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meandmybumble · 7 years

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My head is a terrifyingly dangerous place at the minute. I am not even slightly ok.

Everything has snowballed and instead of everything in the world giving me anxiety and fear that I can kind of cope with and ignore by obliviously entering into a self destructive dissociative phase, I am so absolutely crippled by fear and “what ifs.”

I am so scared that I am “mental” and that every single bad thing that has happened to me (and let’s be frank my entire life has been a series of damaging, traumatising events) is a result of my mental-ness and that I deserve for those things to have happened. I’m terrified of that. I can’t explain how terrified I am. Not just because of how it will make me see myself but because then others will also think I am just a mental case who makes the bad things happen.

Obviously because I am definitely clearly crazy, obsessing over being crazy isn’t enough. I am plagued with worry and fear stressing that maybe I am not even mental at all and I am inventing all of this for attention and drama (two things I hate and strive to avoid more than anything) and I am paralysed with the fear of looking overdramatic and ridiculously humiliated when a Dr of some sort tells me I am absolutely fine and that I’m inventing all of this.

I am also terrified of being misunderstood and misdiagnosed by Drs because my head is so messy I can’t organise my thoughts enough to give accurate symptoms and examples of these plus also the fear of things not actually being true and that I’ve invented them. Which then leads me to be terrified that I’ll be given the wrong medication or the wrong course of treatment and that I will not only never get better but that I’ll get worse. This has lead me to overanalyse every single thing I do and say. Am I acting normal? Is this a symptom? Am I pushing people away? Fuck sake alesia stop rambling on incessantly because nobody cares…WHY ARE YOU STILL TALKING… YOURE MAKING A FOOL OF YOURSELF AND YOU WONDER WHY YOU ARE NOT WORTHY OF LOVE AND AFFECTION…JUST SHUT UP!

I am equally terrified of both being crazy and of not being crazy that I am abso-fucking-lutely making myself crazy/crazier than I have ever been.

I am terrified of being diagnosed with a mental illness most likely brought on by “childhood neglect and abuse” because even though I had a bad childhood, I was loved in the best way my parents could given everything that was going on (mostly my dad’s drug addiction and paranoid schizophrenia and the stillbirth of my baby brother that neither of my parents recovered from) but to ever have to tell my mum that or to have her Google whatever diagnosis I may or may not get and read that breaks my heart. I am scared of how my mum will react to my mental-ness because I don’t ever want her to feel like it is her fault that I am a terrible crazy person because it is my fault, my battle, my guilt and my shame to bear- nobody else’s. I’m also terrified of having to be completely dependent on medication because I am terrified my mum will think less of me as a person and because I will feel less of me as a person. Can you tell from my history of child neglect and abuse that all I have ever wanted is real love and approval from my mother???

I am scared that I am a terrible, toxic mental case and that I am poisonous to people around me. I am currently going through yet another phase of ignoring everyone that cares about me cos I don’t want to break them, bore them, annoy them. Also because I just cannot physically believe on any level that anybody actually genuinely cares about me purely because they just fucking care. My friends are telling me they’re struggling with things or need help/advice and I can’t even bear to be there for them because I am terrified to absolutely epic proportions that my thoughts/opinions/advice are mental and not healthy or helpful at all and I’m scared of hurting my friends or putting them into bad situations because they listened to my mental advice.

I’m scared that I will lose my job. I like this job and the people. But I am scared that either I will convince myself everyone hates me and quit feeling quite justified because everyone treat me like dirt or I will have some sort of a breakdown on shift in front of everyone and everyone will see how mental I am. I’m scared that if I get diagnosed with some condition or other that it will (rightly so) make my bosses see me differently if I tell them. Yet I am also worried that if I was to keep it a secret I’d be lying and deceiving them. I’m struggling with that right now- I feel like I’m deceiving them by not being honest (not in detail but ya know addressing the fact I’m clearly going through a dark, spiralling mental breakdown and damaging identity crisis)

As if worrying about everything isn’t bad enough. I am worrying about everything and also things I am imagining and then to really make sure I’m suffering as much as I deserve to suffer, I’m worrying about every single possible outcome/eventuality and even every single impossible outcome and eventuality.

