Isn’t crumbs of SSRI a nonsense? I used to do it, too, BTW.

I have a degree in philosophy and literature (this starts to become a blog about boosting the ego) and I’m not a native speaker of English.

So if you tolerate my English, I can sometimes drop by. We met on some opioid thread on the old side, remember?

Then I had a look on your blog there and I liked it. 

I am also paid for writing. Not here, unfortunately. 

So you wrote some kind of memoir. A very brave thing. If I were to write a book, it would be something like “The Pledge“ by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. A philosophical crime story. The book was much better than the film, although Jack Nicholson did his best. I hugely recommend the book before the film.

Yes, also been reading a lot. It’s my main passion since childhood. Read at school, read at work, whenever I could. Instead of meeting friends, boyfriends, going to school. I spent time holed up at home, reading.

Friends thought I was meeting my Boyfriend. Boyfriend thought I was meeting my Friends. In fact, I was meeting my favorite Author. Doesn’t mean if dead or alive. They’re all alive in the books. You know, sometimes strategic lies are necessary to survival.

I love existentialism. Yes, Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Cioran... Also pre-existential philosophers like Socrates, Stoics, Pascal, Schopenhauer. And psychology schools, mainly Freudian and Jungian, Adler, Ellis.

Films don’t leave a lot to imagination. Very stimulating. I used to love films, Ingmar Bergman being my favorite director.

Now I chiefly watch dark comedies (Woody Allen, Coen brothers) and Japanese horror stories about ghosts.

Horrors are so funny. What can be scarier than life? Dark humor requires a certain degree of IQ, and it’s no fun to be doomed with it.  Hitchcock was great.

Must go now, take care.

Paula

It almost definitely is! Been taking them to ward off withdrawals more than to actually do anything, but it's probably doing neither and is pointless. 

Well, you write English wonderfully. Of course, drop by whenever you want, I'm happy to talk!

I will check it out for certain, that sounds like the sort of mash up of genres I can get interested in. I will probably watch the film too as I am always willing to give something with Jack Nicholson a chance.

Well I understand that entirely! For certain. There is a song I've been listening to recently called 'Reading in Bed' by Emily Haines, and the chorus goes 'With all the luck you've had/Why are you so so sad? Sing from a book you were reading in bed, and took to heart/All of your lives unled, reading in bed'. Well, sometimes I feel that way, that my life has been unled, that I spent too much time with my favourite authors, as perhaps you felt. But, on balance, I count it will spent, as I'm sure you do too. You can live in those books, they're dependable and give you something to carry with you.

Cioran, now you're talking my language! Cioran is a funny one, at times I find him so preposterously cynical and almost melodramatic (though not so much as Nietzsche), but he writes so beautifully, and to be honest, more often than not I find myself concurring with him. Of course he isn't the rigorous systematic kind of philosopher that Hegel was, or even Schopenhauer or Heidegger were, but he's my favourite to read. 

Believe it or not I've not seen any Woody Allen! I plan to watch Bullets Over Broadway very soon, unless there is another one you would recommend to start off with?

What can be scarier than life, I concur. One of my favourite lyrics, by Laura Marling 'Why fear death? Be scared of living'

I watched the movies Renfield and Roma last night.

Renfield was dumb, but stylish and fun enough. Well acted and entertaining, which is enough sometimes. Good cinematography, as was Roma, a beautiful story if a bit slow.

The night before that I watched Arrival by Denis Villanueve, with Jeremy Renner and Amy Adams, and that was absolutely fantastic, one of the best films I've seen in a long time. I'll not spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it, but it truly is beautiful.  I followed that up with Persona by Bergman, which I didn't like quite so much as Winter Light or The Seventh Seal, but which I still enjoyed.

Tonight I'm going to continue with some more recent sci fi, with Gravity, and if I feel like it I will follow it with Ad Astra. Then I think I'm going to contrast it in the coming days with some historical movies, Barry Lyndon, The Lion In Winter and Lawrence of Arabia are up there as likely candidates.

In terms of how I'm feeling, things have been good, particularly the last two days. It's been a good week, with only fleeting moments of anxiety that are always washed away sooner rather than later, and almost always give way to rapt attention as I watch a movie.

@Estee I can share some of my novel with you if you'd like? I thought some of it may be a little bit crass for benzo buddies unfortunately. It's not extremely crass or anything, but it does cover some embarrassing moments that I felt, as ridiculous and almost slapstick as they are, seemed to me to be somehow revealing of something very human.

The novel is largely about finding whatever it is you need to find to survive. Finding it in friendship, in a movie, in books, just finding it in something that relieves the suffering, however temporarily. But it also touches on the struggle to create exalted high-art in the modern world which is so crass and debasing, on class, trauma, reinvention and imposter syndrome. As inane and unpromising as a memoir sounded, I'm really trying to be ambitious with the execution of it. It is also told in a kind of strange narrative voice, the main character (me) is called 'the writer' and it is written from this perspective, despite the narrator clearly being the character in question, in an attempt to mimic a feeling of disassociation.