I love three-day weekends, but boy do they throw the ol’ internal kenning of time and space off. Today’s top ten Tuesday prompt was ‘things that make me NOT want to read a book’, and I can’t think of much. If it’s a romance, a political campaign book, an exhaustive encyclopedia of paint glazes — then yeah, I probably won’t be reading it. Otherwise my stacks are a potpourri of subjects from parking lots to poop to philosophy.

From Plato, Not Prozac! which after fifteen years I’ve broken down and bought a used copy of:

Philosophical counseling is, in the words of my Canadian Colleague Peter March, “therapy for the sane”. To my mind, that includes just about all of us. Unfortunately, too much of psychology and psychiatry have been aimed at “disease-ifying” (that is, medicalizing) everyone and everything in sight, looking to diagnose each person who walks in the door and find what syndrome or disorder could be the cause of their problems.”

From The Unpersuadables: Enemies with the Enemies of Science:

Behind us, the genuine German was becoming worried that the Polish restaurant would have no space for our party. ‘We have no reservation?’ he said. ‘There are twelve of us!’ ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ said the posh Englishman. ‘The Poles are used to being invaded.’

It is as if the mind of the schizophrenic is suffering from an excess of stories. This, I have come to suspect, is not a coincidence. We humans are creatures of story. And the story of story begins in the unconscious.

I will try to remember, though, that as right as I can sometimes feel, there is always the chance that I am wrong. And that happiness lies in humility: in forgiving others, and in forgiving myself. We are creatures of illusion. We are made out of stories. From the heretics to the Skeptics, we are all lost in our own neural tjukurpas, our own secret worlds. We are just ordinary heroes fighting phantom Goliaths, doing our best in the service of truth when the only thing that we really know are the pulses.