Candle to the Sun

Nine twenty.

I’ll be calling my sister at ten o’clock. It’s just a cloudy December morning, a little above freezing, and not much to do. I’ve been to the store already and seen nothing special, except that a customer may have employed a trick to get a free drink. My first reaction was not cynicism; it came only afterwards. My brother would’ve suspected foul play immediately, because it takes a cheater to know one. Not a very kind observation of my brother, but he was never very kind to me either. The constant cloudiness every day suggests a moral vagueness that pervades everyplace, disturbing at holiday time. You want to believe in human goodness, yet an honest person can’t belie what she sees and hears. I didn’t get a chance to ask Lisa if she was having a good day. I watched her as she ran two credit cards and had to decline them both, frowning and saying no. The card slider made a menacing beep each time. Probably Lisa was thinking like my brother when the next customer stepped in and offered to pay it. On my way home, I thought about the ways people learn to survive in society. Is it fair to say that some people are scavengers? I feel like one of those myself, though I wouldn’t mind being like a crow for a day. I knew a peer in high school who hated seagulls. His attitudes came from his dad, I expect. He later became an alcoholic, or anyway he got drunk at the reunion 13 years ago. I didn’t go.

Ten twenty.

I really need something to lighten up. I read what I wrote above and saw darkness and despair. Is everyone so unhappy today? Maybe it’s just one of those days. Or maybe I should shop at a different store. But it’d sure be nice to see the sun for a change. Lighting the candles to watch for Messiah doesn’t really compensate for the dismal weather in winter. Let the light banish darkness; but there’s no substitute for the real sunshine. 

This Beast

Four thirty.

I haven’t been sleeping much the past few nights and I’ve got a lot on my mind. No one has much fun anymore, and when you get older, good times become less available to you. Even beauty gets less beautiful in the flesh, so you look for other forms of beauty, perhaps the imperishable kind. But I’m sick of this life of devices and computers, the way they’re usurping the birthright of humankind, which is our ability to think. People are doing what Prometheus did: giving knowledge away to someone else; but we don’t know the nature of this beast that will benefit from us.

To hell with it all. I’m tired of this crap. And it’s only five o’clock in the morning and black as pitch out of my back door. Aesop is bugging me for his breakfast already. But the worst of it all is the phantom living of cyberspace. The wave of the future is here as our humanity ebbs out of existence. What kind of idiot gives knowledge to an unknown cyber god? 

Nutshell Manifesto

Two o’clock.

I think I get it now. For a long time I’ve tortured myself like a masochist when there was no good reason to do that. Instead, I want to experience pure happiness and pleasure from my life, starting today. The one in control of my happiness is me alone. Things like guilt and fear really suck. And it’s not difficult to tell positive moods from negative ones. I know when I feel happy and this is indisputable, and likewise the pain of depression. Finally, when I’m in a toxic situation then I need to get myself out of it. But the key to everything I feel resides with me.

Sick of Junk Mail

10am.

It’s a cloudy morning, though not a solid sheet of overcast; you can make out individual clouds, gray and white. At 6:30 I hoofed it to the store; now it seems like forever ago. Just a typical trip, nothing exciting. Life generally feels dull, having lost its luster, and I see people chasing after the bucks every day, no one really happy or making an effort to give each other pleasure. The only exception is the little Ty stuffed animals you find in stores, which you give your friends or family to appreciate them. Otherwise the times are cold and joyless as everyone keeps to herself, closed and expressionless, exchanging only money and material things. It might be easier for a person who has a lot of money to thrive today, but the poverty of love affects everybody. No one really feels what community means nowadays. Again it’s not like the world of James Joyce. I suppose that I am just another statistic, a symptom of everything going on. If half of Americans don’t believe in God today, then I’m just one of them; a simple fact of sociology and demographics. But there’s something wrong with this point of view, as the poet W.H. Auden indicates in “The Unknown Citizen.” Every person is an individual with original feelings and thoughts, with a life to live, and one chance at fulfillment and passion. Deny a person that, and the soul of the world is shot to hell.

So far, I’m not having a good day…

On an Even Keel

Quarter after seven.

Aesop is hot to trot for breakfast. Very soon he’ll get it and I’ll probably go buy groceries. Outside it’s cloudy. I feel tired and most people are not very happy. Everyone could use a lift in spirits. The starting place for this is ourselves.

Quarter after eight.

Or more precisely, myself.

The song in my head is cheerful enough: “Cross the Heartland” by Pat Metheny Group. American Garage is a classic, though very old, released in 79. The bass guitar that Mark Egan used on the album was put together by Jaco, which he gave to Metheny, from what I understand. Egan started out as a trumpet player and then he met Jaco at the University of Miami. I really liked A Touch of Light, his solo CD of 1988. “Bombay Way” is a lot of fun. At the time I first heard it, I was a student in English bombarded with reading homework, so I needed a break from so many words.