I can’t make it stop. I’m so scared of feeling like this for the next X amount of months because the NHS massively massively fails people with mental health issues. I went to the Drs on Monday because I’m at such a LOW DESTRUCTIVE POINT that I’ve finally stopped ignoring and pretending that I don’t need help. I need help and I need it pronto. So the dr gave me absolutely no advice or information, no reassurance, no fucking drugs and told me he’d send an “urgent referral” I can only presume this is to a psychiatry team to assess my crazy properly. Only I have to wait up to 4 weeks and if I don’t receive anything my dr will send another URGENT referral and I am, again, to wait up to 4 more weeks in the highly probable case that this letter never shows up. And then it could be anywhere between weeks and months to the actual appointment date I’m terrified I’ll never actually receive. Last year I was referred for therapy and I’m still waiting for that letter.

I’m worried that I will feel like this, so full and heavy with worry and fear that I can barely get out of bed or leave my house, for the months it is probably going to take for me to be seen. I’m scared of feeling this way for so long because I literally cannot cope and it has only been 6 days. But then I’m scared that I won’t feel this way when the appt comes. What if I feel fine and happy and cannot even recall the bad things that happen/that I think that mean I can’t live any form of life? This just reinforces my fear of not actually being crazy at all. What if I convince myself I’m fine and normal and don’t even go to the appointment?

I’m scared. I’m terrified. I’m already picking apart every part of my “personality” because I do not know who I am but that certain aspects of my personality are actually just intense symptoms that I never knew were symptoms such as my crippling empathy for everyone and everything or the bouts of uncontrollable intense passion I have for things.

I’m scared that I’ve been like this forever so I rack my brain constantly all day every day trying to pinpoint a time I was normal. Trying to figure out if things “trigger” my episodes or if I just live continuously changing between episodes without any normality at all. Trying to work out if I’m normal right now or if this is some sort of episode. And yes, obviously this makes me terrified that I AM ABSOLUTELY 100% NORMAL STOP TRYING TO MAKE YOURSELF CRAZY YOU ARE A TERRIBLE ATTENTION SEEKING DRAMA QUEEN.

I just can’t stop being scared and worrying about every single little thing to the point I am inventing things to drain all my energy worrying about as if I don’t have enough genuine “normal” worries I should be focussing on and fixing.

And then on top of all of this- this post just being a mere few of the things flying round my head- I am absolutely paralysed with fear that I will get Annie taken away from me. I hate myself for ever going to the Drs or for actually telling people what I was going through last week because now I am accountable. Now I have to take steps to find out whether or not I’m absolutely bonkers and they are going to take my only piece of love and happiness away from me because I am bad for her. I am a bad mum and I am going to destroy her mind. Which then leads to me being absolutely certain that I am bad for her and that she would be better off with anyone other than me.

How do I make this stop? I can’t stop. All of this and more is spinning round literally every waking moment. Every day I wake up and think “this is it I’ve hit rock bottom” and then I break even more and find more things to worry about. I am scared of what rock bottom actually will mean for me.

#mental health #mental breakdown #broken #worry #fear #stress

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republicstandard · 6 years

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Book Review: Homo Americanus: A Child of the Postmodern Age

We exist in a strange moment in time. Ideologues who revere and preach Communism sip on their Unicorn Frappuccinos in Starbucks and instant message their comrades via Facebook using their iPhones. Those who wish to live in a world created by the ‘resistance’ of neo-Marxism, with its foundations cemented in the fortune 500, would see tradition and spirituality torn asunder and replaced with a secular, monolithic hellhole where anti-establishment rhetoric is censored, and our daily lives are monitored.

If you have questioned how and where this train of thought emerged, look no further than Dr. Tomislav Sunic’s Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, published by Arktos. The book features essays from Sunic himself, evolutionary psychologist Dr Kevin MacDonald, and philosopher Alain De Benoist. MacDonald's book The Culture of Critique made waves exploring how Jews initiated and advanced a number of important intellectual and political movements during the 20th century. DeBenoist is the leading philosopher and voice of the French Nouvelle Droite a European school of political thought that emerged in France during the late 1960s. Suffice to say, Homo Americanus has guests of great pedigree!

Born in Croatia 1953, Tomislav Sunic is a prolific writer. A former professor of Political Science and translator, he has served in various diplomatic positions with the Croatian government. He achieved his undergraduate degree in French and English Language and Literature during the late 70s, where he was exposed to the radical ideas of the European New Right permeating out of France, guided by Alain De Benoist. Sunic has a pleasingly direct style, and has proven himself as an important voice and intellectual for the modern European New Right. He holds a doctorate in Political Science from the University of California and has authored publications such as Against Democracy and Equality (2011), and Titans Are in Town: A Novella and Accompanying Essays (2017). He currently resides in Zagreb, where he continues to work as a freelance writer, including as a contributor on political semiotics and the spirit of Communist totalitarianism to the French quarterly Catholica.

