absurdity revised…

This has always been a place for honesty, it remains that way.

The pills stopped working 3-4 weeks ago. I’ve been running up-hill ever since. Every day is a new effort to stay on top of my mood.

The doctor has doubled my dose. Little effect has been felt over the past 3 weeks, not even a superficial improvement.

I can’t tell if I’m getting worse, or if I’ve been sad all along and it has been buried. It could just as well mean that the pills never helped and I had just gone back to my default again. Just as many times before; I have recovered from a bout of depression after a month or two of rest. I sail through the storm, rather than calming it in any real sense. Calm water mistaken for a persistent force.

Now I’m back to the stage I was at before, that black hole of sadness to the side of me – stretching to swallow me, but for now just remaining a peripheral threat.

I can be intensely happy, I can run about and scream and make noises. I can read for hours and hours, keeping focus. I can play stupid little games on the Wii with a semblance of satisfaction. It seems that when I am around people I can just forget it all. Except, when it comes to trying to sleep I just lie there getting stressed. I have to take my sleeping pills to make any attempt at sleep. Otherwise I’ll lay awake and my head will just endlessly play out encounters and projects and then start to hurt.

Headaches. I’ve never had them before and now I get one a day, usually around 5-6pm. It isn’t unwelcome. It keeps me focused on physical pain rather than the inertia of melancholia. At times it will feel like my brain is breathing with the same futile effort of a bulldog.

I’m still not any nearer, thanks to this slug-like NHS, to getting any real help. The consensus is ‘swallow these and wait.’

To begin with you always take the options handed to you, because you’ll try anything to climb out of where you are. You’ll clutch at the straws of wishful thinking and convince yourself you are getting better, when really you are just subtly forgetting your fault lines run where they do.

I’m still reading. I’m still writing. I’m still taking photos. I’m sailing. I’m managing to eat a little when I can. I’m exercising. I’m alive.

None of it gives me real lasting pleasure. I’m trapped in the talons of this sickness. There is no reasoning with myself, I will just find myself sad and wishing that life would stop. It feels like I’m wired up to the taproot of human misery, I’d give anything for a little of my usual apathy. I’d give anything to have my ego reclaim me. The thing is that I just don’t care.

Selfishness, I guess. Therein lies the dilemma.

Am I so self-involved that a perceived misery is unconquerable in the face of all the joys laid out ahead of me?

In the light of all the misery in the world, what makes mine seem acute in comparison? Do I have a right to ache?

Is pain relative or is that egotistical? Is pain in fact on a scale from one extreme to a far greater one?

Is comparison to other perceived ‘greater pain’ helpful? Or does it just make one wallow even more in your own limitations and self-centered attitude?

Most recently my life has been especially given over to other people. I have put myself second in the greatest of my efforts and helped (often beyond my means). I have not done so for gain. Except that I have gained friendships that I value and make me regretful for not establishing with similar candidates in my history. I have not lied. I’m not even proud, I care very little about what people get from me. My misanthropy has now been turned on myself only. I retain my skill of apathy as a challenge to myself, making more and more elaborate efforts to assist people. I suppress my selfishness when it rears up, forcing myself to do more and more beyond my comfortable inclination. I feel I am better for reducing those unpalatable parts of myself.

It gives me a question… can you be a good person by suppressing your sinful attitudes?

Can you be human and be free from selfishness? Or is it just a quieter voice over time?

These are all questions that mean very little to me. Before they’d have driven me to madness, but now (with a little help from Camus) I have seen that they are all absurd questions. They will never be answered to any great or helpful point. What matters is that I ask them and continue to act in a way that comforts me. It comforts me to ask these pointless questions because it focuses my aims. I am content to be a good force in the world where previously I have been a negative force.

I understand that it is in my nature to be sad. That is who I am. For a reason unknown, I must ache. It is not an obstacle, merely a feature of my landscape. Just as a mountain is not an obstacle to a mountaineer, but a victory he attempts to claim. The man seeks not to climb over it, but to conquer it in the name of joy. Just as to a fisherman a sea is not an obstacle, but a landscape of harvest. Not to be skipped, but endured to obtain a bounty.

Still this truth brings no real conclusion. I am a captive of myself and to myself I must bear witness.

I continue to grow, even if there are pains in doing so.

broken…

Something I promised myself (and I will keep that promise) was not to stop taking my medication if I starting feeling better. I haven’t. I wont. This is a slight slip, but it acts as a good indication of how seriously I need to take things.

Yesterday I forgot to take my pill. Today I forgot to take another. I told myself it was ok and it was just because I had other things on my mind. About 20mins ago I started feeling rather awful.

Its like a creature is waking up in me and my heart is fluttering in my ribcage. I’ve got this real nervous feeling and I can’t concentrate. I’m spacing out slightly too. Headache on the way.

I honestly didn’t mean to. What will I do?

I’ve set up my mobile phone to let me know when it is time to take my pill. I always have my mobile with me, so its not a hard to be reminded by it. Not sure why I didn’t already. I guess I just thought that once I got into the habit, I’d be okay.

Anyway, don’t worry about me – I’m going to take a pill in order to sleep tonight – then wake-up and make sure that I drug myself up good.

Blather like you mean to say what you’re saying…

 

Not long ago – days ago even – my imagination had me many leagues below an ancient ocean.

