Monday, May 26, 2014

What's at the intersection of an obsession with death and an obsession with the creation of meaning?  Paralysis.  Melancholia.  Despair.
The sad reality is: you spend all day in a box and then when you cross over, you'll spend all day in a box.
There's more sound and fury now then ever before.  So maybe you make an effort to throw your own voice into that swirling cacophony, thinking it will make a difference, but why?  What for?
Once I was driving at dusk, heading into my hometown.  I turned a corner and it seemed I was heading right into the sunset, all violet and shades of rose.  The sky made up like a whore.  I had this epiphany, "Existence is forever.  Now that I'm in it, I can never get out."  I felt so tired, then.  Tired to the point of sickness.
Ever since then I've asked myself, "How do I break loose?"  Maybe that's the only true freedom.  To be nothing.  To have nothing.  Know nothing. Want nothing.
But here I am.  Stuck in these maddening circles of desire and craving.  Grasping at small things that will make me forget for a moment.
Maybe you'll say I'm depressed.  That I "suffer from depression."  Ridiculous.  You learn how to minimize the gravity of it--how cavernous it is. You get so good at the song and dance, you do that old soft shoe in front of trained professionals and they brush their hands together, "All done!"  They clock out feeling satisfied and go home to their own shit. 
The real condition--the actual feeling--it's so much bigger than a word.  Especially one co-opted by big-pharma, a word you hear all the time on television and see in the glossy folds of magazines.  "Anxiety and Depression, Anxiety and Depression, Anxiety and Depression." They're the goddamn Laurel and Hardy of our times.  Even your troubles are commodities now.  Things you can use to get you out of a boring situation, badges to make you feel special--things that might be able to save you from an honest day's work.
Fuck a name.  It's a feeling that bucks off a name like a wild horse.  You can't name it because it isn't yours.  It belongs to the universe itself, something older than time--almost holy.
What's the solution, then?  You can't outrun it, you can't cheat it--it always finds you.  It spots you hiding behind your stupid pleasures and points its finger at you and waves.
 "Here I am.  Hello, there.  Here I am still."
Maybe the only thing for it is to keep going through the motions.  Moving your body this way and that, in the ways deemed acceptable.  Relying on your muscle memory to get you through all the smiling and requisite laughter.
That's the terrible thing.  That maybe we're all fooling each other.  That maybe we all feel it nipping at our heels, but we're too proud to admit it.  
    

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