Sunic investigates Americanism, the patriotic values of the United States, as it has evolved from its Puritanical roots -via post-war Frankfurt School psychology- into a monolithic, bland consumerist culture obsessed with consuming, rights, and privileges. These are the characteristics of a new type of man Sunic names Homo Americanus. The Puritans sought to develop a promised land for all people by the people, without aristocracy or regality; a rejection of the Old World. As Benoist states in his postscript:

“They also wanted to create a new society that would regenerate mankind. They wanted to create a new promised land that would become the model of the universal republic. This bible-inspired theme, based on the idea of the ‘chosen’ America… a leitmotiv throughout American history.”

The legacy of the Judeo-Christian Puritans that still lingers in modern day USA has resulted in the soft takeover of US politics and foreign policy by the Jewish lobby. This takeover can be identified in the obscurity of the Iraq war (2003) and the ongoing conflict In Syria. As Sunic states, the Puritans had a culture obsessed with a “Judaic rationalization of religious life”; Benoist reminds us “Governor John Cotton suggested the adoption of Hebrew as the official language for the former British colonies”. This has precluded a revival and love for the original settlers’ racial and national past, as Benoist mentions;

“The problem is not so much that Americans ‘have no history, but rather that they do not wish to have one… the past is reminiscent of their European roots”.

Those who were once European, born and descended, have now turned their back on Europe due to;

“[t]he massive influx of non-European immigrants as well as the persistence of the pseudo-Marxist and neo-liberal role models of ethnic diversity who still frame the discourse in American universities”.

Today, American society is characterized by the quasi-dictatorship of secular ‘empathy' and the market. The mere mention of ‘wrongthink’ has become taboo in public discourse, thus inhibiting open dialogue surrounding political, religious or other controversial issues. As a result of this hyper-politically correct culture, right-leaning intellectuals such as Sunic, McDonald, and Benoist are ridiculed and libeled as they present objective criticism. This type of censorship has played a central role in the creation of Homo Americanus; a man with shallow thoughts and desires with a false smile plastered on his face. Critics of this false idol is met with the cold shoulder at best. At worst, ideas that harm the Golden Calf of Homo Americanus is shut down and branded as anti-semitic, racist, and xenophobic, the character of the critic is assassinated, o the person of the critic is sentenced to prison time. Consider the sentences as a result of Holocaust denial, antisemitism, and xenophobia, meted out for the act of posing unanswerable questions.

This is where Sunic begins to draw similarities between Homo Americanus and his “twin brother" Homo Sovieticus, a man that emerged from the dissolution of the Communist bloc in eastern Europe and Russia.

Communism: a utopian make-believe that in reality could only function via a system of constant propaganda and censorship of anti-establishment rhetoric. What is worrisome about Homo Americanus, is that he refuses to recognize the lie of the Capitalist system which promises utopia as Communism did, but defines it differently - individual freedom. However, both capitalism and communism are tacitly designed to kill individualism. In communism this is achieved by removing all personal possessions and spirituality. A person's value depends on how much they can produce and contribute to the system. In capitalism, this is achieved via a monoculture of consumerism and guilt; it is secular in nature, and decadence & degeneracy are lauded.

Unbeknown to him, Homo Sovieticus was a slave to conformity. He abided by the stringent rules and regulations of the Soviet Union, and had no loyalty to his peers. He had his nationhood eradicated and subsequently became a citizen of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics exclusively. Similarly, in the Americanized West, we are told that nationhood and pride in our ethnic backgrounds are primitive and wrong. We are told that we are citizens of the world who live in an open society. We are told that diversity will make us stronger, despite rising racial tensions worldwide. Benoist expands on this further;

“Capitalism cannot transform the world into a vast market… unless the planet first becomes atomized and the world renounces all forms of symbolic imagination...for the logic of profit and continuous accumulation”.

His point being the inherent necessity for capitalism to erase borders and remove all nations’ history in order to create a one-world market rather than a world of nations. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Under Communism, a person was in serious trouble once he put the system or its executors into question. Recall the treatment of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist, historian, and short story writer. He was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and Communism. He helped to raise global awareness of its Gulag forced labor camp system, and who, in 1945, accused of ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’ based on comments written in letters to a personal friend, was imprisoned for 9 years. The epic Gulag Archipelago was the result, a stark critique of Communist power, and the human soul itself. Though the modern gulag is digital rather than Siberian, those who question the authority of the American left, are exiled. Recall the deplatforming of Alex Jones and InfoWars. Though the implications are not as severe (yet) the more power the American left gains, the harder they will come down on dissidents. Just as did the Soviets.

