Month the Sixteenth

6.20.24 Here it is again, the season of the crab

What has become of me? In this season of the sun, which starts today, summer, Cancer season, the heat come the last few days rinsed out by the cool rains in off the lake…it is a beautiful conundrum to be alive at all, I reckon, and one for which I couldn’t contemplate changing a thing. You see I am a firm believer that life is worth living, for all the heartache and hardship and sadness that comes with it only serves to highlight the joy, the wonder, the excellence that comes with piloting these meat sacks around the continents, or perhaps the sea if that is your bent. It has been a long time since I have written here, and for that I am sorry. You will not see this for another month and my last month’s output was very small, was very meagre, was very sad. I will do better, will try to do better, will maybe or maybe not succeed. It is tough to find the time to write when the sun is all consuming, when we need to be outside at all costs. Maybe I will make it a ritual to write every morning again, like it once was.

But enough about me and my lacking. This is the season of abundance, of green everywhere and bright sun and no time to do anything. It is the busy season L&G, it is the busy season and I am no good at making time. What to do with that? What to do with anything? Is it even worth it to continue? Of course it is, this here is reason enough. A record of my time, which is spent in doldrums and drink as often as I am away from work. But I am happy, I think. And that must count for something, must be enough for me. What more could I want, truly? Is there anything more than happiness, than success in one’s work, than love in one’s life? Can one ask for anything else and not be considered a selfish being? There I go with the questions again…it is a habit of mine that I doubt I will ever shake, for I am an inquisitive being by nature.

I wish that you could be here with me today, as I sit in my pig-sty room and type here on this macbook. Wish that you could see the progress I’ve made in coming out of the fear driven hole that I was in just a few months ago. Back to reality as opposed to the stricken fantasy that was driving me insane. It is a welcome relief, if I’m being honest. And what reason do I have not to be honest here. We are free of cop town, free of all that jazz. And into the real world, where things continue always as if there was nothing coming to ever end it. Of course we know about the big one, the thing that awaits us all eventually. It cannot be escaped, cannot be evaded. We must square up to that reality, musn’t we? We must stare into the void and know that it will reclaim us no matter how hard we wish otherwise. If you believe in an afterlife more power to you but isn’t it a more beautiful thing to live once and die and then be subsumed back into the Earth? Isn’t it a beautiful thing to be returned to ash or dust and become part of what brought you into existence in the first place?

Without this planet we are nothing, and still we are doing our damndest to destroy it. I do not think we will succeed, but still we are trying. And as the forests burn and the floods come and the tornadoes and who knows what other calamities, we continue to slide down the tracks towards a ruination that we haven’t even begun to imagine. Of course we have begun to imagine it, I suppose, but imaginings and realities are two very different camps, and this is beginning to drift into the latter. My this coffee is terrible, this water tastes like perfume. My senses seem to be firing well, seem to be perceiving the way they are supposed to. And that is a gift, for the unpleasant things they perceive. 

This is enough for a new beginning, for a new attempt to be more diligent. One on the first day is an auspicious thing for this new month. I must go now to greet the day, as afternoon comes on and the sun hides from us behind its blanket of clouds. I must go now and make something of myself for there is no time like the present with which to do such a thing. I must go now and be.

Because to be is the thing to do, Hamlet be damned. If not in being where are we to find anything to offset the suffering that comes with, well, being. Buddha had it right, I thinks, and I am no disciple but game respect game. A better saviour than Christ, I reckon. Or at least the teaching that life is hard but you can get over it if you realize you have to die seems better to me than follow all these rules and you get to go to a giant party in the sky when you die. I don’t know, I’m rambling. I’m going on and on about things that have so much bearing on our lives that often we forget them for their omnipresence. Maybe religion is God, after all? Who knows, I am not a good judge of much. Maybe the quality of a wine. Maybe the fineness of a woman’s face? There are so many things in this life that bring me joy and I am going to seek them incessantly. For to live fully is to be absorbed in the world while knowing that the world in which you are absorbed is ephemeral even if it seems at times to be interminable. That is my message to you, which of course takes me back to my proclamation early on that I am but a repeater of platitudes. A parrot on a stool who cannot shut up because the pressure of flighted thoughts keeps coming and coming and the only cessation comes when I sleep. And even then the thoughts become images so surreal that I cannot even remember them fully upon awaking. I will not be a practitioner of dream yoga, preferring, as my teacher taught me, to sleep when I sleep.

