PassiOne…

I’ve always had a thing for Italy, and that didn’t have a lot to do with the fact I went there on my last year as a student. I had more things, one of which showed itself very clearly during that trip. We were staying the night at a youth hostel, which had guests from all over the world. That particular night, I encountered a young lady from New York, with the most awsome New York accent I’d ever heard. With the girl being quite nice, and obviously enjoying herself at snooker, I felt comfortable enough to bud in and ask her if I could play along…

Now my English back then was already quite articulate, but we were
taught Oxford-style, even during the course I stole away from my father
when he was done looking at it. Actually I spoke English quite well
before my first encounter with it in school.

But something weird happened on the way to New York… as I approached
her, it seemed like I was stepping onto the basketball court from What
the Bleep Do we Know! We engaged in a little One on One, and within 17
minutes I spoke fluent New Yorkian! Same thing happens now when my
parents visit or call: normally I speak ABN, which it Dutch for
‘Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands’, or Commonly Polite Dutch. Most Dutch men
and women call it ‘Algemeen Belabberd Nederlands’ or Commonly Lousy
Dutch, but that’s beside the point. The moment my parents call or call
on me, my ABN drops straight back into Zeeuws, a dialect spoken in the
South, where I was born. Only difference between the two situations is that I grew up in the latter, but had never set eyes, ears or mouth on American soil before!

 

So you could call me a Language Chameleon. I flow with the crescents of
language. But at the same time, I’m picking up signals from various
sources, all valid languages, like Dutch, English, C++, SQL, Spanglish
and many other cross-polinations. If you’re into that thing, do view
Spanglish, with Adam Sandler and a delightful dark-haired lady whose
name escapes me for now  (I checked, it is Paz Vega who plays Flor). She comes to America speaking not a single word
of English, and is accepted to take care of his kids. His wife, a true-to-life neurotic, one of Tia Leone’s masterpieces,
complicates things, but in the end, everybody is happy…

But all those darkhaired, darkeyed beauties on Moorelife, now are they an Addiction or a Passion? 

Well, that would depend a bit on when you asked the question, and when I answer it…. And you’re in luck, as am I, because this morning while getting my first coffee of the day, it came to me: the missing link between those and other concepts! So get yourself a helpful dose of your favorite addiction, come back to your screen, and join me in an analysis of preferences, drugs, moore drugs, the addictions that require them, and the side effects of it All. Passion is related to all those, but may be quite a bit healthier for your health…

Or is it? Well, I love to think so, or rather feel it: there is a distinct difference in feeling between the addiction of last week and the time before, and the selfcontained and selfconscious stream that flows within me now. Stream of Passion may depict it as flames, but flames in their dynamic properties are very like waves. It’s the temperature that is the greatest difference, but then again boiling water flows just like ice water, so temperature needn’t be that big  deal. As long as you’re comfortable with it…

And that I am, comfortable like a load of stuff fell off me! The set of preferences in my mind has not specifically altered itself, and hasn’t even been influenced by me in significant amounts, but something has changed: it feels like I’ve died and gone to Heaven! Well, that’s one surefire way of kicking the habit, wiping out the side effects, and generally disarming any addiction you might have. But point in case is, that even though the barber accidentally cut the cord on my MP3 player that continously helped me with my breathing exercises, the end result wasn’t quite that I stopped breathing, but rather started living!

Now I suddenly knew why Henk, that psychic from my past, kept asking me if I’d controlled my asthma yet! He wouldn’t tell me why, but I just knew there always was a good reason why he didn’t tell me certain things. This was one of them. He could have said "Quit looking outside for the solution to your asthma, you can control it from within!", but that would have totally ruined the effect of his question, and would have unleashed a myriad of side effects, not really healthy for me back then. Ah, side effects! Sounds like upgrades, or rather downgrades: if you’ll just indulge me for a moment, and take a byte (or several megabytes) of your own preferences, maybe you can taste the difference between Passions and Addictions. 

While you are doing that,  I’m gonna play you One from my All time High hit parade. She is part of the reasons I had for naming this article PassiOne…

Right, that wasn’t Passione merely because youtube somehow hasn’t managed to  snare it yet in its Web. But listen to the lyrics, and you’ll hear the passion flowing through it like nothing else! Well, live hard, die young they say, and so she did: Nadieh died of cancer in 1996. Did I know her? Well, in a way yes: I knew absolutely, that her style of music was right up my alley, way beyond the throb of everyday life! That’s called discernment, which you know we all have. Like we may not know everything, but the moment we hear it we know about its truth for us. And Nadieh spoke to me!

That’s Passion for you: Addiction without those nasty side effects! Because passion is within, it doesn’t have those, for passion is nothing but an addiction that has been mastered by the addict, who has now become an adept…  Yeah: he or she adapted to addiction, thus rendering it safe and totally counteracting the side effects.

Side effects are things you don’t want to get out. Years ago, I already used the above image for something else, and loved it tremendously, especially for those eyes (Yep, eyes again). I mean, Nicole Kidman is a great actress, but I never was more  awestruck by her eyes than on this image. Funny to see I now have an opportunity to work with her yet again. But back to the side effects again: they are that which spills over into the external, if an addict can’t self-contain his passion. But rather than trying to get the patient to deal with it in the way that works best, doctors try to attenuate and / or contain the side effects of the addiction. They do that using drugs, but notice how drugs is an ambiguous word: it pertains to both the stuff that creates the addiction, and the stuff they use to diminish the side effects… Huh, figures: if they are that close then drugs can all have side effects, and that means cascade failure of the entire mechanism if enough combinations create a chain reaction. The only radical cure then is either going cold turkey, or kicking the bucket altogether.

But dying is a slippery proposition: you’ve got virtually dying, which is called a successful cold turkey, and really dying which would be the less favorable variation. Same for overdosing, which is a lot more like hot turkey: give in all you want, thereby totally dumbing down the specific receptors for a given addiction. Here too we have virtually overdosing, which leaves us with a 3D tangible result, and really overdosing, which leaves a less persistent 3D result generally. But either way, the addiction should be contained after that. Nice and symmetrical, don’t you think? Just like Nature….

But is virtually overdosing a mechanism that can be trusted to deliver results? Well, I must say my experiences with it are quite recent, at least those I realised, but then again I may have kicked that bucket once or twice before I knew I did. Point is that I’m still alive, so your argument is invalid.

And I must say, once you beat the addiction and turn it into a passion that way, life sure feels a lot better: no more anxiety to get your next shot, because you know you already have all that it takes to be completely high on your particular poison. Merely thinking of it will instantly create that gratifying sensation, because your neural network has been rerouted to facilitate the dumbing down of the various receptors. Nature adapts, always…

And apart from the anxiety about getting your next shot, there is the knowledge you don’t need it anyway. Just like some people can completely  flip out on a single joint, others like myself and a colleague I spoke to today experience zero effects from the seven leaved plant. It seems we have no passion for it, and thus cannot get addicted to it anyway. But then this does call for a bottom line again, sort of like the riddle about the kleptomaniac and the nymphomaniac. Do you know the difference? It’s not about haves and have-nots, but rather about having and being had….

How to tell addiction from passion: does it control  you, or do you control it?

Nity nite, bedbugs….

Dre’