Funk, but not the good kind

Have not been able to escape a nagging sense of despair for the last few days. It doesn't help that death is all encompassing, both personally and in the wider world all over the news. It has been weighing heavily on me. Probably just the heat, the slipping arc of the sun, circumstances, the vagaries of biochemical disorders of the mind--still, plenty of bad news on all fronts. I can't recall any good thing that anyone has been able to relate in the last couple of weeks.

"I hear a very gentle sound: very near yet very far; very soft yet very clear. . ." Indeed, the shadows of the evening fall across the years. It seems there is no good thing I can achieve that the world cannot taint and ruin. All my hallowed grounds are soured. I obtain wealth and then idiots cause it to be devalued.
I am beginning to wonder if effort is worth it at all when all accomplishment is so easily made futile by the wicked simpletons who have been given power in our time.
Tiresome, very tiresome.

Rest In Peace, Cecil

To paraphrase Job:

"He was a byword of the people, for he was righteous in his way and of clean hands, one wise man among you. My eyes are dim with sorrow and all of us, we are in shadow. His days are past, his purposes broken off, even as are the thoughts of my heart: day is changed to night, light is short because of darkness. His grave is now his house, his bed in darkness. Where now is hope? One day, we too shall all go down to the bars of the pit, when our rest together is in the dust."

The Desolate Part of The Wastelands

Despite the wretched heat, I noticed today that the sun was waning, now where it was May 21. The day visibly shorter, the sunlight paler, the solar arc lower in the sky. It shouldn't depress me, but it does. The symbolism of death. How many more rebirths of spring do I get to witness? I think I'm going to Argentina this winter. It's the only place the dollar seems to be rising; god only knows what that says about those poor bastards. I want to move to a place where there are no seasons. I hear Quito, Ecuador, is the City of Eternal Spring. That sounds nice, someplace that just wobbles sedately on the equator. Although checking the weather there now (ain't the internet grand?), it looks like perpetual rain, high 62º, low 42º, every day: miserable. Par for the course--eternal spring turns out to be shitty.
I read today that the Dead Sea is drying up, the waters of the Jordan and Galilee diverted for agricultural uses. Jesus, we manage to kill even that which is already thoroughly dead. I remember the sweet cool waters of the oasis at Ein Gedi, splashing around and laughing under the burning December sky with a girl I'd met on the tourist bus.
I have a photo: I'm floating in the Dead Sea, holding a Heineken. "Look, Ma, I'm at the earth's lowest point!"
But not yet at mine.

I try to keep up to date on neurological research. From what I've read regarding the hippocampus, sleep and the formation of long term memories, I wonder if dreams aren't perhaps part of that process, the mind's resorting its memory banks and they're the screensaver. They certainly never to seem to have fuck-all to do with the day's events or anything remotely relevant to what's being processed. I'm not a Freudian.
I woke up at 4:14am from a vivid dream, starting awake like a rubber band snapping. I realized I'd been approaching this hellish swampy humidity that makes the heat so bad all wrong. Cowering like a petulant invalid in a darkened room, that was only making it worse. How I got this from a dream about being in Amsterdam and the ATMs closing at 5pm, I couldn't tell you. (I had no sense of smell in the dream; no olfactory element when I was in a smoky coffeeshop and my waking mind noticed the lack.)
I decided to embrace it instead. I ran even longer today in the putrid 99% humidity, and then sat outside in it throughout the wet, pestilential, buggy heat of the day, reading and swiping at the flies. The dew on the grass never evaporated.
Tiresome, but what can you do. Learn, if not to love it, to tolerate it. So bring it on. Do your worst. Let's see it.

"That which does not kill me only causes me countless miseries and suffering."

- Joe Bob Nietzsche

It really is "the humidity, not the heat". It's not desert heat, it's swamp heat. Florida rather than Nevada, all the difference in the world. Just keep thinking, "Never again, never again. . ."

I felt better just having decided to slog through it until it's over. Some of that serenity prayer action occasionally works wonders.