There is a striking similarity between these two systems in attitude to education and intellectuals. Under Communism professors who miraculously escaped from the purges and continued to work were treated as low-caste. In a society like this, those who do not produce are useless as their material usefulness does not exist - a produce or perish mentality. Students were seen as potential dissidents to the communist regime, as professors might fill their minds with dangerous ideologies. Meanwhile, laborers would be in a fog to the state propaganda and despise the lazy students educating themselves on the backs of the taxpayers.

Under Capitalism, true professors are laughed at as lifetime academics who couldn’t make it in the ‘real world’; the butt of a joke. Why struggle against a politically compromised academia, when one could use your intellect to profit from it, or choose another career path entirely? The motives are different but the same principle is inherent in both systems - that which is not material is not worth respect. Such philosophy is detrimental to the soul and has crippling consequences for us as both material and spiritual beings.

The proletariat in the land-of-the-not-so-free buy into the state propaganda via news networks and social media, thus feeding the system that serves to only benefit the so-called elites. To paraphrase Sunic, the American system has succeeded in many facets of communism that the Soviets failed in - fooling the masses into feeding the system that wants to destroy them.

In short, Homo Americanus is an excellent exploration into the evolution of Americanism, from its Puritanical roots into the Global Superpower we know today. In this review, I have barely scratched the surface of the very many talking points of the eminent thinkers Sunic, McDonald and De Benoist.

Sunic explores many other facets of Americanism such as American foreign policy; how it polices the world and interferes in other countries’ domestic politics in order to further its own interests, its techno-scientific obsession with progress, and America’s important role in the future of all European peoples worldwide.

Required reading for all interesting in the Dissident Right and its enemies.

Homo Americanus is published by Arktos Media, and is available for order now through their website.

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flyinghigh716 · 7 years

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Bargain & Daily Book Deals 08/02/17

Today on Amazon's Gold Box, get up to 50% Off on Adidas MLS Fan Gear, 20% Off on a Lenox Butterfly Meadow 12-Piece Bowl Set and 67% Off on a Lenox Butterfly Meadow 18-Piece Dinnerware Set, Service for 6.

My Bargain Picks

No Way Down: Life and Death on K2 ($0.99 Kindle), by Graham Bowley [HarperCollins]

No Way Down is both a gripping read and a clear-eyed investigation of the hubris, politics, and bad luck that brought on one of the worst disasters in modern mountaineering history. - Michael Kodas, author of High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed

Graham Bowley's No Way Down does a great job of putting you on the mountain. It is a refreshingly unadorned account of the true brutality of climbing K2, where heroes emerge and egos are stripped down, and the only thing achieving immortality is the cold ruthless mountain. - Norman Ollestad, author of Crazy for the Storm

In the tradition of Into Thin Air and Touching the Void, No Way Down by New York Times reporter Graham Bowley is the harrowing account of the worst mountain climbing disaster on K2, second to Everest in height but second to no peak in terms of danger. From tragic deaths to unbelievable stories of heroism and survival, No Way Down is an amazing feat of storytelling and adventure writing, and, in the words of explorer and author Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the closest you can come to being on the summit of K2 on that fateful day.

Open Road One Day Deals & Promos

Kimberly's Flight: The Story of Captain Kimberly Hampton, America's First Woman Combat Pilot Killed in Battle ($2.99 Kindle), by Anna Simon and Ann Hampton

US Army Captain Kimberly N. Hampton was living her dream: flying armed helicopters in combat and commanding D Troop, 1st Squadron, 17th Cavalry, the armed reconnaissance aviation squadron of the 82nd Airborne Division. An all-American girl from a small Southern mill town, Hampton was a top scholar, student body president, ROTC battalion commander, and highly ranked college tennis player. In 1998, she was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the army. Driven by determination and ambition, Hampton rapidly rose through the ranks in the almost all-male bastion of military aviation to command a combat aviation troop.

