As a young person I read some of the writings of Carl Jung. There was a section in it that I couldn’t quite come to grips with about how inanimate objects are living, sentient beings in a living, sentient world. I think that my story demonstrates that my scraps dish and bread board, otherwise perfectly respectable examples of well-behaved inanimate objects, certainly gave me back as good as they got.
Speaking of Carl Jung, I watched a good part of the movie A Dangerous Method when it came up on Foxtel recently. I saw it first at a theatre a while back, but it was one of those movies I felt could stand a second look, especially as Dick told me afterwards that Keira Knightley’s performance had been widely panned by the English critics..
A Dangerous Method was based on a play which was in turn based on non-fiction book (more appealingly titled A Most Dangerous Method) and whereas I can imagine it being effective as a play it seems it lost some of its power in the transition to the screen. Perhaps they should’ve used a screenwriter other than the playwright to write the screenplay, but it was an interesting enough movie anyway by virtue of the nature of the subject. It’s a reminder too that today we blithely accept that psychoanalysis best describes the world we live in, but that that assumption only works if there is some degree of consensus and we tend to forget that there was a great deal of dissent if not outright opposition when Freud first presented his theories.

I had to get a prescription from the chemist this morning. I’ve been suffering from an ear-ache cum tooth-ache cum sinus-ache for more than three weeks now and its progress has been annoyingly non-linear i.e. one day I think that it’s gone and then it sneaks back and keeps me awake all night. So, after another sleepless night I finally went to the doctor and we decided to nuke whatever it is with a course of anti-biotics and hope that whatever it is finally leaves me in peace.
The pharmacy girl asked me if I wanted to wait or to come back and I chose the latter ‘cause I really felt the need to go to the toilet. (Yes, alright, it’s another toilet story. You don’t have to read any further if you don’t want to).
Perhaps out of some old world politeness I initially favoured the Well’s toilet rather than Choclatte’s, (there’s some old saying about not shitting where you eat too), but when I got to the Well I found all the cubicles bar one were occupied and the one that was left had a deposit peeping sheepishly over the rim that you knew wasn’t going to succumb to mere flushing – so I went to Choclatte and politely asked for the key to their always well maintained toilet.
It made me think though. What is it about another man’s shit that is so unappealing as to make you gag just thinking about it, and yet a turd of your own making can inspire you to want to record it on film?
It’s a rhetorical and even gratuitous question of course, so I won’t tell you about the unsinkable Molly Brown, shaped like a perfectly formed bratwurst that is possibly still resisting all efforts to sink her in a Bordertown servo’s toilet.
Analyse that.