37 YEARS LATER

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV-Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR), the following criteria must be met for a person to be diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

1. Excessive anxiety and worry (apprehensive expectation), occurring more days than not for at least six months, about a number of events or activities (such as work or school performance).
2. The person finds it difficult to control the worry.
3. The anxiety and worry are associated with three (or more) of the following six symptoms (with at least some symptoms present for more days than not for the past 6 months). Note: Only one item is required in children.
   1. restlessness or feeling keyed up or on edge
   2. being easily fatigued
   3. irritability
   4. muscle tension
   5. difficulty falling or staying asleep, or restless unsatisfying sleep
   6. difficulty concentrating or the mind going blank

Symptoms can also include nausea, vomiting, and chronic stomach aches.

1. The focus of the anxiety and worry is not confined to features of an Axis I disorder, e.g., the anxiety or worry is not about having a panic attack (as in panic disorder), being embarrassed in public (as in social phobia), being away from home or close relatives (as in Separation Anxiety Disorder), gaining weight (as in anorexia nervosa), having multiple physical complaints (as in somatization disorder), or having a serious illness (as in hypochondriasis), and the anxiety and worry do not occur exclusively during post-traumatic stress disorder.
2. The anxiety, worry, or physical symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
3. The disturbance is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, a medication) or a general medical condition (e.g., hyperthyroidism) and does not occur exclusively during a Mood Disorder, a Psychotic Disorder, or a Pervasive Developmental Disorder.

EVERY TOUCH LEAVES A TELL-TALE SIGN

I think I would be able to tell you the story of Ward 11 if just one of you materialized in the blogosphere.

A YEAR CHASING GHOSTS

I wonder if Levine is still alive? I haven't dared to check. I don't want him to go before you get to him. That's you, Zyn Dry, because I know you have nothing left to lose.

Last time I checked him was at some university in Canada, living the life of Riley. Somehow or other he has managed to airbrush all of this from his history. Not even a trace of slime, as the song says.

So I wasted a year chasing shadows.

EXCUSES, EXCUSES

I wrote that book, the one with the blue inkspot on the cover. That's why I haven't been blogging. Though it's pretty clear no-one has missed me very much.

I think you'd like it, Ysabella Brave.

Twenty-six months later

I can't believe you haven't found me yet.

THE PAPER CHASE

Did you hear the one about the conscript who chased bits of paper?

He was obsessive. He couldn’t walk past a piece of paper without picking it up. He would look at it briefly and then throw it away again.

Once he was doing drills on the parade ground when a wind got up and began to blow bits of litter and fragments of paper all over the place. He broke ranks and ran around the parade ground until he had collected every one. He examined each in turn and threw them back into the swirling breeze.

He was arrested and sent to DB for two weeks. Detention Barracks, where they made you do pole PT until you vomited. Where they made you polish the concrete floor until the corporals could shave in its reflection.

But he kept on chasing paper, in DB itself, and afterwards when they reluctantly let him go back to his unit.

Eventually they took him to hospital and had him examined by a panel of doctors and psychiatrists. They couldn’t find anything wrong with him but decided they had no choice other than to let him go.

When they gave him his discharge paper he looked through it carefully and said, “Thanks. This is the one I’ve been looking for.”

HEROES WANTED

I could tell you anything I liked about the moment I made that decision.

I am the blogger; you are the bloggee. So you are obliged to accept my version of the truth.

I could tell you it was a political epiphany – that I realised at that very instant that I was nothing more than a tool of the apartheid military machine, that I was suddenly overwhelmed by an unbearable shame, that I resolved immediately to forswear obedience to the evil racist empire, to heed the examples of Mao and Che and Gandhi and Mandela and to commit myself henceforth to the struggle against oppression in the world in general and in South Africa in particular.

I could tell you that I decided then and there to become a conscientious objector, that I stood up and limped to HQ, demanded an interview with the Commanding Officer, declared my opposition to conscription, proffered my hands for the obligatory cuffs, and resigned myself to two years of abuse in prison. Object to this, kaffirboetie!

But that was never on the cards. My two older brothers had done their military service, admittedly in the navy, at Simonstown and Saldahna Bay. They’d come out of it okay - better off, even, if you believed my father. He had had the time of his life fighting Rommel in North Africa and sweeping the last of the Germans out of Italy, all the way from Sicily to Naples. On VE Day he commandeered an American jeep and took an Italian girlfriend to Lake Como for two months. He missed the only boat they could find to take troops back to South Africa that summer and ended up spending a year at Helwan camp outside of Cairo waiting for another one. But he said it was worth it.

So the family view was very straightforward. You did your military service and you got on with your life. Politics didn’t enter into it. My brothers told me the meaning of vasbyt and min dae. They weren’t there when I got on the train to Pretoria. We didn’t make a fuss about those kinds of things. My girlfriend cried and gave me a copy of the Penguin edition of W.H. Auden’s “Selected Poems”. A subscription to Scope would have been more useful, as things turned out.

And there was another thing. We knew that military service was the price we paid for the privilege of being white. The umfaans we grew up with on the farm didn’t have to do it. They didn’t even have to go to school. Somehow, in the back of our minds, we accepted it as a reasonable trade-off: a year of pain for a lifetime of special rights, like voting, and living wherever we liked, and getting good jobs that would pay for nice cars and houses and swimming pools. So we went obediently, like pigs to the bacon factory, as penance, or expiation.

I could tell you another version, the one that worked for Howard B.

The madness strategy.