Well that went on for a ways beyond the full stop I had intended. It goes on and on and on and on. There will come an end only at the end of the hundred fourty-fourth month, I suppose. A perfect square if I can live long enough to complete it. I think the odds are in my favor but truly one never knows. Each breath could be your last, so be grateful whenever it isn’t. I am morbid and I am joyous. Make sense of that if you can…

TTFN.

6.23.24 from the road

There is something to be said for watching the mile markers recede, something to be said for weaving in and out of traffic as the construction barrels squat on the shoulders. But not much. I would much rather be asleep in a bed right now than trying to sleep in this car. And so I have abandoned sleep to greet you here, as I am abandoning cigarettes, as I am abandoning love. Not all of those things are true, mind you, but if I don’t keep you guessing how will I ever keep you interested. Of course there is no guarantee of that regardless, but I persist in my explorations, of self and of whatever I find interesting at a given moment.

Today it is summer traffic. All the people moving either to escape the heat or just because they have somewhere to be in the north. For us that place is home, but for most it is not; instead it is a respite from suburbia, from concrete and traffic lights and people everywhere you look. Of course when they flood the small northern towns all of those things are present but suburbia, and I do suppose there are considerably more trees. But here beneath these grey skies we hurtle down the road on I-75 towards the coffee I so desperately need, toward anything other than sitting in this seat and watching the world go by.

It is not so bad I suppose, I could be driving, and then I would not be able to spout my monologue at you, who will read it weeks or perhaps even years from now, if this thing turns out to have any staying power. What is it I want from this project? What am I doing this for other than to keep the muscles of creation primed? Is there a purpose, is there a reason? I contend that there must be even if I can’t think of it right now. I wouldn’t be so insane as to ramble with no reason other than to fill up my day.

At least I am not talking about God, right? Instead it is the sort of low day when you want to hide under the covers but instead have been pulled from bed to greet the day and have breakfast and not enough coffee and then have to return by car from the southern part of the state to the northern one. All the while trying to quit smoking, which can grate the nerves on even the most placid and relaxing day. Not that this is strictly not relaxing, but I do not like the confinement of this passenger seat, do not like the gas fumes from the red plastic can that permeate the cabin even with the windows down. Of course the noise of the wind is also a bother and we are still an hour or so from our destination.

This is not the excitement of the road that Kerouac wrote of, even if I am mad for everything all at once. I believe that that is a throwback to the first entry, if I recall correctly, and that is a beautiful thing. All these words and not a margarita in sight. Man I could go for a cocktail, as we were discussing this morning about how maybe that makes us alcoholics to some eyes. But I do not think that I am, alcohol is just a friend of mine. A way of softening the blow of existing, which is perhaps the greatest burden that each one of us shares with the rest. Life can certainly be a bitch, life can certainly be a bear, life can certainly be difficult. But mostly it is okay, even on boring car-bound days like this one.

Why is it that I struggle to see the purpose of it all at times, when surely it is to love and to be loved and make the world a better place with acts of kindness. You can kill ‘em with it but you can’t resurrect them after. We save those kind of miracles for crucifixions and the like. No use to save someone who wasn’t brutally murdered…there I go with a string of God adjacent thoughts depending on what it is you believe. They may be smack in the God-depths if you believe that Jesus is God, which I don’t. So God-adjacent, for some people’s beliefs. Of course belief being our most dangerous and most powerful agency, the ability to conceive of truth and invest ourselves in it being a thing that empires have been founded and dismantled over. And wars still fought along religious fault lines…

I do not know where I am going with this. I just follow the inner voice, like headlights in the fog hoping to get home and take you there with me. To wherever this is headed, to wherever it is you want to go. I am open to suggestion but mostly I just follow my own whims because I don’t know when I start a sentence half the time where it is going to end up. Like this one for instance, I bet you didn’t see coming the image of a monkey drinking a piña colada out of a coconut, nor the one of a lobster with a Marlboro red in his claw. Did you hear the one about the engineer with the amphetamine habit? Me neither, but they say his bridges are the safest around. I’m going to say that’s enough for today. I have digressed and then digressed from those digressions, leaving you with naught but drivel and myself with a headache from staring at this tiny screen. The letters continue to come and I send back no reply.

TTFN.