On January 2, 2004, Captain Hampton was flying an OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopter above Fallujah, Iraq, in support of a raid on an illicit weapons marketplace, searching for an elusive sniper on the rooftops below. A little past noon, her helicopter was wracked by an explosion. A heat-seeking surface-to-air missile had knocked off the helicopter's tail boom. The helicopter crashed, killing Hampton.

Kimberly's Flight is the story of Captain Hampton's exemplary life. This story is told through nearly fifty interviews and her own e-mails to family and friends, and is entwined with her mother's narrative of loving and losing a child.

More Daily Deals

Horrorstor ($1.99 Kindle), by Grady Hendrix [Quirk Books] Shelf Awareness for Readers Starred Review

Praise for the author: National treasure Grady Hendrix follows his classic account of a haunted IKEA-like furniture showroom, Horrorstr (2014), with a nostalgia-soaked ghost story, My Best Friend's Exorcism.-The Wall Street Journal

A traditional haunted house story in a thoroughly contemporary setting, Horrorstr comes packaged in the form of a glossy mail order catalog, complete with product illustrations, a home delivery order form, and a map of Orsk's labyrinthine showroom. It's a treat for fans of The Evil Dead or Zombieland, complete with affordable solutions for better living.-Kirkus Reviews.

Something strange is happening at the Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland, Ohio. Every morning, employees arrive to find broken Kjerring bookshelves, shattered Glans water goblets, and smashed Liripip wardrobes. Sales are down, security cameras reveal nothing, and store managers are panicking.

To unravel the mystery, three employees volunteer to work a nine-hour dusk-till-dawn shift. In the dead of the night, they'll patrol the empty showroom floor, investigate strange sights and sounds, and encounter horrors that defy the imagination.

More Bargain Picks

A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler ($1.99 Kindle), by Jason Roberts [HarperCollins] Publishers Weekly Starred Review

He was known simply as the Blind Traveler - a solitary, sightless adventurer who, astonishingly, fought the slave trade in Af-rica, survived a frozen captivity in Siberia, hunted rogue elephants in Ceylon, and helped chart the Australian outback. James Holman (1786-1857) became one of the greatest wonders of the world he so sagaciously explored, triumphing not only over blindness but crippling pain, poverty, and the interference of well-meaning authorities (his greatest feat, a circumnavigation of the globe, had to be launched in secret). Once a celebrity, a bestselling author, and an inspiration to Charles Darwin and Sir Richard Francis Burton, the charismatic, witty Holman outlived his fame, dying in an obscurity that has endured - until now.

A Sense of the World is a spellbinding and moving rediscovery of one of history's most epic lives. Drawing on meticulous research, Jason Roberts ushers us into the Blind Traveler's uniquely vivid sensory realm, then sweeps us away on an extraordinary journey across the known world during the Age of Exploration. Rich with suspense, humor, international intrigue, and unforgettable characters, this is a story to awaken our own senses of awe and wonder.

The Scribe of Siena: A Novel ($1.99 Kindle), by Melodie Winawer [Simon and Schuster] Library Journal Starred Review; Publishers Weekly Starred Review

Equal parts transporting love story and gripping historical conspiracy, debut author Melodie Winawer takes readers deep into medieval Italy, where the past and present blur and a twenty-first century woman will discover a plot to destroy Siena.

Accomplished neurosurgeon Beatrice Trovato knows that her deep empathy for her patients is starting to impede her work. So when her beloved brother passes away, she welcomes the unexpected trip to the Tuscan city of Siena to resolve his estate, even as she wrestles with grief. But as she delves deeper into her brother's affairs, she discovers intrigue she never imagined-a 700-year-old conspiracy to decimate the city.

After uncovering the journal and paintings of Gabriele Accorsi, the fourteenth-century artist at the heart of the plot, Beatrice finds a startling image of her own face and is suddenly transported to the year 1347. She awakens in a Siena unfamiliar to her, one that will soon be hit by the Plague.

Yet when Beatrice meets Accorsi, something unexpected happens: she falls in love-not only with Gabriele, but also with the beauty and cadence of medieval life. As the Plague and the ruthless hands behind its trajectory threaten not only her survival but also Siena's very existence, Beatrice must decide in which century she belongs.

The Scribe of Siena is the captivating story of a brilliant woman's passionate affair with a time and a place that captures her in an impossibly romantic and dangerous trap-testing the strength of fate and the bonds of love.

Will remind historical fiction readers of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander and Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl EarringLovers of meticulously researched historical fiction and time-travel narratives will be swept away by the spell of medieval Siena (Library Journal, starred review).

