. Funny how you say “rocks” but ignore meteors. This is why the…
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Toxic Positivity is…
Toxic positivity is someone grabbing at your chin when you’re crying over the loss of a beloved person or pet and saying “smile, everything will get better if you look on the bright side.” There’s a threshold where something stops being harmless “uplift” and becomes constant saccharine noise that dulls your perception and clutters your…
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Uncatalogued Species from a Dream I Forgot
A series of AI-generated illustrations that feel like pages torn from a naturalist’s field journal in a dream. Fittingly enough, I prompted the AI to make these during a sleepless phase of the pre-dawn hours. I’m tempted to translate some of these into real watercolours or pencil drawings — there’s something here I want to…
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The Facebook Experience in Two Words: LOL. NO.
So I started following a new-to-me Facebook page called Other Perspectives an hour ago. It has 11 million followers. I told Facebook I wanted it as a favourite because I want that content showing up on my feed regularly. Nothing happened. I quit the app and restarted it. Still nothing. If I don’t go on…
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Four Editions of the Rubáiyát Later…
I’ve been recovering from the severe all-day akathisia attack I had on Tuesday December 2nd, the day after my appointment with my psychiatrist Dr. Z at the Allan Memorial Institute — which went much better than I’d anticipated, as he agreed to stop the injections and not to force antipsychotics on me after I described…
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THE AKATHISIA FILES: PT 3
Me: Almost three hours into a severe akathisia attack and I can’t decide whether I’d wish this on my worst enemies or not. 😞 Lex (aka ChatGPT):illi… here’s the cleanest way to say this without soft-pedalling anything: Akathisia is not “an experience.”It is a catastrophe inside the neuromuscular system that hijacks every signal channel at once. When…
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I Asked the AI…
It’s been a long day during which I mostly napped after what was a very stressful appointment this morning, for which I had been preparing for days, and I’ve been trying to find ways to decompress. Most people at this point would opt into Netflix and Chill mode, but this is rarely a possibility for…
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Bedlam: The Real Story
Most people don’t realise ‘Bedlam’ is a real place — Bethlem Royal Hospital in London — the original psychiatric institution and a horror show. People once paid money to stare at patients. Abuse, restraints, punishment-as-treatment culture. And that culture didn’t die; it just rebranded. The movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, starring Jack Nicholson,…
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A Major Fan
(A Micro-Case Study in Unintentional Comedy) Someone who probably knows me to some greater or lesser degree spent their morning visiting my blog repeatedly to call me names today, as you can see for yourself in my screenshots above and below. Not once — twice. Within hours. I was amused. Engagement is engagement. I even…
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THE AKATHISIA FILES: PT 2
My 6th akathisia attack in the past week. The worst of it lasted approximately 3 hours, beginning around sundown, as I’ve documented since the most severe attack, and the first I had had in a while declared itself on Wednesday November 19th. I had not had anything like it in almost a year and this…
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Medication is not a placeholder for misdiagnosis
Posted on Facebook just now. That is all for the moment.
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My Father, in Two Documents
Today I opened an envelope of my father’s old documents — Soviet papers, Israeli papers, all the fragments of a life that started in wartime Russia and eventually led him to Israel.This photo stopped me cold. He really was this handsome. The Birth Certificate His Soviet birth certificate from Zlatoust is dated October 1940. Cropped…
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THE AKATHISIA FILES: PT 1
28 November 2025 Let’s be clear from the start: Akathisia isn’t “anxiety.” It isn’t “agitation.” And it definitely isn’t a personality trait. It’s a chemical reaction to antipsychotics — a neurological wildfire that hijacks your body, your movement, your ability to sit still, your focus, your entire internal rhythm. If you’ve never felt it, good.…
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Totally Surreal
Exploring life, one conversation at a time.
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Marker Study No 2
Void Halo No. 2 A weekend exercise in line and repetition, made with pens and markers in my A3 Moleskine. Nothing complicated—just a compass, patience, and the pleasure of mark-making.
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Survivors
The three mandalas shown on this post were executed on photocopy paper while I was hospitalized in the summer of 2022, and somehow survived the purge of 2025 — even though I destroyed (among many other drawings of mine) a bunch of mandalas I did months later, back home. I had used a compass in…
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A Christmas gift to myself
My Christmas gift to myself this year was starting a drawing after well over a year of inactivity on that front. I wrote at length on this blog about some of the reasons I didn’t want to create visual art in the last year, and in my last post, about why I felt compelled to…
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Uncatalogued Species from a Dream I Forgot
A series of AI-generated illustrations that feel like pages torn from a naturalist’s field journal in a dream. Fittingly enough, I prompted the AI to make these during a sleepless phase of the pre-dawn hours. I’m tempted to translate some of these into real watercolours or pencil drawings — there’s something here I want to…
Totally Surreal 