Here is the news…
Whimsical blog of #stroke survivor credited with 38,000% increase in lookups for ‘apoplectic’: https://t.co/jNgTaCxKx1#Trump @VanityFair https://t.co/Tat9SOhy97
— Ricky Monahan Brown (@ricky_ballboy) November 2, 2017
[Is this more FAKE NEWS?!?! Read on to find out where Stroke Bloke’s going with this…]
Of course it’s Fake News. Apoplectic Me is nothing if not Of The Zeitgeist.
BREAKING! The Collins Word of the Year 2017 is… FAKE NEWS 📰 https://t.co/zPFXYBvXzb #CollinsWOTY #WordOfTheYear pic.twitter.com/3vFeQNToPl
— Collins Dictionary (@CollinsDict) November 2, 2017
And you don’t get much more Zeitgeisty than apoplexy. This is the trigger for the spike in curiosity about apoplexy:
It makes sense, I suppose, that apoplexy – unconsciousness or incapacity resulting from a cerebral haemorrhage or stroke – has entered the language as a word describing Trumpian rage. I’ve written previously about the emotional lability arising from my haemorrhage stroke. Uncontrollable rage is certainly a common symptom, whether it arises from scrambled connections, the grieving for what is lost, or some combination of these and other factors.
As time passed, and I practiced meditation and rearranged my priorities, the apoplexy – extreme anger – faded.
But just like a lottery winner, my background level of anger slowly returned to something around its baseline – somewhere between a lottery winner and a paraplegic and quadriplegic – as time passed. But then if you’re a long-suffering reader of the blog, you probably noticed that already.
Most mornings since last Tuesday, though, I’ve tended to learn six apoplexy-inducing things before breakfast.
What does one even do with that? With mass shooters, with wilfully ignorant Foreign Secretaries, with tax avoiders, with fascists jailing elected politicians, with buccaneering Brexiteers, with Auntie Beeb?
Well, withdraw into art, obviously.
I’m a citizen. politics is the machine I pay for to manage my life – we all own every single one of those dudes
— Sadenia Eddi Reader (@eddireader) November 6, 2017
And leave the irony of the context of that remark well alone.
So in the past few days I’ve been to
- Edinburgh’s beautiful Central Library to hear a librarian from the National Library of Ireland talk about 140 years of the Library with particular reference to its relationships with W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney. The presentation was organised by Edinburgh City Libraries in association with the Consulate of Ireland in Edinburgh. That’s the Consulate of Ireland, a small to medium-sized independent Celtic country in the North Atlantic.
- The beautiful Scottish Poetry Library to hear a discussion of the work of the war poet Wilfred Owen, and how it developed during his time in Edinburgh as a patient of the Craiglockhart War Hospital for Officers alongside Siegfried Sassoon suffering from shell shock 100 years ago.
Amid talk of ’17, interesting to hear talk of how food shortages were beginning, and the populace were being told that all would be well.
— Ricky Monahan Brown (@ricky_ballboy) November 3, 2017
Apparently, 1917 was pretty rough, too.
- Catholic Action playing a storming set at Sneaky Pete’s on the Cowgate. At least that was unreservedly joyous.
So all in all, I guess I’m doing well.