7.5.24 Hell and back

It has been a week ladies and gentlemen. L&G L&G. I am doing my best, that is all I have to say. I have support and for that I am grateful. Crows outside the window. I wish for something to ease the blow. Something soft, like propranolol. I wish I wasn’t so scared of the world. But it is a scary place right now. The future is very uncertain. I don’t know what is going to happen in the future but it scares me to think that it all could very well be collapsing. We have said this many times but America is not immortal. These are interesting times, per the old Japanese curse. But we persist. We continue to find joy in the face of the bleakness.

There have been black mirror episodes howling in my brain. I have been afraid of hell, literally. An eternity without freedom. One does not stare into such an abyss and not flinch. I bowed down and prayed for absolution. And was rewarded with love. It is a strange day to be me. I don’t like explosions in the sky and I don’t much like hoardes of people. We will be facing them today certainly. Here in the north the fourth is a festivity. We bombast and galavant and call each other names in the name of independence. I wish I was a world away. And yet I am right here, dissatisfied. You never know what is going to happen.

So I sit right here and, wracked with anxiety, try to focus on how much I love my life and how blessed I am to have all the things that I have. There are good things in this life and nothing is guaranteed. That is what scares me. That is why people pray. Maybe prayer is an impulse that makes us care more for other people. Maybe that is why I am so stilted. I am a strange creature. I live in fear more than I care to admit. I hope that you do not. I hope that no man bears the burden that sometimes sweeps over me like a dripping blanket of malaise. I wish I was not so afflicted, but sometimes it is all you can do to make it to the end of the day. I’m sorry to all I have wronged. I try to be a good person and if I fall short of my own impossibly high standard then I deserve to have grace with myself. It is important not to grow hard when the world clatters against your skull.

There is a place I used to go a lot but haven’t been to in years. Low flying aircraft, low mood. I am depressed L&G. I need to start getting more out of therapy. Need to capitalize on the time I have with him. Trust the process Richard. It may seem slow but you are doing your best and that is all you can do. Try to let the mistakes go. Try not to make any more. I’m going to cut this short. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so sorry. For what exactly I couldn’t say, but for all the wrong I’ve ever done might be a good estimation. It is hard to remember everything sometimes. I miss myself. I need to be present more often and not dwelling on futures I cannot control.

TTFN.

7.5.24 Later

It has settled, the tizzy I was in. It has been a rough week for me. I have been struggling not to be buried under the fear. I wish I weren’t in such a state, and maybe I have only myself to blame. Bipolar disorder is no joke. Paranoia is real and paralyzing. It is all I can do to keep my chin up. Maybe I am the problem. Maybe I am being too cavalier. I called into work today. Panic attacks. They will suck you dry if you let them. The attacks that is. Suck up all your useful energy and leave you a ball of nerves. I am not so bad as all that now, but earlier I was.

7.15.24 Where have I been? Where are we going?

My date and time settings are all screwed up. The computer lost a week and now it is telling me it is April 12th. What in the world is going on with this world. Assassination attempts. Airstrikes. There is so much strife and yet I continue within my little bubble just trying to make it through every individual day. I wish that I could change the world, and maybe I will, somehow, but who knows if it is possible to change world with word. That is a laugh to ask Ferlinghetti. I stand on a precipice and feel no urge to jump. I stare into a void and it stares back at me. I am happy and I am also stressed. What a time to be alive.

Of course it is always the time to be alive, so long as you are vertical and still kicking. Maybe even horizontal at times, should it be a lazy day in paradise. I am doing my best to be happy, doing my best to be well. It is not as easy as it sometimes looks. The world is an imposing place, and I find it imposes on my moods a little more often than I would truly like. I want to be free, to be loved, to be well. Is that too much to ask, or is it always a struggle to be those things. I felt the other night that I was doing everything wrong. That everything I had been valuing was not the right thing and that I needed to take a left turn and veer onto that side road and rip up the blacktop to somewhere else.

