early to bed, early to rise...

I am headed to bed, I think. It is just about 1am, and I am exhausted. I did indeed have a fever, though pretty low-grade at 99.4F.

I finally yielded and took some (5 year old) cough suppressant. We'll see how well it works.

I am seriously not cogent now, compared with my relative lack of cogency.

Regina's Song

While lying in bed, trying to recuperate/deal with whatever this bug is, I read David and Leigh Eddings' novel, Regina's Song. I am not going to dwell on the plot particularly, beyond noting that it deals with issues of institutionalization for mental illness.

I am generally a fan of Eddings, even when I have found his work repetitive and redundent. I like his humor, his word use, and his worl view.

Never has that been clearer to me than how he writes about the perspective of the buggies and the normies.

Normies are those folks who have never been in such a mental institution, such an "asylum." Buggies are those who have, who are eithe rcurrent or former habituees of such places. The two authors explore the attitudes of the Normies towards the Buggies with great relish and disdain.

The suggestions are:
1) The buggies know more of what is going on, being done to them, than they might let on.
2) What we think is irrational, unreasonable, crazy behavior makes perfect sense to them.
3) That if they are willing to fake it, they can get themselves out.

The second of those certainly is not dissimilar to a Dabrowskian observation that a group of folks were not insane - they were sane people having reactions to an insane world...

The first and third of those resonate as well...

And I, for one, know that the gap between those of us in and those of us out is not so clear nor broad as those of us out might wish to believe.