Day After Night of the Living Dead

Woke up rather dazed and confused this morning. Been out the whole night before Halloween Day partying: “Deadman’s Party - Come As Your Favourite Contraceptive”. Lots of aging hippies in inappropriate Goth get up. Cheap booze and bizarrely, expensive grub. Not exactly haute cuisine but rather a bland mish-mash of terribly hideous and greasy vegetable samosas, chicken fritters – the type you’d get from a cheap Indian takeaway. And onion baji as hors d’oeuvre. Yuckity yuck.

Wrong: What’s the point of the theme? I’ve never seen anyone wearing a pill box boob tube to pop your fingers with whilst dancing to “Let’s Go To Bed” by The Cure. Or anyone brave enough to wear a condom over his head. Where’s the pounding yet equally depressing Heavy Metal music?

Right: It was indeed a Deadman’s Party. Everyone is either dead or a zombie. I was sitting next to an apathetic bore or asshat without any sense of imagination. Or a smidgen of humour. Dead or alive. Simultaneously.

Wikipedia

Like Schrödinger's cat:

“A paradox of quantum mechanics. There’s a cat in a box with a pointed gun at it and the shot is triggered by the weight of a single atom. If the gun doesn’t go off, the cat lives. If the shot is fired, the cat dies. But quantum theory says every atom exists simultaneously in decayed and undecayed states. So the gun fires and the gun doesn’t fire and the cat exists in two states, simultaneously: alive and dead.” Got this from “Electric” a book I was reading last week.

Or a vegetable:

A rather derogatory term most people self-consciously try to avoid to label a long overdue patient dependent on life support - hospital geeks would like to call as ‘breathing machine’ waiting to be freed from a life of opiate induced stupor, torture from chemical restraints and being forced fed with blenderized complex compound of gooey stuff through the tube wishing for a merciful anaesthetist to do a brain stem test. A rather sad, sad state your conscience constantly wrangle with in silence. Is life or death worth fighting for?

Or a job burnout:

You love saving lives but there’s just too much death. You end up getting depressed and frustrated and confused. So many people perhaps don’t realize just how demanding the life of an ICU nurse is - that everyday you are routinely involved with life or death decisions literally. Death is what you have for breakfast, lunch and aftenoon tea. You will eventually succumb to being powerless and helpless. This is interesting:

"We must believe we are potent, that we have the power to influence what happens to us. I say "believe" because how we see the world exerts a significant impact upon one's susceptibility to burnout. Believing that you can't control what happens to you and feeling helpless is one of the most threatening human experiences. Any time you believe the world uncontrollable, you are in trouble. Research suggests, for example, that Voodoo deaths may be caused because the victims believed they were helpless. Many concentration-camp prisoners seemed to have died of helplessness. They were told and believed that the environment - the guards - had total power over them. Based on his own experience, Bruno Bettleheim, a renowned psychologist who survived one of the worst Nazi death camps, says that it was when people gave up trying to influence what happened to them that they became walking corpses."

[ Causes of Burnout ]

I drank quite a lot of lager. No red wine, as I had gout. I asked my self:

Why on earth am I here?