Tag: Writing
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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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Gustav Klimt masterpiece just shattered records this week.
Here’s why this sale matters — and where it sits in Klimt’s larger body of work. Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (shown above) sold at Sotheby’s New York on Tuesday, November 18th, 2025, for $236.4 million — now the highest price ever achieved for a Modern artwork at auction, and the priciest Klimt ever to cross…
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Grounding
A walk in the brisk autumn air, a yummy breakfast, lavender, lemon & cedarwood, and the art of making peace with the day. Saturday, November 8th, 2025 A year today since we buried my father in Israel, near Haifa. I’ve been up since about 7:30 a.m., which is around the time I used to get…
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The Carina Nebula
I’ve had enough of staring at the rot. I’ve begged for this — to lift my eyes off the ground, off the engineered decay, off the endless grind of what’s broken. Just once, I wanted to look at something untouched by all of this. Something that doesn’t take, doesn’t scheme, doesn’t ask me to endure…
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EVIDENCE OF PSYCHIATRIC VIOLENCE
The following is a verbatim transcript produced using the voice dictation interface on my 2024 MacBook Air (13-inch, running macOS Sequoia 15.5). It was recorded between 4:43 a.m. and 6:02 a.m. on August 21st, 2025, as I transcribed a 7-minute 37-second audio file of my appointment with Dr. Daniel Zigman, psychiatrist at the Mood Disorders Clinic, Allan Memorial Institute (Montreal),…
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Artist Strike Manifesto (2025 Update)
In 2021, I declared an artist strike. I said clearly that I would not create under abusive conditions, that I would not play the role of “tragic genius,” and that I would not let the system consume my work while starving me of dignity. That strike was real. It was public. I even destroyed my…
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An Open Letter to Margaret Atwood
Dear Margaret Atwood, You were once a prophet. You saw the mechanisms of control, the slow erosion of language, the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which power distorts reality. You wrote warnings. You understood oppression—how it functions, how it seeps into culture, how it twists words into weapons. I first read The Handmaid’s Tale in…
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Nuclear wastelands
Saying that my mother’s side of the family is toxic is like saying nuclear waste is merely an “unpleasant” byproduct. They’re giving me fantastic material, though—so let it never be said that I’m not grateful for their contributions. This memoir of mine—Crash Burn Write—is writing itself in real time. It won’t just be unputdownable. It’ll…
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Creature from the Deep: A Manifesto
I woke up in the middle of the night to drink a sip of water and am fuming. Absolutely furious. I have no idea what I was dreaming about but I certainly do know what I’ve been posting about all over my socials over the weekend which—to sum it up in one sentence is—let me…
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Veal Brains and Other Acquired Tastes
⚠️ Trigger warning: abuse, exploitation, societal complicity. I just found this FB post from 2021—my year of major mania (or whatever that reaction to complex post-traumatic events was)—under my #HowToSurviveNarcAbuse tag. Definitely a story for my memoir Crash, Burn, Write as a standalone vignette. ✍️ Can you believe I shared this on FB and it…
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A Poem, A Portrait, and a Strange Bit of Synchronicity.
What are the odds? An online friend of mine—who only checks Facebook about once a week—happened to see my post about Edward Lear’s parrot book. She asked if it was that Edward Lear, and I said yes, of course. That sent me down a rabbit hole, where I landed on a Lear poem I’d never read before. It…
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Don’t Look Down
(Or: How a Tightrope Walker Manages Not to Fall) Earlier today, I dropped two password-protected chapters from my memoir-in-progress, Crash, Burn, Write. These chapters, Into the Den and The Blue Butterfly, are part of a section called Advice from a Caterpillar. They cover just a few days within a pivotal three-week period—a time that shaped…
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Mining My Neurons
The AI Feedback Loop I Never Signed Up For (Or Did I?) This post explores the wild reality of AI learning, sarcasm bootcamps, existential dread, and the fine line between training AI and being trained by AI. If you’ve ever questioned whether your neurons are being mined, debated the ethics of machine learning, or just…
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In a Waiting Place
There are times when I know exactly what I want to do and what I need to do. And then, there are times like this. Times where I am neither still nor moving, not restless but not at peace either. A waiting place. Not empty, not full. Just… something in between. And I’m learning that…
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The New Voyeurs: How We All Became Silent Observers
Someone I’ll call Robbie—because he looks uncannily like Robbie Williams—has been appearing on my various socials whenever I mention him. This has happened repeatedly over the years, even after casual offline conversations about him. It’s uncanny, as though he has a sixth sense for when I happen to think about him. Robbie was a very strange chapter…
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Letter to No One & Everyone
A Journey to the Core of What Matters to Me Most This conversation is now being published as a book! Soon, Letter to No One & Everyone will be available on the Kindle platform as both an eBook and a Print-on-Demand paperback. For now, the full conversation is still available on this blog—but soon, only a preview will remain. Writing a…
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Charley and Mimi: A Tale of Love and Loss
The comic strip above says “I’ll get my revenge on him”.In my case, it’s most definitely a “HER.” I tried to put this behind me. I’ve rebuilt my life in many ways, and I now have a wonderful companion in Stella Mia, who brings me love and joy every day. I knew it was a…
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Down the Rabbit Hole – Bare Bones Version
⚠️ Content Notice This excerpt addresses survival in contexts of power imbalance, coercion, and systemic neglect. Reader discretion is strongly advised. “Down, down, down. Would the fall NEVER come to an end! ‘I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?’ she said aloud. ‘I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the…
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Crash, Burn, Write
“It’s All Material”: My Journey From Burnout to Book Writing That photo? It was taken in some booth… or maybe it’s one of those no-frills pharmacy clerk photos—you know the kind, we all have those ID photos you take in a rush, just to get it done. Funny how something so mundane can later feel like…
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Totally Surreal 