That is a common feeling. A flight of fancy that doesn’t leave me alone until it passes. It is gone now, but in the moment it is intense and makes you feel like you are useless for not being able to see the truth. But what is the truth, what is the way? The only thing I am relatively sure of is that this ends in a grave. Until then I’m just going to try to enjoy myself and make what positive difference I can in the world. To love and be loved. The mystery, the joyful mystery of life. It is not so big an ask when one has a heart like mine. For all my doubt about myself I feel like I know how to love, and for that I am grateful. Gone the loneliness of the winter months, gone the doldrums of the spring. Gone the terror of last week, or was it the week before? I am tired ladies and gentlemen, of feeling like the whole world is passing me by while I tread circles into the carpet. I have been living, yes, but have I been living? This is the question we must always be asking, this is the thing that separates the happy from the sad. Or maybe happiness is a simpler question and I am always making it much harder than it must be. Maybe.

But there is a beauty to this life that resurges every time I greet the blank page. Maybe I have been struggling because I have been neglecting my journal. Maybe there is something about this process that makes me happy and fulfilled and it is all I need to do to sit and stare and move my fingers in the relevant sequence to make some kind of meaning. Certainly my life feels more meaningful when I am here, with you, dear reader. This month’s entry is looking to be abbreviated, as I have not been very diligent in the heart of the summer. With the sun all the way in the sky and the waters warm around these parts it is hard to dedicate any time to staring at a screen, even if, as I just mentioned, it is helpful to my mental health. Always I seem to be struggling with that.

It is not surprising, truly, that we struggle with our mental health. In this age of constant stimulation, just deleting the instagram app off your phone leaves a vacuum. It is a healthy vacuum, requiring us to engage with the world rather than with an endless and inane stream of images to keep us complacent. Or enraged, I guess, depending upon your bent and upon the contents of your feed. This whole life I am hoping to be doing it right and never knowing truly if I am making terrible mistakes. My anxiety is almost constant, and at times crippling. I know that I just need to keep breathing but the cigarettes even rob me at times of being able to breathe easy. I want to live a long and happy and fruitful life, and all the time that doesn’t seem guaranteed.

I think a large part of my fears come from reading 1984 as a child. The thought police made an impression on me that in my more psychotic moments make it feel that everything I’ve ever done wrong will come back to haunt me in a visceral, carceral way. Of course the Catholic upbringing probably did not help with the guilt complexes. It all adds up to a low quaking fear that trembles through my body, through my nerves. And the constant stream of cautionary advice from my parents. Don’t do this, don’t do that. I know they have my best interest in mind but don’t they know I worry? It is the worry that will kill me if nothing else does first. 

But that is enough thinking about death. Death, with any luck, is a long way off. I’ve got a lot of good years to live and a lot of good things in my life to celebrate in the meantime. It is this, the celebration of good, to which I dedicate this entry. I dedicate my love to all those who care about what happens in the world. I dedicate my life to my family and friends, my hope to all those who are feeling hopeless. Is that enough for now? I do believe it is, and that I can go on with this day with no further anxiety about what may or may not be. I have no control, or very little control, and that is okay, I guess. Nothing I can do about it in any case. And there is the blessing, the smallness. The knowledge that I am the author of all these works, that there is no ghost inside my mind that is claiming credit for all the work I’ve put in at the keys over the years. Kiss me misty, I’ll be here all week.

TTFN.

7.16.24 Kyle Gass and Political Violence

Strange days L&G, we are living in a time when half the world wants the other half dead. Is that the status quo for the last century, or have the divisions grown to proportions we haven’t dreamed of since, well, who knows since when? I’m not sure it has ever been so divided, so outright split down the middle that we might even call it an American schism. And Kyle Gass wishing that they hit Trump when they brought him a birthday cake in Australia. Good for Jack Black to decry that, assassinations are not cool, not at all, not at all.

But it is the world right now. The world is fractured, broken. I do not wish to be party to the brokenness. I will try to be whole in the face of a world that terrifies me, in spite of a world seems to be falling apart. Hopefully there will still be coffee in the apocalypse, and hopefully there will be no apocalypse. Hopefully business as usual will hang on through my lifetime and the climate, which is growing more and more threatening each week, will be the death of us all and not some other, more man made, calamity. You see these are the times we live in, and though Jeff Tweedy said that every generation thinks it’s the last, maybe we are the last few here. Though babies are being born they say there are not enough of them. I do not envy the world they will inherit, though surely I will be a party to some of the things that are to come.

