Category: depression

return from deep water

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Would that I’d left myself in that water, feeling the cool glacial water lake seep into my bones, weighing me down and slowing pulling me into its depths.

I’ve never loved more and felt more torn away.

Interfered with.

Where is the peace that vacation used to be?

Where are the satoris, the relaxation that comes with not really having anything do in a lovely situation?

The afterglow?

Where’s my goddamned afterglow?

Target: 800 words
Written: 629 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: Brothers Of Earth, CJ Cherryh
Comics: The Crow: Memento Mori 1-4
Music: Lust For Life, Iggy Pop/David Bowie

last day in paradise

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Took a trip up to Haileybury, just for giggles and beer.

Not that we were booze cruising. I’m just an aficionado of food and drink, from greasy spoon to Michelin star, from lagers to merlot and back again to scotch and cigars.

I don’t know why. I know it’s all bad for you.

But not in moderation.

And in moderation, we do fine.

Of course, kimchi burger, a stout and later, a bison burger and an IPA may not be the moderation we seek.

Oh, well.

It could also be the coward’s method of self-harm. A slow motion death, in concert with the rest of the planet.

Anyway, it has been beautiful here, despite the family fights, the neighbour fights, the complete lack of downtime or quiet moments to read more than a handful of pages and constant activity in our cabin.

I want to walk into the woods and stay there, but I am ill prepared. I am no outdoorsman.

I wouldn’t last ten minutes.

Target: 800 words
Written: 865 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: Brothers Of Earth, CJ Cherryh
Comics: The Crow: Pestilence 1-4
Music: Random Music, again - Pearl Jam, The Rolling Stones, Todd Snider, Spacehog

morbid wonder

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I suppose I’m giving the impression that I’m suicidal. I’m not, not really. I’ve too much I’ve not done in this life yet for that, though the depression’s relentless attacks on my ability to do any of it is wearing on me.

So, in that sense, yeah, maybe. There’s a lot of the time where giving up, half-assing it, letting go of any sort of potential for joy, all seems like the best path forward.

Sinking into mediocrity, a sort of mind-numbed endurance, its own special skill, though any and most of us have mastered it.

It’s called “waiting to die”.

Coming up here reminds me there is more to this world than our petty differences, our pointless bullshit.

There’s more than in-fighting.

There’s wonder.

One look at that sky, graded robin’s egg to to royal blue, stroked with tender brushes of clouds and one can’t help but be reminded: religion may be a fiction, but there is still a sense of the divine.

Of majesty and beauty, grandeur.

Holiness.

It has nothing to do with little men in the sky and everything to do with the sheer vastness of what’s beyond our own meager skulls.

It could be so easy to give it all up.

But then what?

Target: 800 words
Written: 584 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: Brothers Of Earth, CJ Cherryh
Comics: The Crow: Skinning The Wolves 3, The Crow: Curare 1-3
Music: More Random Songs - Julian Plenti, Linkin Park, McCoy Brothers, Misfits, Overflow

remember me?

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I’m increasingly beginning to think I’m playing lute for the damned.

The seemingly unstoppable march of fascism, climate change, gun violence, bigotry, overpopulation, war, fucking microplastics…

At this point, I’m thinking I could write humanity’s single greatest work of fiction, and it wouldn’t matter, because humanity itself will be gone before my lifetime is out.

My lifetime might be tomorrow.

Armageddon might be tomorrow.

I have works of staggering genius in me, but I fear that neither I nor anyone else will live to see them.

Nor will I ever get my head far enough out of my ass to complete them.

Is it still fatalism if it’s true?

Target: 800 words
Written: 535 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: The Adventures Of Captain Hatteras, Jules Verne (it's nice to feel cold in this heat)
Comics: The Crow: Flesh And Blood 3, The Crow: City Of Angels 1-3
Music: Undisclosed Desires, Muse (apropos, I suppropose) <-- that's the staggering genius I'm talking about.

sledgehammer

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I don’t know why, but every time Sledgehammer comes on, I want to get angry. It’s not that the song inspires that in me, it’s that, no matter what I do on my shuffle, it somehow manages to come up.

Like, every time.

I’m not that big of a Peter Gabriel fan; in fact, I think that’s the only song in my repertoire, and I think it came as part of a new wave playlist or something.

But the sledgehammer keeps returning, and it’s not cool, like the 80s TV show.

It’s just a bludgeon, one more little way for the universe to throw tomatoes at my face.

I am a Shakespearian actor playing poorly on an off-off-Globe stage.

And I’m not even in one of the good ones, or playing the juicy part.

I am the walk-on; the Sir Andrew Aguecheek of middle-class Canada.

Forever pursuing; forever the joke.

Target: 800 words
Written: 262 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: The Regiment, Farley Mowat
Comics: Postal: Deliverance 5-8
Music: Underground 6, Linkin Park

dumb ass moves

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Well, we’re fucked. Biden dropped out, which means lawsuits by Republicans against whoever replaces him, endlessly lost and appealed until it gets to the incredibly corrupt Supreme Court, where they’ll rule against the Democrats and hand the election to Trump.

I know guys like Marc Elias and Seth Abramson seem to think there’s no legal basis for the challenges and it won’t be an issue, but when has that stopped them before? Hello? Immunity? Aileen Cannon throwing out the documents case?

