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by ZYRA

It's now springtime and the clocks have gone forward. Well, mine haven't. All my wall clocks, watches, and computers are all still on GMT. Why conform to an artificial time like "BST" when you can have "the time it really IS", ie GMT? The added satisfaction of having your clocks on GMT is that you're right and almost everyone else is wrong.

One of the advantages of being "mad" is that you don't have to play along with all this conformity nonsense so epidemic in the "normal" world. The normals have to spend a lot of effort trying to hide away and blend in with the crowd. But you don't have to be "normal", because you KNOW you're different. You can BE YOURSELF. My health has improved greatly since I started dyeing my hair pink/blue/green/etc, and wearing clothes I think ought to be fashionable rather than the drab unoriginality conformity demands.

And when I go round the supermarket to buy stuff I get looked at. Great! Then I go to the till and pay up not with paper-money, but with solid metal five pound pieces (You can get them from the Post Office). People soon start to question their beliefs in the normal world.

When I was younger I missed out on being a teenager. But now I'm making up for it. Have you missed out in your life? Remember it's never too late to live it!

Why is ECT so popular with psychiatrists when so many people believe that it doesn't show good results? I have a paranoid theory about this. The idea is that ECT makes you subconsciously frightened of electricity. This is an insidious plot to stop you getting involved with the electric mania in which you wire up hundreds of lightbulbs. If you did, you'd probably find it very therapeutic. I have now wired up several hundred small bulbs in one room. There is a technical way of doing this which is moderately safe and requires the insides of gambling machines, dead computers, video recorders, car headlamps etc. I have some plans if you're interested ask me. But there is a trial version available where you hang many sets of christmas lights up all over the place and have them switched on instead of the normal room-light.

Another helpful idea is the writing-up. I write volumes of stuff in diaries about things that are going on, whether true or delusionary. Whilst this doesn't stop the delusions, it means that they have to be more consistent!

Delusions of Grandeur has a solution. The idea is to make clever plans and actually attempt to become GRAND. If you're individualistic as well, this star-quality gives you a good start.

Now on the new dreaded Mental Health Act. The idea by the government is to have an ethnic cleansing, removing so-called mad people from society. However, if the government had tried to ban Trade Unions, there'd be a general strike. So here's what we do: We form non-disappearance clubs. The idea is to get to know as many people as possible, so that if you get locked up without having done anything wrong, there will be a lot of people (ie the members of the non-disappearance club) making a lot of fuss, so the authorities will have to think twice before sectioning any of us.

This article was originally published in Perceptions Magazine when the magazine was called "VOICES' VOICES", and the original didn't have so much direct hyperlinking in. ZYRA can be visited at this character-review on the Voices Forum site and at Zyra's own website www.zyra.org.uk which is quite interesting/odd/strange/large.