Winawer's debut is a detailed historical novel, a multifaceted mystery, and a moving tale of improbable loveWinawer has created a prodigious, vibrant tale of past and present that transports readers and fills in the historical gaps. This is a marvelous work of research and invention (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

May be price matched at eBooks.com, iTunes or Kobo for those needing EPUB.

Please see this post in regards to backing up your books purchased from B&N and this post if you are having problems with the new web design.

All prices current at the time the post is written. Most bargain books remain at their listed price until midnight (each store operates on it's own timezone and schedule), but prices can change at any moment. I have seen prices change within the hour or even minutes after posting.

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ricardosousalemos · 7 years

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Nine Inch Nails: The Fragile (2017 Definitive Edition) / The Fragile: Deviations 1

When Trent Reznor debuted The Fragile, the followup to his star-making The Downward Spiral some five years after that record’s release, comparisons to Pink Floyd’s go-to double album The Wall abounded. For one thing, Reznor tapped that record’s producer, Bob Ezrin, to help sequence from the chaotic collection of tracks he’d assembled. For another, both records were released at the turn of their respective decades, and could be seen as summary statements for much of the music of the ten years that preceded them.

But the most direct point of comparison is the sheer scale of both recordings. No, not their length, but their height, if you will. Years of overfamiliarity might have dulled our appreciation for just how goddamn towering they both sound. The Wall’s two versions of its anthemic introductory track “In the Flesh” and David Gilmour’s soaring solo on “Comfortably Numb” all but demand you look upward to see where the notes are coming from. Reznor and his collaborators—most notably producer Alan Moulder and guest guitarist Adrian Belew—similarly made The Fragile’s songs sound like vertical constructions, piling element on element, often with dizzying rapidity. And in its newly remastered and rereleased incarnation, The Fragile (2017 Definitive Edition), the record scrapes the sky like never before.

“The Fragile” and “Just Like You Imagined,” highlights of the album’s first disc (thinking it of a CD is a hard habit to break after nearly twenty years), are two of The Fragile’s most effective moments in this regard. Shambling into existence with a slow, steady drum beat that sounds like rattling chains, the title track works its way through three iterations of its chorus, the sole lyric of which is the disarmingly direct promise “I won’t let you fall apart”: first softly, near the bottom of Reznor’s vocal register; then at an ear-splitting, double-tracked shout, accompanied by cinematic synths; and finally with multi-tracked, major-key harmonies that turn the phrase into something close to a prayer. “Just Like You Imagined,” arguably Reznor’s finest moment as a composer, picks up where “The Fragile” leaves off, using that same celestial-chorus harmony construction and prominent cameos from Bowie sidemen Mike Garson on piano and Belew on guitar to create a wordless epic, spiraling upward in volume and intensity.

Which is not to say that The Fragile is all lacerating art-rock bombast. On the Dr. Dre-assisted “Even Deeper” and the late-album high point “The Big Comedown,” Reznor crafts a methodical industrial robo-funk that evokes deep-sea sonar pings and a malfunctioning robot, respectively. “Into the Void,” a direct Black Sabbath reference, juxtaposes the very NIN sentiment “Tried to save myself but my self keeps slipping away” with very un-NIN “ooh-wah-ah-ah” backing vocals. Its follow-up, “Where Is Everybody?,” is a sludgy pelvic thrust with a title cribbed from “The Twilight Zone” and a delightfully dark doggerel chorus: “Pleading and needing and bleeding and breeding and feeding, exceeding…Trying and lying, defying, denying, crying and dying.” Both are reminiscent of first-disc standout “The Wretched,” a relentless throb with a chorus that bellows “Now you know this is what it feels like” (itself an answer to “How does it feel?,” the refrain of Reznor’s collaboration with industrial supergroup Pigface “Suck”) and the almost comically spiteful line “The clouds will part and the sky cracks open and God Himself will reach his fucking arm through just to push you down, just to hold you down.” Misery loves comedy!