It’s raining right now. Not everything is going wrong. Sometimes one bad apple spoils the whole bunch, or so it seems to the depressed person. So then you look for evidence to the contrary. This is a rational response to a cognitive distortion. You only run into trouble when you’ve given up on reason. People tend to amplify the negative things out of proportion.

I should give myself a refresher course in cognitive therapy.

Right Foot In

Quarter after eleven.

I just had a lunch of cottage cheese. Feeling kind of low right now. My sleep was troubled last night, so I got up before five o’clock and pottered the time away, waiting for daylight to come. In a moral and emotional way too, I’m waiting for a sign glowing in the dark to show the path forward with my life. I feel very tired. All these conflicting perspectives give me a headache. The music I hear inwardly is “Gypsy” from Fleetwood Mac, very long ago… It’s as though I could flip a coin and let that be my direction. Or consult the hexagrams of the I Ching. Go to an astrologer to cast my horoscope. Have my palm read. I never tried tarot before. Nor singing down the moon. Take the midnight train going anywhere. Roll the bones. Everything would stand an equal chance of being right on. I could be putty in the hands of the four winds… until the hurly burly is done.

Bubble gum, bubble gum in a dish

How many pieces do you wish?

One, two, three, four,

And you are not it.

Backwards

Eleven thirty five.

Again I see that we get it backwards, maximizing pain and minimizing pleasure for ourselves and each other. If this is the task we’ve set for ourselves, then we execute it very well. But why isn’t it obvious that taking delight in the suffering of others is the essence of wickedness?

I get another image from Grimm’s: the Golden Goose. Everyone who touches the train of followers becomes stuck, and they all follow the leader with the goose, not knowing whither or what for.

I dunno. Either I’ve changed or the world has changed. Years ago my life made good sense to me, but today it’s incoherent and no fun anymore. A banker said to me that sometimes people suck, but it seems to me now that it happens all the time.

It makes me want to withdraw into my shell and forget the world. Give me a good reason not to.

If the Frog Had Wings

Quarter of seven.

I got up too early. I’m waiting for an email from my friend in Texas, but she has visitors and is probably busy with them right now… I was just thinking of how a lot of people invert human knowledge. They put ingenuity before the facts we actually know. For example, the Bible is a much older book than any garden variety biology textbook, so they give it more weight. It’s as if language were logically prior to the information from our senses and scientific method. The history of ideas is more important than the facts we take for granted. You can see this when you walk into a bookstore and browse the titles. One I remember was Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, I don’t know the author. Many Americans reject evolution even now, while in the UK it is accepted as fact everywhere, Catholic schools included.

Eight o’clock.

I’m having a low energy morning so far, though I made it to the store already. If I read some of Coleridge’s poetry, would his metaphysics convince me or would I see it as fluff?

I’d like to know what people are reading in other countries today. My own country has become very isolated, so we’re limited in what we think and do. I’ve begun to feel claustrophobic with the same old stagnant notions. I need a breath of fresh air from across the Atlantic, if anyone there takes us seriously. But maybe no one really thinks anything in the current state of affairs: the war of the Ukraine and Russia. Maybe I’m living in the past and eating my heart out…

If I fell in love with you

Would you promise to be true

And help me understand

Cos I’ve been in love before

And I found that love was more

Than just holding hands

Quarter after nine.

It’s such a long way from here and a long time from now. To the past or to the future makes no difference; the present moment sucks. But the world around me goes on and on as if nothing had ever happened. If I could stitch time between now and the last decade, then I’d call to her to cross the bridge to be with me, if she’d have somebody so poor and pitiful as myself, and so obtuse…

So wretched. 

Dawn

Seven o’clock.

There’s no daylight yet. I have no plans for today; maybe a phone call to the veterinary hospital to schedule Aesop’s appointment. How strange if the light never came this morning. But I see it rising very gradually, a change of color in the east. Sometimes I feel like a stranger to myself. It’s hard to monitor what’s happening with my identity over time, and I feel quite invisible and inconspicuous to other people. “I could be replaced by any bright spark.” This may be a sign of maturity or it might be depression. Now I see cloud stripes behind the tree line, gray blue upon pale white. 

Dawn comes regardless of how I feel, and I feel damn lonely. 

Lion & Ox

Five ten.

Of course it’s still dark outdoors, but I was done sleeping for the night. I wrote something about memories and regrets before bedtime. I concluded that because I decided as I did, I am still alive, safe, and writing today. In other words, I made good decisions, so those regrets are useless. It’s sort of like Pollyanna or Pangloss, reasoning from what is optimistic, looking on the bright side, the glass half full. This made me feel better before I went to sleep… I reread my letter to a friend from yesterday and remembered how I felt at the time of composition. Not only were there no regrets, there was no guilt or shame whatsoever. I believe that being remorseless is the key to solving depression. And if a person wields guilt as a tool to manipulate you, then you should probably blow them off. Life is too short for feeling shame. The experience of pride is our ticket to joy… The “mild yoke” that Milton refers to is the yoke of shame, in my opinion. Under the burden of guilt, your whole perspective is darkened as long as it remains to plague you. Therefore it is desirable to liberate yourself from it.