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Every now and again I find myself in a mental rut wherein everything I see and hear simply reinforces my preconceptions and prejudices. Sadly, any species of happiness is extremely rare when I'm in such a state: predominant emotions include anger, despair and disbelief. I look at the world around me and my confusion and disgust swells in my brain like a malign tumour, pulsing and flexing until it simply must escape by any means possible, and thus I blog. The words on your screen are blister-born, shaped by pressures just behind my forehead and ejected, at times, with fearful force.

This blog has served over the years as my relief valve to the pressure cooker of life lived in a world gone mad. Sometimes it seems as if the words themselves form a tightrope over a gaping chasm of insanity.

There's probably a pill for that. If there isn't, there soon will be.

In fact, that's part of today's nasty cranial carbuncle. We read in the Times Online that there's a good chance my propensity towards laziness and my occasional fits of pique are symptoms of two separate soon-to-be mental disorders, respectively called "sluggish cognitive tempo disorder" and "intermittent explosive disorder". No, I am not making this up.

That last one sounds like diarrhea, doesn't it? I'd suggest that both these "disorders", and the multiplicity of others being crafted, are just that: excrement, shat upon the world not to fertilize big farms, but rather Big Pharma.

This is denied in the article: "One of the reasons we're doing this", says the research director of the American Psychiatric Association, "is that we are concerned about establishing better thresholds of diagnosis for people with a genuine disorder". But by classing every possible combination of emotions and actions as a genuine disorder--see? it says right there on page 743 of the DSM that my whining is actually "negativistic personality disorder"!--what they're really doing is (a) mocking people who actually do suffer from mental illness and (b) providing practically unlimited opportunities for profit. Not your profit, of course, nor mine.

Got no sex drive? That's a problem: sexual arousal disorder. They have blue pills for that, little blue pills that will make you normal. And you want to be normal, don't you? Of course you do. Not wanting to be normal is abnormal, and thus proof of a much more severe underlying mental dysfunction.

Got too much of a sex drive? That's a problem: you're hypersexual. They have pills for that, little red pills that will make you normal. And you want to be normal, don't you? Of course you do, you're a preteen boy in the throes of puberty, and you're scared witless about appearing abnormal to your friends. Hell, you don't even know what "normal" is. Is it "normal" to look at your friend's sister and rip the fly out of your pants? Lately you've even looked at a teacher and ran up the flagpole. That can't be normal.

How long before we're all taking something to level out the hills and valleys of everyday life, so rife as it is with disorders and diseases lurking in every shadow? How long before our every thought is regulated and milked for potential profit? I fear it may not be long at all. Incipient Paranoia Syndrome for sure.

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"C'mere, love, you gotta see this", my wife said from her place on the couch. "This is the saddest thing I've ever seen."

It made me sad, all right. Also almost unbearably angry. As I looked at the children, some appearing to be no more than three years old, dressed in their frippery and finery for a beauty pageant, what I saw was pain in nearly every face. Some of the kids looked as if they were about to burst into tears. Some of them looked like they had just recovered from a bout of crying. It's all too easy to hear hectoring parents: Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about! Smile, damnit! You want to be pretty? You want to win this thing? Well, right now you're ugly. You came in third. Third, after all that money we spent! You're worthless. You're disgusting.

It actually made me nauseous, looking at this kids whose parents were undoubtedly vying for the chance to be America's Ugliest. And that was just looking at their faces. Then I went back and, horror-struck, looked at their clothes. Not for the first time, I felt a shred of sympathy for the passing pedophile. Some of these kids look for all the world like porn stars. What in the almighty hell are their parents thinking? I'll tell you what they're thinking:

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What is it about money that it has utterly pervaded and perverted practically everything our society holds dear? It's all for sale, now. Entertainment, which not all that long ago consisted of imagination plus limited props, is now something like a trillion-dollar a year industry. Real estate, so called because it denotes "real" wealth, is increasingly just another paper-shuffle towards fake prosperity.

We can't be too far off of David Foster Wallace's conceit in Infinite Jest: just imagine the year 2011 being renamed "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment". Think of the market potential! Think of the money! Stop thinking and just buy in, already!

Or we'll force-feed you this here green pill...