Through the Cracks

Quarter after eight.

The guilt and self criticism were getting me down yesterday, and still hard to fight off today. I don’t know what’s doing this to me. It’s sunny this morning. Michelle complained to me about a customer who was difficult, so I told her about an old joke that she also remembered… I feel very vulnerable and depressed, perhaps because of my relationship with the church. I really don’t want to go back again. Every day I feel less superstitious from taking the Vraylar so that the notion of metaphysics is implausible to my mind. I’ve totally lost my faith. I feel more like I did when I was younger.

Nine o’clock. I guess blind faith is taking another person’s testimony for something miraculous. But some thinkers like Emerson advocate judging for yourself. Dare to know and use your own reason. I’ve never seen a miracle… I thought my visit with Todd yesterday went poorly, but I felt terrible and had no defense from my own accusations. Yet I’ve been saying all this time that I don’t care for the agency. It’s not a comfortable place to go to. I am extremely tired of being treated badly because of my diagnosis, as if I were a second class subhuman. Thus I resolve to keep blogging and raising awareness for mental illness. We keep getting the shit end of the stick. If you fall through the cracks then you’re destined to stay there, hoping for a miracle. I’ve never seen a miracle. 

Ook! Ook!

Six forty.

It is rather odd how information gets processed in our minds, or maybe mine is idiosyncratic. You can’t assume anything about the influences on a work of music or literature. And maybe the information just isn’t available. An example is Moby Dick. I can’t prove that Melville ever read Schopenhauer prior to writing his novel, and yet the resemblance to the other’s philosophy is uncanny. Things like intuition and induction can’t be trusted to be accurate, which for me is a big disappointment and a painful revelation. The defeat is so dispiriting that I feel like giving up. Well, it’s time to go to the store. Is all knowledge useless? How do we know what we know?

Seven fifty. Suk, who owns the store, said it’s a very slow day today. Between six and seven o’clock, only one customer came. It’s a ghost town out there. But— through her front window I could see the nape of Kat’s neck where she sat on a couch watching tv. Her blond hair was done up in a ponytail very prettily. I imagined going up to her door and saying hello, but the hour was ungodly early. Besides, her husband was probably home: all of their vehicles were there. A few minutes ago I tried calling my sister, fruitlessly, so I’m guessing that her son is also home. All of these expendable guys, mostly ignorant… “Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street… Look over there (where?) there goes a lady that I used to know / She’s married now or engaged or something so I’m told.” Whatever happened to Joe Jackson? It’ll be a long day. The last time I heard that song was probably on the Friday of the Fourth of July weekend in 2005. I got off work and stopped by Safeway for a half rack of Foster’s and Stouffer’s stuffed peppers. Then I got home and started my little party for one, putting on the music and imagining myself in junior high school again.

Nine o’clock. Only a month later, on one hung over Monday morning, I quit that job, and in another six months got rehired. It just seemed like such a hamster wheel with no reward that I cared about. We live in a very materialistic society, women and men alike, which makes it difficult for something like love to exist. And all I can do is make blog posts to bewail the situation. I’d give anything to see it all melt away, replaced by a new Renaissance where people dare to love and to know; where life is one big epic poem, and everybody is Tirso de Molina.

Pinball / New Ideas

Nine twenty five.

Feeling nervous about my coming trip to the agency at ten o’clock. Not very happy about it. Last night I realized how much I was craving alcohol at a subconscious level, betrayed by figurative language: rain and water imagery mean drinking alcohol to my mind… I feel lousy and low energy. I’m waiting in my driveway for the taxi to come get me. It feels like the world is falling apart, but I can’t do anything about it.

Quarter of one. That went pretty well, and Misty made me a new appointment for the end of August while I was there. The sun has come out, a better color than recently. They’re saying that some of the smoke has cleared around here. I’ve decided to give the Sturgeon novel another chance out of curiosity. Think I’ll spend an hour with it this afternoon and suspend judgment.

Quarter of eight.

At the end of my nap just now I dreamt about my nephew Ed. He was trapped within a giant lightbulb, the spinning filament of which grew more rapid and more lethal the longer he waited to get out of it. The suspense was like “The Pit and the Pendulum.” I woke up before the dream was resolved. My sister hasn’t returned my call from yesterday morning, so I’m a bit concerned for her family. I know it’s no good to try to guess what’s happening with them, though my mind will still weave dreams to fill the blanks until I have more information. I wonder what persuaded Ed to get a job as a park ranger? It has become one of those cliche occupations associated with very conservative people, sort of like flower arranging for women, which my sister used to do. It only shows how easy it is for us to be pigeonholed and subdivided by this machine called society. Very strange to watch it happen to people you know as they are shot out like balls in a pinball game, hitting this and that bumper for points until they disappear down a hole. It’s not an original metaphor, either, but one provided from a stock of images for anyone to buy.

Quarter after nine.

