The Pills You Take To Mend Will Be the Architects of Your Destruction: A Musing on Paxil and the Struggle With Madness

I have been on and off various psychiatric medications for my entire adult life, mostly concurrent with a good fifteen plus years of self-medication with "illicit" drugs and alcohol. Surprise of all surprises, I am also the kind of "adult" who can never seem to get his fucking life together.  This instability accounts for my …

Disquiet, In Scorn and Solipsism

Jelena Mrkich, Art Therapist "...and a deep and weary disdain for all those who work for mankind, for all those who fight for their realm and give their lives so that civilization may continue... ...a disdain full of disgust for those who don't realize that the only reality is each man's soul, and that everything …

farewell to self

What follows is a selection from The Sacred Lost Tomes of The Ryan, the brief and terrible history of which is glossed over here and here.  This poor excuse for poetry was written circa 2002 while I was living in Albuquerque, eating all the hallucinogens I could find while obsessively listening to TOOL and reading way too …

Jerome David, An Imposing Shadow

On a recent Netflix documentary kick I watched the outstanding film Salinger, about the late, somewhat reclusive author of Franny and Zooey, a handful of stories, and some other book that I can't remember right now... #ImJokingYouPhony In the film, one of J.D. Salinger's associates (I've already forgotten who) remarked that, as the reluctant bard …

the acedious

the acedious i bathe myself in toxic waters it is the only thing i know. poison begets putrefaction a perpetuity preferential it is the only thing i know. cries of suffering suffocation the noise abounds ubiquitous it is the only thing i know. © Ryan Scott Sanders and Dharma and Belligerence: Mad Rants from a Free-Range Buddhist …

PESSOA on ABSURDITY

"ABSURDITY Let's act like sphinxes, however falsely, until we reach the point of no longer knowing who we are. For we are, in fact, false sphinxes, with no idea of what we are in reality. The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves. Absurdity is divine. Let's develop theories, …

Schizophrenic Listening Habits

I've just gone from spinning an album called Rudiments of Mutilation by underground power violence psychonaughts Full of Hell to listening to Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. with absolutely no segue or transition of any kind. That's weird, right? But, actually, having experienced this dichotomy of aural tone and theme first -- before recognizing and …

The Work We Do or Do Not Do

"We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that's finished is at least finished. It may he poor, but it exists, like a miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who's crippled. That plant is her …

A ridiculously short post on an infinitely prodigious topic.

I think I may have reduced the entirety of my existential crises down to a single, yet powerful, philosophical dilemma: How to reconcile my innate nihilism with my cosmic Buddhism. Is it, indeed, possible to believe in nothing and everything? We shall see... 🙂 (Perhaps this is a repurposing of sorts.) Also, it turns out …

An introspective musing on cycles and change

Throughout his story, when faced with something perceived as insurmountable, the Ryan's defense mechanism has been to shut down, to push all others away, to isolate and to marinade in comfortable misanthropic loathing. Eventually this acidic process breaks down all the rotting weight and we are able to flush it away, leaving behind a sort …