 "There was a wicked messenger From Eli he did come With a mind that multiplied The smallest matter." Dylan I have often used the allegorical image of someone half in and half out of a grave to describe my ongoing battle with depression. I got bitched slapped out of that scenario about a month ago when my 86 year old mother turned in her kitchen and broke her hip.
Since that day, I have devoted much of my time trying to get my mom's situation in order so that she can return to her house (her wish) when she gets out of rehabilitation. I don't begrudge a single minute of the time, however, it has cut seriously into the time I spend reading and writing. I had been working on establishing a routine of rising, reading with my coffee, then writing from about 10:00 till noon. I enjoyed the way it disciplined my thinking. Now, I worry that by leaving my perch looking out from the grave (symbolically) and maintaining a more solid presence in the material world I might be cutting myself off from the source of my creative waters which always seem to flow best when I felt emotionally troubled. I hope not. I hope it's just fatigue. I am very tired when I get home, and my bones hurt. I close most of my days off with a visit to mom at Hanford Post Acute where she currently resides in a room with my Aunt Sue who has also broken her hip. It's a depressing place for sure, a destination that awaits many of us as we outlive our usefulness. I usually get home about 9:30-10:00 in the evening which leaves me just enough time to check my facebook, read a few pages of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil before I fall asleep. It has been good for me mentally to face the challenges that have come my way and I hope that I can hang on to the will that allows me to power through these stressful times. I might actually get something done. And there's also plenty of things to be depressed about if that is the issue. I almost can not handle the complete and utter stupidity of this world. If it wasn't so tragic, it would be a brilliant comedy of errors. Well, it is a comedy, but a very dark and bitter one something like Quintin Tarantino would write. You know the stories where you get about half way through before you shut it off because you have listened to a lot more "motherfuckers" than you care to and have seen about 10 times the ugliness that your mind can handle at one sitting. Sometimes, I feel like writing him and asking him if someone burned his testicles with a curling iron when he was young. This actually brings me to the real subject of this treatise. I think the world has taken a serious wrong turn somewhere and it has gotten to the point that there is a missing bridge looming up ahead somewhere, and we are all far too busy listening to Shannon and Skip arguing about whether Kevin Durant should have stayed with the Warriors to do anything about rectifying the problem. I read somewhere that we are in Stage 2 lunacy with Stage 1 lunacy being the damage caused by the sixty-seventy years of weird thinking created by television viewing. Stage 2 would be the increased detachment from reality brought about by the invention of the internet. This has stuck with me and also influences the way I look at the world and people. There is so much diversionary information that no one can think seriously anymore. It started when pastors and preachers started cutting sermons short in order to get home to the football games. Well, really way before that; it really really goes all the way back to when the church told Galileo that the earth didn't move around the Sun. It didn't take a genius to see where that mistake would end up. Science slunk out of that room red-eyed and with one thing on it's mind: Revenge. Tolstoy wrote about it later and told us exactly where it would eventually lead, as did Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche too. They each described in powerful detail the horror of what would come from mankind's overweening pride in its ability to reason. There's the rub. No one reads anymore, or if they do, they prefer the blather of the misinformed and the permanently distracted and treat it with all the reference due to something that is both real and valuable, which it is clearly not. Which is something that they should know, and would know if their heads were not so partial to the sights, sounds and scents coming from the inner lining of their own asses. I once read a Rolling Stone article that called Eminem a genius. If he is a genius then the fat kid I sat next to in 6th grade who could fart on demand is a genius too, and so is Taylor Swift, and Pee Wee Herman, Barry Manilow, Joy Behar, etc. We have all but forgotten what is good and what is not. We live in a world where the news channels make up their own fucking news and are insulted that we have developed trust issues because of it. Our sermons now come from politicians who in happier, more honest times would have been employed as circus clowns or classroom tattle-tales, people who constantly not only sell us wolf-tickets but get butt-hurt and angry when we catch them in the act. And get this, they have a cadre of devoted followers who are not only willing to call everyone else out as liars and fools, but are also willing to suspend their own good judgement in order to belong to a cause, no matter how unworthy. And you cannot convince them otherwise because they have been permanently blinded by their own need to feel virtuous, even when they are not. And it all comes down to a simple argument, does life have meaning or not. One side either no longer knows what meaning really means or never has and has passed on oh so many opportunities to forgo the Blockbuster Movie or NBA game to spend at least a little more time thinking about truth and reality, while the other side is convinced that life is so meaningless that the world would be better off if we didn't exist at all. But we do. Go Figure. |
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