And now I suspect that being original is an exercise in futility when we live in a consumerist society with everything mapped out for you before you even exist. I should take a look at Auden’s poetry, particularly to reread “The Unknown Citizen.” Salinger nailed it very shrewdly with The Catcher in the Rye. Suddenly I realize that my feelings now are echoes of me from when I was twenty years old; but what I feel is no less genuine for being an adolescent’s feelings. Everyone takes a ride on the carousel, even if you choose not to do so. The rain falls on everybody’s head. Whether a player or a spectator, we’re all in the game. You can sit and watch the skaters on the rink, but someone’s also watching you. Sartre: we live only in the eyes of other people. Green means go, red means stop. But is it really hopeless to dream up a new idea? Maybe I’ll be the one to find this out. 

The Collar

Wee hours.

Still I have difficulty sleeping. I think it’s from the cholesterol medication. For now I’m not going to worry about it. In a sort of delirium a minute ago I thought of D.H. Lawrence again, that he was thrown in jail for obscenity or something that wasn’t accurate, and why did I have to study him at the university if he was such a degenerate? 

I don’t think anyone really knows anything in these times. But we have to believe somebody and maintain optimism, a faith that things will work out okay. People as a rule are not the nasty brutes that Hobbes described in Leviathan. The other day I made an observation in my journal on the priest’s white collar and what it might symbolize from a psychological perspective. The collar seems to sever the head from the body, or rather rationality from feeling. If hell is everything below the neck, then heaven is what is above it. I wonder what happens when the collar is removed, and head and body are allowed to communicate? The result is not chaos, but instead experience in full color and wholeness. The thoughts you only cogitated become convictions you feel with your whole body. And what I’ve just illustrated is an aspect of schizophrenia, originally conceived as the split between reason and feeling. But what I find interesting is how this condition applies not just to me, but to a lot of people in some capacity. 

Pupa

Five o’clock in the morning.

I woke up an hour ago and it seemed I was done sleeping for the night. It’s about time again to call my sister on the phone. Still I have this feeling of my privacy being invaded, my heart ripped out of my chest and diced to pieces. It feels cold in the house: suitable for a martyr… Finally I see the sun rising in the colorless east. I hear the calls of a few birds. In ten minutes, Michelle will open the store on another business day and obediently I will go buy some things. “Man is born free and he is everywhere in chains.”

Six thirty five. Of course, since it’s so early, there was no one out on the street. Only two other customers at the market. My pen pal hasn’t written me yet. It’s weird to have a cold day in July, but then I look forward to the fall. Hopefully the music venues will be open and my band can gig. The thought of society weighs heavy on my mind, and not as a desirable thing. I’m not like Pastor Dan, who argues for the rights of the collective whole; for me, it’s the individual that matters. It’s okay with me to be the black sheep of the fold, or better yet, consider me gone. The world seems slow to wake up this morning. If I said I want to go home, would anybody understand my meaning? It’s kind of like looking for Mercy Street in a dream: not there. Seeking high and low for Eldorado. Arcadia, the lost and last remains of the Golden Age. Life after the lapse isn’t much fun, and the freedom I believed I had was an illusion… But life goes on anyway. Maybe the stoic solution is all right for me. Whatever gets you out of bed in the morning. It’s not that people are bad. I just can’t grasp how the monster of civilization got out of human hands, assuming a life of its own.

Seven thirty. The furnace turned on for a minute. Still no word from my correspondent in Texas. And a new thought presents itself to me:

Perhaps the cage is really a cocoon.

Orpheus V

We had a really good practice this afternoon and got quite a bit done. I took my blue Fender bass and felt very comfortable playing it, which makes a big difference to the way rehearsal goes. This bass also cranks out a great tone. I think I’ll use it all the time after this. The other guys played better than usual, too, and Mike and I smiled and winked at each other while Ron would take a very long solo or something silly. We were basically indulging him and being gently deprecating, or saying, Well you know how Ron is. We have two or three really strong numbers that we can use for playing in a gig, and we’ve got plenty of time to work up the others.

Yes, instinctively human versus a consumerist society. I was just thinking of how it’s difficult to be free and human in a culture that has us so utterly pegged. It’s the sentiment of Pink Floyd in “Welcome to the Machine,” by now a lugubrious and kind of stale song, but it gets my point across. Everything you can dream of has been already thought of by the monster of society, so, before you can express your feelings on this or that, you’re in a certain category of people in the eyes of the government and whatever shapes our destinies. My observation is not an original one. It should have been obvious to me long ago. I suppose it’s a cynical view, and perhaps rather defeatist to see human life as a mass production run, like being on the assembly line or shot through the chute. When our lives are set up this way, at the mercy of a culture we can’t control, is it even possible for us to express something new and independent, original and real?

And how has the band changed me… and do I like it. Mostly it’s just the fact that we’re a trio of guys, more or less the same age. I feel that I’ve been bonding with them, for better or worse, but I think our project could lead to something good in terms of a career for me, and I love doing music anyway. It started out as just having fun on weekends, but I believe it may grow into something more serious and disciplined.

Right now, I don’t feel that the band has been a bad influence on my mentality. I might’ve gravitated away from the church even without playing with Mike and Ron, just as a function of time. And by the way, my sobriety feels very secure, though I should never be complacent.

Overall I feel pretty good at this writing.