But it loves empathy too, and this is where The Fragile stands out from NIN’s catalog. On tracks like “The Fragile” (that “I won’t let you fall apart” chorus, the climactic assertion “It’s something I have to do—I was there too/Before everything else, I was like you”), “I’m Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally,” and “We’re in This Together” (the proof is in the song titles), Reznor dismantles his reputation for solipsistic self-loathing and outwardly aimed anger. There’s plenty of both, sure; album lowlight “Starfuckers, Inc.,” for example, is familiar to students of the alt-rock gossip circuit of the period as Trent’s kiss-off to his estranged former protégé Marilyn Manson, while their subsequent rapprochement led to a video where they teamed up against a Courtney Love lookalike. But in the main, The Fragile depicts an artist desperate to preserve the few connections he still has in the face of ever-growing substance abuse (this was the final album he’d record before getting clean and sober) and crippling grief (the record contains a dedication to his grandmother, a beloved figure who’d recently died). Whether positive or negative, the roiling, confessional tumult of the lyrics is reflected in the monumental sound, and vice versa.

The cumulative approach is at its clearest in “10 Miles High.” Cut from the CD version of the album to trim minutes off its already elephantine running time, the song had previously been relegated to B-side status, appearing only on the relatively obscure original vinyl edition, where both space and pacing permitted it to remain. Heard it in its proper context at last, “10 Miles High” comes across as the emotional and sonic key to the whole album: titanic in scale, unpredictably varied in its dynamic range, and absolutely annihilating in its despair and rage.

Beginning with a tinkling synth shimmer and distant-sounding vocals that murmur “I’m getting closer/I’m getting closer/All the time” (a callback to the band’s biggest hit, of course), the song gains ominous strength with loping, pounding drums and an assertive bassline. A repetitive, sour-sounding guitar joins in just before initial chorus bursts through the murk: Reznor shouts “I tried to get so high/I made it ten miles high,” each “high” echoing like a sonic exclamation point through the crunch of the guitar and drums that sound like they’ve been covered in cast iron.

Then the song peels back to a low hum, with a sardonically jaunty guitar strum and Reznor’s incomprehensible whispering dimly audible in the background. When the chorus and its repeated proclamations of miles-high self-medication come back, everything sounds muffled and choked rather than crisp and piercing. “I swore to God I would never turn into you,” Reznor’s muted voice screams, his disappointment in his failure dripping from every word like venom. The song ends as quietly as it began, with Reznor chanting the words “tear it all down, tear it all down” over and over until everything cuts off. As a lyrical and musical chronicle of complete and total personal failure, it’s peerless in the Nine Inch Nails catalog; only Broken’s scabrous “Gave Up” and The Downward Spiral’s title track (a song whose sonic toolbox “10 Miles High” raids extensively, but which somehow sounds optimistic in comparison despite its suicidal subject matter) come close.

All of this makes The Fragile: Deviations 1 a truly perplexing proposition. Reznor’s on record as saying that the original album emerged from perhaps the darkest period of his adult life, but that the recording process was a life-affirming period in retrospect. He’s teased a revamped re-release for the better part of the past decade, up to and including a more straightforward Apple Music-exclusive instrumental version a few years back on which several new tracks were debuted. Deviations 1 (Reznor’s obsessive ambition makes that numeral worth noting) is the fulfillment of this promise. Less a remix than a recreation, it’s meticulously constructed by Reznor and his longtime collaborator Atticus Ross from the existing recordings, stripping away the vocals and introducing alternate takes and brand-new songs culled from dozens of unused tracks. The result is a complement to the original, but not necessarily a compliment; its deviations are worth exploring for the curious and the completists, but they’re ultimately less than the sum of the additional parts.

Most of Deviations’ deviations, and certainly the best of them, are structural. By adding the new songs, a dozen in total, Reznor is able to seed melodic and rhythmic ideas for more thoroughgoing use later in the album. This, granted, is nothing new for Nine Inch Nails: The plinked-out keyboard hook at the end of “Closer” returns as the central melody of The Downward Spiral’s title track; “The Frail” is an acoustic work-through of the chorus of “The Fragile”; and “La Mer” introduces the playful melody later used to punishing effect in “Into the Void.” Reznor returns to this well with at least a couple of the new additions: “Missing Pieces,” inserted prior to “We’re in This Together,” serves as a prologue that introduces several of its key sounds, while “Last Heard From” revives them just prior to the album’s final stretch.

But Deviations’ experiment with musical foreshadowing goes a bit deeper. On the original, the breakbeat-and-guitar bedrock of “Starfuckers, Inc.” was a sonic anomaly, making the already dubious song even tougher to take in context. Here, new tracks “One Way to Get There,” “Taken,” and “+Appendage,” plus the skittering direct lead-in “Feeders,” insert that Atari Teenage Riot/Earthling-era Bowie sound at multiple points throughout the record, which goes a long way to making “Starfuckers” easier to stomach. Yes, it’s still a less-good “The Perfect Drug” with a goon-squad chorus, but at least it can’t sneak up on you anymore. (The inclusion of the single version’s pisstake coda—a sample of Paul Stanley shouting “GOODNIGHT!” at a crowd that begins chanting “WE WANT KISS! WE WANT KISS!” in response—indicates Reznor’s aware of the song’s goofball nature.)

