There’s something oddly comforting about cattle mutilations, isn’t there? No? Just me? Cows mysteriously and clinically slaughtered, no footprints, tire tracks or evidence of human involvement at all. Like the cows were painlessly Raptured from this stinking Earth and their own servitude that only leads to slaughter by different means. The corpse left there decaying in the son, but their bodies hollowed out by draining, lying there empty and bloodless.
There’s something quite undeniable about the possibility of just… disappearing. You wouldn’t need any reasons, no tragedy or story to worry your family with, you can just – poof! – drain your whole body of all its essence and leave an empty husk in the sand to be discovered by an Idaho rancher.
My continued battle with my own mental health continued as before in 2025. I continue to believe that I don’t actually have depression, I’m just rationally reacting to capitalism and the medication I take is only designed to dampen my realisation of the entire world system. I’m not crazy, it’s just that the system sucks! I frequently get myself into a material reality that I believe renders the antidepressants more of a hinderance than a help – I have decided to blame them entirely for both my difficulty getting out of bed in the morning and my ‘portly’ figure – so frequently try and get off them. I tried to cold turkey that bitch in 2022 – a real ‘How the fuck was that three years ago??’ thing here – with pretty disastrous results on both my mental health and my dating life (so me not getting enough fanny is another thing that’s 100% antidepressants’ fault!!). This year, I tried a more formal route and told the doctors that I’d like to phase citalopram out of my bloodstream. I was on 40mg a day, basically the maximum. I phased that down to 30mg a day. OK, we cool, this is all looking good, I’ll be out of this capitalist straightjacket soon. Then I went down to 20mg a day.
And my whole world collapsed in on itself.
Fuck my brain, seriously. It was far worse than that 2022 cold turkey experiment, which scientifically I don’t understand. I suddenly became an Oracle, I could clearly see into the future, and the future suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks! I saw the places that world leaders (well, one world leader in particular) were dragging the world. I saw the logical end goals of every reactionary and oppressive political move. I saw the dialectical contradictions of the funding of overseas massacres coupled with the increased marginalisation of refugees and asylum seekers. I saw this increased victimisation leading to the complete eradication of my line of work. I saw my own, meaningless, worthless life continue on infinitely, and I rationally decided that there would be only one way of stopping the spiral downward.
I went back to 30mg a day, and also referred myself to some therapy. I realised that this therapy would just be more imperialist psychobabble designed to make me simply stop questioning things, that without proper structural change all it could ever do was convince me to not care about capitalism’s inherent evils. But, hey, if I don’t try it, how can I properly complain about it!
It still hasn’t started yet, but I’ve had two assessments over the phone. They asked me if I knew where I could go for help if I was seriously considering suicide, and I had to explain that… Why on Earth would I do that? Do you have any idea how big a decision suicide is?? It’s not like buying an exercise bike, where there’s definite arguments against that you really should consider (mate, after buying that new armchair from the charity shop a few months back? Where the fuck are you fitting an exercise bike?). I already know all the arguments against it. There’s no helpline to a stranger who will convince me otherwise! If I’ve decided to kill myself, I’ve decided to kill myself! It’s because I have thought long and hard and have come to the conclusion that suicide is definitely the best option! And you’re asking me “Do you know where you can go to be talked out of it?” I don’t want to be talked out of it! I know for a fact that the other person isn’t going to listen to my point of view, and is going to say that I’m making a mistake, even when I’m clearly not! I’m not going to open up to a clearly biased ‘devil’s advocate’ to try and fuck up my big plans despite being privy to essentially none of the evidence!
OK, cool, they said. We’ll put you forward for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, yeah?
Samia’s wonderful third album seems to find similar perverse calm in the absence of things, in the ideas of unexplained disappearences and of bodies being drained. ‘Bloodless’ is sadly a bit of a victim of the ‘2025 Tax’. The stats will show a huge drop off from the placing of her last album, but that’s largely because of the field’s increased average quality this year. It’s not as good an album as ‘Honey’, sure, mainly due to it not even touching that album’s sheer amount of stone cold bangers. But it’s still an incredibly beautiful and poignant look at the ways we are forced to twist and distort our very being and identity to the whims of others, until we are left spiritually empty.
Oh, and bloodless.
2023 #7 (-27)
That’s what I’m talking about. The dumb users only rate it 76, because they’re fucking idiots who don’t know what’s good for them.
See? Leave this to the professionals, kid.
Necessary Evil 