 

I dreamt I had returned to my long estranged hometown and, to recover long ignored memories, had ventured onto the sandstone hill I had played on as a child. I knew, as I had not then, that I was walking on stone that had once been a seabed. So, walking this same stone – this one-time seabed now turned sun-heated baking tray for every unlucky mollusc that lost its way. So walking this same stone that trilobites would have scuttled over – and now lie buried within – I wished wholeheartedly to take my time and engage with this feeling and the easy sustenance I found from it. This effortless meal of fantasy and immensity stretching out before me, that made me at once feel small and insignificant and then, in the same moment, made me feel integral to the world.

 

All this felt as if I were bringing all this life back, what had once been teeming and had laid for so long, that it might perhaps crawl up and out of the rock and start again the toil of existing.

 

Whilst standing there it became clear that, though I longed to join in with this aqua sutra – though I wanted to move back in time and occupy the same space as now, feel the cool water around me. Though I wanted a fantasy, for the pressure would have crushed me and I could not bring myself to accept that. Though I wanted so desperately to be a part of that world I know that if I were transported back I would not join, as a drop of water would, that ocean. Instead I would join it as a slick of oil.

 

Always wholly separate, that is how I am. That I would not fit in with prehistoric creatures is little surprise, that I could never fit in back in my hometown had the same ring of sadness to it – even now.

 

It is at this point that I find myself outside my childhood home, a shed on that same hill. The rusting roof, the doormat, the seats and that table made from a tire and a stop sign. I walk in and everything is upended. I walk out and find my old tools, a spade and some sheers, broken and rusting.

 

The day carried on, the sun pressed down on my skin, filling each pore with a rock pool of its own and glittering on the stone as its rays met the occasional polished grain – just as it glistened when the rays hit my moist skin. It had been like this all day, hardly a breeze to stir the stale air. Up in the endlessly blue sky unknown birds circled; too small to be vultures, not to mention unlikely for England, but still my imagination ran away with itself and I prayed swift deliverance from their greedy gaze. The song of crickets in the dry grasses sounded like the sizzling of eggs in a frying pan. The only other noise was the far off sound of engines on the duel carriageway, about two miles off in the distance, their survival ensured by our reliance on them.

 

Coming back to my hometown is like looking at fossils. There is no way to resurrect those old memories, or travel back to meet them. I must clarify that I wish to rewrite, rather than repeat those memories. They are now just fossilized, unearthed with careful thought. I can remember quite a bit about that old world I used to be a part of. Can see myself, undeveloped, like our ancient ancestors that would then have simply been curious looking fish.

 

Purpose seems to be the theme of these thoughts. That I have no purpose is an ever-present concern. My tools, rusting, are no longer able to do what they were meant. I have my wishes, aspirations, and targets. The trouble is that there is no impression in the stone for these things. I cannot trace the outline of a body. Cannot work out how they will move and come about. The ancestor cannot trace the family tree forward.

 

Realising that I have been standing on this almost lifeless mound for the last few hours breaks the spell. I walk down, first through brush – shoulder high and thorny – then down through greener ferns. Eventually I reach pavement as I leave the hillside and venture down through the winding streets and some time after that I arrive at the train station to board a train for my home, some 300 miles from this world.

 

As I look out of the carriage window there is a great rumbling – straining to see further down along the train – my face is pressed flat against the glass as I see uncountable tons of seawater fall onto that hill and rush down to greet me.

better off in bed

 

‘Then again’ has got nothing on me. My every waking moment is a sermon on any mount you can count.

 

 

I’m not sure where to start today, tonight, this morning… it has been, and is, all these things.

 

 

I’m lying in bed with two towering bookshelves to my left. Scores of books, some read – most just flipped through. All those words, all that information and, though I hunger for it, I can never seem to find the energy to begin any real campaign – no winning this war of attrition, there will always be backup coming from somewhere; always a cavalry of classics lined against the lip of the sky.

 

 

Nest Chick is out with her Cuckoo Tweeter and so I’m a pidgin shy of all alone. Beak-to-beaking-it together and I don’t get a look in – she and she got no me, no me at all – one wonders how they cope; yet cope they do.

 

 

No one else is awake these days, I seem to find them sleepwalking through life and I quickly get sucked into that mentality. Follow suit in the very outfit myself. Tonight I found myself stupefied and so had to evacuate the house party before my brain oozed out of my ears and my heart sank like a shipwreck. Compass set to sheets and a shower, I got home in quick pace – then all I needed was a spot of sleep… or the spiders to leave… whatever. I made a cup of tea and waited up for Nest Chick. Snuggled down under downy sheets.

 

 

Tie-dyed was the style of my first bed-sheets, second hand at the point where they reached me, and I loved them. For all the non-dye stains, for missing buttons and its cheesecloth hem – all raggedy ends – for all those things I loved it. I knew early on that it mirrored my view of myself, that even now I want someone simply to love me as foolishly as I loved those bed-sheets. For all faults can be found endearing. Most blemishes the results of a life lived, rather than a life kept in an airing cupboard.

 

 

Now I wish I had those damned sheets, but mostly I miss the pillow. The was worn in the middle and the fabric had bobbled slightly. It wasn’t rough on the face, but soothing when it warmed to my temperature. I’d get to sleep with my head nodding. Rubbing my cheek against the soft-rough surface. It was heaven. It was comfort. Now I wish I had that damned pillow because I need some easy comfort. Hard to find nowadays, where most things flash and blink but are none-too-good against the cheek.

 

 

I liked things the way they were a good few hours back, when we were easy in each other’s presence. Perhaps I should have stayed, simply sat there in silence?

 

No, I think I’m better off in bed, with or without the pillow.