More interesting still is the intermission that Reznor inserts between the original break between discs one and two. In its original incarnation, the first half ends with the synth-Floyd soundscape “The Great Below,” and the second half begins with “The Way Out is Through,” a tear-down-the-sky (literally: the lyrics in the vocal version prominently feature the phrase “the heavens fall”) behemoth of distortion and vocal reverb. Deviations tosses in a trio of tracks as a palate cleanser between these two showstoppers: an open-ended guitar-and-drum loop called “Not What It Seems Like,” a wobbly bass-and-percussion number named “White Mask,” and “The New Flesh,” moved up in the track listing from its place on the original vinyl, its crescendoes serving as a sort of precursor to the high-volume “The Way Out Is Through.” Given the concrete purpose they serve, perhaps it’s unsurprising that they’re the best of the the new tracks. They are nevertheless bested by “Was It Worth It?,” a newbie crammed in amongst the party jams “Into the Void” and “Where Is Everybody?” Between a handful of squalling guitar lines and a keyboard melody that sounds like a rotating prism, it has more hooks than the opening scene of Hellraiser.

Yet even at a dozen strong, the new tracks don’t fully tell Deviations’ tale. That task falls to the now all-instrumental versions of the original songs, few of which hold up when compared to the originals. In some cases this comes down to dubious editing choices: “Pilgrimage (Alternate Version)” strips away its precursor’s “Tusk”-style marching-band section. Closing track “Ripe With Decay (Instrumental)” adds a backbeat, stripping much of the power of the entropic original. Most bafflingly, “10 Miles High (Instrumental)” builds up the regular version’s secondary guitar riff—played so quietly in the original that its presence seems almost sarcastic, like a mockery of the whole idea of riffs—into a dull cock-rock stomp and strut.

The album’s biggest problem, though, is a lack of editing, not a surfeit. Most of these songs have a pretty reliable melodic template; take out the words, and you’re left with overlong and unvaried segments. Groove-based songs like “Even Deeper,” “Into the Void,” “Where Is Everybody?”, and “The Big Comedown” weather this excess relatively well, since their rhythm-oriented structure has a funk-like momentum that carries them through the surplus sections. More straightforward rockers like “No, You Don’t” or “Please,” however—never the album’s strongest moments—drag noticeably without Reznor’s voice. If you want a metaphor for what’s lost in this new version, the revamped cover—a black, white, and gray David Carson photograph of a waterfall, now denuded of the original’s vibrant red overlay—pretty much says it all.

Reznor and Ross have no shortage of experience with instrumental recordings; indeed, turning The Fragile into an instrumental album merely brings it line with the bulk of the duo’s recorded output over eight years since NIN put out its sprawling collection of soundscape sketches Ghosts I-IV. At the time of the album’s original release, Reznor already had the unjustly forgotten score for the first-person shooter game Quake under his belt, and The Fragile 1.0 has no shortage of instrumentals. This makes the lack of a more stringent editorial hand all the more perplexing. Far too many of Deviations’ freshly vocal-free songs sound like karaoke versions rather than instrumentals that can stand on their own. The result is a listening experience that outstays its welcome on a song-by-song basis, let alone over the course of its massive 150-minute running time.

Fortunately, the originals are still out there. The Fragile arrived a stylistic turning point, emerging at the point where the “alternative” sobriquet fell out of fashion and “indie” achieved dominance. Today, though, reservations about the lyrics’ outré confessionality and the music’s jam-packed, everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink gigantism seem positively quaint. (Don’t care for titanically hyper-produced albums stuffed with uncomfortably intimate and self-mythologizing lyrics about your emotional world falling apart? Tell it to Lemonade.) The Fragile may lack the tightness of Nine Inch Nails’ other highlights: the concise fury of Broken, the inexorable depressive logic of The Downward Spiral, the late-career professionalism of Hesitation Marks. But it takes the emotional distress that gives it its title and transmutes it into something colossal, defiant, and resilient. Listen to it at your strongest or your weakest (and I’ve certainly done both) and it will offer you a sonic signature commensurate with the power of what you feel inside.

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