These guys still think this system isn’t wholly corrupt, which they, of all people, being lawyers watching this shit happen in real time, they’d fucking KNOW. But, hey, as good a president as Harris would probably be, and I would love to be wrong about this, these lawsuits alone are going to fuck us all.

Big mistake, in my opinion.

Unless they’ve got a plan to remove Thomas and Scalia (and the other corrupt Supreme Court Justices like Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett), then they’ve got nothing, and they’ve just completely fucked themselves (and the rest of us) into a worldwide nightmare.

So, good one, guys. Good choices, idiots.

Target: 800 words
Written: 232 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: The Regiment, Farley Mowat
Comics: Think Tank: Animal 3, Romulus 4, Samaritan: Veritas 2, Postal 21
Music: Under The Bridge, Red Hot Chili Peppers

impromptu grandkid

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So, we’ve been invited up to the see the grandbaby, which is always a riot. Unfortunately, she cracked her head on a dresser and had to get a couple of stitches, so things may be more subdued than usual.

Poor baby. She’s such a sweetheart. There’s a purity in children that’s enviable, a pure connection to joy and other big feelings, a present ability to immerse oneself completely, that contrasts so nicely with those of us who have had all the joy so scraped from us that we’re little more than hollowed-out shells.

I pray for that kind of easy innocence, that easy joy.

I will never feel it again.

Target: 800 words
Written: 303 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: The Regiment, Farley Mowat
Comics: Postal 19-20, Think Tank: Animal 2, Samaritan: Veritas 1
Music: Order In Decline, Sum 41

exhaustion hunting

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I made a note while thinking about the next revision this morning that referred to the book (and ultimately, life) as exhaustion hunting.

It runs us ragged, from one crisis to the next, shortcircuiting our brains with constant fight-or-flight responses, until we’re too weary to fight back.

Our entire system seems designed for that. Corporatism, the constant pushing of the incomplete narrative (in itself a truth, that we are all works in progress, for entirely different reasons, none of which can be solved with externals), the fear that you aren’t enough, and you need to push harder, harder, harder…

Is there any question that our current setup is more akin to exhaustion hunting than the acts of creation and production, with corporations and billionaires as the ones feeding off our carcasses when we finally drop dead?

We are grist for the mill. Worse, we’re effluent.

This world. With climate change and/or fascism about to kill us all, I think the notion of legacy is rapidly running down the drain. What impact when the world is gone? How can a body heal itself, when it’s already got stage 4 cancer, and thinks chemo and surgery are conspiracies?

How do we survive this?

I don’t think we do.

Target: 800 words
Written: 370 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: The Elfstones Of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Comics: Romulus 3, Postal 17-18, Think Tank: Animal 1
Music: King James Version, Harvey Danger (I was all "a Harvey Danger album I've never heard?  What?"  Then I listened to it and knew every lyric, and started having flashbacks of listening to it after the bar, in headphones, full blast.  The words were the same, but the music was not what I remember.  It's amazing what the mind edits and what it retains.)

sublime lyrics

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I just want to write Sublime lyrics, as I listen to Saw Red while I try and figure out what I want to say today.

Unfortunately, I’ve come to the conclusion that I have nothing to say.

Sometimes, that’s enough.

Target: 700 words
Written: 339 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: The Elfstones Of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Comics: Symmetry 8, Postal 16, Eden's Fall 3, Romulus 2
Music: John Coltrane Essentials, John Coltrane (I still don't really get jazz, but man, Equinox and Wise Man sucked me in.  You have to appreciate the man's skill.)

kingsville

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I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Saturday was my birthday, spent touring the local wine country with my family, and thoroughly enjoying it. It was a very nice day, and I would have no problem spending every weekend like that.

I’m not even particularly worried about my age.

I just look back at the length of my life and think… what have I done?

What have I contributed?

All the shitty things I did because I wanted to be somewhere else, something else? The courageless bluster?

It all means nothing if I haven’t actually backed up what I said I wanted with action.

That’s the thing these days; it’s so easy to fucking talk. To be outraged, to troll, to assert your betterness.

I don’t want to assert I’m anything better; I know I’m not.

The older I get, the more I find myself drawn to realness, to the radical acceptance of the situation, of not wanting to have anything to do with the pretense of others, the falsity of their projections, and most certainly, the epic spewing stream of diarrhea that is my own current state of being.

All talk, no action. No action, and barely even talk at times.

Wanting everything; doing nothing to get it.

Waiting for the dragon inside to finally take over and take flight, and praying it’s not actually a fucking dung beetle.

Anyway, there is desire to change; it hasn’t yet reached the tipping point to actual change. It doesn’t, as Amanda Palmer would say, hurt enough.

Still, it hurts pretty bad and a change is coming; there is an ultimate collapse, an upheaval, I can sense it.

A bottoming out, and endless fall, an impact, waited for and dreaded.

A final end – is it all worth it? Does it turn out all right in the end?

Or is all just shit, to be forgotten only a few steps into the future?

Target: 700 words
Written: 595 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: The Elfstones Of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Comics: Think Tank: Creative Destruction 2-4, Symmetry 5
Music: Unchained, Johnny Cash