Depressing musings...

So I'm going to the NDP conference thing this afternoon. It seems my presence is expected.

It's frustrating. It's been four years since my breakdown, and I'm slowly getting better, but I still have such a hard time dealing with strangers. I had to set aside everything this morning in order to mentally prepare myself for the ordeal. It means losing half a day of writing and schoolwork. I just can't focus when I'm trying to prepare.

Of course, a couple of years ago, I couldn't have left the house at all to deal with anything like a conference. And there are times I can do things like this now -- more and more often -- without risking panic attacks, and sometimes even relaxing.

But I look around, and I notice that my two closest friends from high school have also both developed such severe agoraphobia they don't leave the house anymore unless absolutely necessary.

And we all have our different reasons for it, but it's so strange it should happen to all of us, around the same point in our lives, when we're all so far away from each other. None of us were in contact with the others when it happened to us, so it's not a question of influence.

Is there a common thread? Could we identify a "Post-Esquimalt Stress Syndrome"...?

Of sex and politics...

The NDP conference started very late, so I took a little walk through the Village while I waited for it to start.

Maybe it was just the breeze and the smell of autumn that made me happy, but it was the first time in years I've walked through the Village and felt it as a place of liberation -- as one of those Temples to Freedom I longed for growing up in a small town.

I finished Famous Last Words finally. I remained wonderful right until (and including) the end.

The unlikable main character, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, got me thinking about sex and politics.

There's a very minor sub-theme in the novel about sexuality and fascism. Mauberly is queer -- we're never sure if he's bi or gay -- but like Michelangelo or Plato, he seems to idealize sexless love as somehow better, more aesthetic, and remains a virgin, apparently, until his death.

But his sexuality doesn't go away. He always talks about his fascism in terms that are undeniably homoerotic. Because he doesn't express his desire to have a powerful man on top of him in the bedroom, Findley seems to be saying, it comes out in his politics instead.

I've long suspected that football (American football for my international friends) is just one long exercise in sublimated homoerotic desire. A form of exorcism, to make the self-repression easier. Maybe certain forms of political belief are as well...?