Wounded and Smoggy.

Yesterday I just felt detached and reclusive.  I started writing, drawing AND painting yesterday, at various times... and I just didn't feel like doing any of it.  So consequently most of that time was spent sitting, looking at my materials, while some kind of video droned away in the background.

I feel like this some days, I'm sure everybody does... but it puts me in mind of the time when the whole world was just a black pit of hopeless blackness without hope.  There was no outlook, no prediction, no daydream that wasn't swimming in doom, no spring morning worth a notice, no full moon that wasn't faded, run down, tarnished... did I say hopeless.

It's hard, as you might think, to maintain any kind of livable life when everything smells of decay and death.  I hadn't been 'contemplating' suicide, as much as just thinking about death a lot.  But even that was not lost on me, I've worked around the mental cases enough to know that's a really bad sign.  Go on like this long enough and you'll be left with entire forgotten years of time, and whole repertoire of bad habits.  Take 2003, for instance.  I don't remember anything from that year that doesn't involve the ceiling of my room, the television, or wishing I had more energy for my loved ones... I don't think I did a single piece of art, attend any cultural events, nor wrote a single passage that didn't begin with, "I think I'm losing my mind."

Finally one day, as I was complaining about something else, somebody said, "Well, here's your problem..."  He reached into my central nervous system, felt around for a switch, click.

The lights snapped on, the moon was beautiful, the spring was magnificent, the future couldn't get rosier.  The world had changed for me.  But it wasn't the world that changed, was it?  It had been that way all along and I just didn't know it.  I had been building my thinking and entire worldview upon what I thought were the more objective parts of my perception, but I was way off.  If the chemicals aren't right, then nothing else will be.

I could spend hours contemplating what the meaning of that might be. Like being unplugged from the Matrix, except the 'real world' is just like the Matrix, but better, brighter and happier.  It put my human perceptions of reality into a very different, and more realistic context, I think.

A few weeks ago I was reminded again of my whole legacy of depression, and how I'm not depressed now, but the seeds are still there...  I had been stressed to a boiling point over the hemoraging of my life force... a melodramatic way to put it, but accurate when I'd work 50 hours a week just to live the life of the semi-homeless.  I went into Ms. DeMille's back yard and lit up a big fat one.

Normally I don't smoke the whole thing in one shot, but this time I did.  There was nothing I could do about the situation at that moment except just calming the hell down, so I did.  As it worked it's magic I vividly remembered when I was living every few hours like this.  Four or five a day... it was expensive, unhealthy for any number of reasons... not even to mention the diminished returns of high tolerance.

Standing there in the yard, I was very glad those days were past...

The world is a beautiful place, wounded and smoggy as it is... and I'm one of it's biggest fans.