Maybe it will all be alright, maybe we will figure it out. The powers that be either have a plan or they don’t and such things are way above my pay grade. I am just a lowly writer, sommelier, pirate. I’m not a pirate, btw, just felt like saying that. I think that sometimes it is refreshing to say things we don’t mean just to prove to ourselves that we can. That we don’t have to be serious all the time, though the world pressing in implores seriousness at nearly every turn. I am alive and for that I am grateful. If I have bad (read: unhealthy) habits so be it, I will do my best to survive for as long as I am allotted. That I have heaven FOMO, that is fear of missing out on heaven on earth with everyone I love invited to the party but me, is a personal problem. I feel guilty for the way I have lived, for whatever reason, though I have always tried to do good and be good to people, to bring light and love wherever I go. It is a deep seated problem in my psyche, and the farther out the idea that will bring us nearer to eternal life the more it scares me. 

Who knows though, really? The future is a beautiful mystery to those of us bound to time and if there are those among us not bound to time in that way may they be stuck in their hell of knowing what will be. That was a fear for a long time. I have a lot of fears, a lot of big fears that at times cripple me and because of this I struggle. I am working on ceasing the struggle with struggle, working on being at peace and happy with what I have knowing that it is not guaranteed to continue beyond even the next hour. It is just mortality, and memento mori is the way. Unless of course technology saves us from death, which is not as impossible as it once seemed. But at what cost, both financially, as such a thing is bound to be expensive, and what would be the unforeseen consequences of not having to die?

Is it just me or do other people struggle with these issues internally? Do you, dear reader, keep yourself up at night wondering what is going to happen to the humans? Do you think about these things and feel afraid, or is it more hopeful inside your skull. I try to keep hope faith and love together in myself, though the faith is not so much in God anymore but in the people around me, which to hear some tell it, is faith in God. Who knows what I am doing, who knows what any of us is doing? Is this rambling fruitful or is it just something to make myself feel better in the face of what I cannot control? Could that make it fruitful? I don’t have the answers to these questions that keep piling up on my pages. Picasso said that computers are useless because they can only give you answers. I say computers are useful because they allow you to record your questions. I also say that Picasso was a madman. I too am a madman at times. I try to behave and stay within the lines drawn on the road. I try to be the best I can be. What more can I ask of myself, what more can I do to meet my own impossible standards?

That said, Political Violence is condemnable. The world would not be better off if they’d hit Trump square between the eyes. The world is not better off that somebody tried to. The world is worse, worse worse worse the world is going to hell in a hand basket and we are forced to watch on tv and the news apps in real time as the wheels come off. Or maybe something is going to save us. I’d bet it’s not a politician. I’d bet, if anything, it is going to be ourselves. Each of us working together with each other to mend the divisions that started this entry. And yet who knows how that would happen? How we could overcome our love of money and work towards a world where everyone has enough. I do not, strictly speaking, think that is possible. It is enough to hold onto your hat and ride the wave, praying that we do not find political persecution. Hoping that we do not find criminal prosecution. That AI does not advise the leaders to end it all in a cloud of fallout. 

To you, who may or may not read this in a timely fashion, know that I care about you. That I wish you every happiness, that I wish to find you in every person I meet and see the light behind their eyes. Of course I was addressing all of you and then made it sound like I was addressing one of you, so I guess the point is a little bit confounded. Such is language. Such is life. Say what you mean as best as you can and try to love thy neighbor. That is the most important part of christianity, away from the dogma and the rules to follow and the prophecies about the end of the world. In a sense the world is ending but I don’t believe the apocrypha to be a good estimate of how it will go. Those who wish to predict the future should look elsewhere than the book of revelation. To their neighbor, maybe. To the man in the aisle at the wedding whom you can tell has been in love with the bride since he was a younger man. To the man on the street with the bells on his shoes. To the woman in the window with her hair drawn back away from her face.

Together, all of us have a chance. Don’t shoot your neighbor, give him a hug instead. Let us find the way forward with something other than violence, please. I’m tired of seeing a world where the best option is to end somebody’s life. Live and let live, as they say, and let us all come together for a feast when these cycles of madness and poverty have begun to ebb. Prepare yourself for trying times, sure, but don’t put all your eggs in any basket. Baskets have a tendency to break, after all. I’m sure you have heard all of this before but I am but a repeater. I only have the power to make ideas adjacent; I haven’t had a new idea in a long time. I don’t want to be a forward thinker anymore. Only want to live out my life in peace, in harmony with my loved ones and with the world. Let us pray to the skies if not to God that we can figure out this fucking bullshit. That is all for now.

Dick