Eepy seepy, here comes Creepy

Depression, like a vampire once invited across the threshold, can come and go forever after as it pleases. After six good (mostly) months off the SSRIs, depression has come back. No darkness visible this, no indeed, it's quite colorful and lively in here.
I don't think it's so much biochemistry as a potent combination of illness, heat, circumstance, lack of sleep...as well as the horrific nightmares. Last night I was up for good at 2am after OK Corral meets MacBeth on a stage that was like the inside of a Land of The Lost pylon: much larger in my head than the physics of the outside would lead you to believe possible. I particularly liked the slowly rotating spotlit diorama displaying all my past failures in life: nice touch, subconscious. Listen, pal, that "wasted potential" and "what might've been" schtick gets old fast. I get it already.
But from whatever source, most probably genetic disposition, capital "D"epression is engraved on the stone of my soul like an epitaph.

I can smell the sickness in my sweat, on my breath. It's a sunny summer day and I'm hidden inside, shrouded in darkness and cool shadows. That itself is enough to indicate that something is very very wrong: I've always hated winter and longed for the summer's heat but now I crave the cold biting wind. Pure insanity. I can't have this kind of bone-deep personality shift and still be sane.
But I can't tolerate the sweat pouring off me, the rotten stench in the obscenely humid, thick air, the relentless insects and their maddening buzz. I'll never again hear cicadas with anything other than horror.

Maybe if I didn't spend the first hours of every day running in it. But on this, I won't compromise. I run, no matter what. I won't stop.
I keep hearing that voice echoing in my head: "One day, your life will depend on how fast you can run. . ."
To which my own always adds ". . .and how far."

You run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking

September 13, 1999

I wonder if the world may have ended August 1999 after all. And I just didn't notice. Sometimes it seems that way.
The 1990s were the Golden Age. And for me, the last of it drained away like sand from an hourglass August of 1999. The world might just as well have ended September 13, 1999 (google it, if you don't remember your classic science-fiction tv). Fucking useless Nostradamus; I was depending on that asshole to have gotten it right.
But the world shuffled along blithely until it was made evident to all on September 11, 2001. Since then, it's been all downhill, despite flashes of occasional redemption.
Since then, it is as though I have orbited a dark star. I have pushed the trajectory outward intermittently but have never been able to escape.
The time is drawing near, when, like Kirk against the advice of Scotty, you have to burn through every bit of power remaining, because you know that it's pointless to hold anything back this time. If you don't break out of your doomed course now, anything held in reserve won't matter except to delay the inevitable death spiral to oblivion. Countdown commencing, ignition sequence initiated.
I will either walk new roads or else my path will end in the clearing but gratefully will I never walk these roads again.

I once said I hoped to have a ringside seat for Armageddon, but I should've known you people would fuck it up, the way you do everything: by half-measures, like a stumbling blind drunk, too incompetent to even get the end of the world right.
As the saying goes, if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself. Just one more DIY project.
Even if it's only my own.

"If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly..."

Regarding A Visit to The City Which Has Been Desolate All My Life

Mommas, don't let your babies grow up to be Desolate

For the 4th of July holiday weekend, I'm back in the miserable god-forsaken Mississippi delta town where I was born near and lived in for a many (sadly formative) years growing up. In the intervening years in which I moved away, it has strangely thrived, like a particularly virulent tumor. I never thought this place would amount to much, but due to its location as a major transportation, industrial and health care hub, plus the area's university, it has continued to grow. Albeit in what I consider an unwholesome, yet oh-so-typically American way. A friend who has temporarily been back for the last two years recounted overhearing two girls chatting about said progress in the form of an Olive Garden arriving in town.

Per Shit My Dad Says: ""You don't have to be good to succeed. You just gotta be the least shitty option. Example: We're eating at The Olive Garden."

And that perfectly sums up this place: you don't have to be good to succeed. This place just showed up at the contest and won by default. It was a magnet for the surrounding rural area, and people who came to college here stayed. It grew. Like the stages of cancer, this town thrived accordingly.

I suppose, honestly, it's not that bad of a place. I've seen worse. But for me, this place epitomizes so much that I can't help be biased. It's the kind of town that one just can't seem to do anything else other than leave. Thomas Wolfe said "You can't go home again," but  Mr. Wemmick, Jagger's clerk in Great Expectations, said it better: "Don't go home."
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seachange is a poetic or informal term meaning a gradual transformation in which the form is retained but the substance is replaced.

And that is what I'm experiencing. There's a silly psuedo-scientific notion that the body's cells are replaced entirely every seven years. Even a rudimentary knowledge of physiology renders that idea sheerest nonsense. But, on the other hand, I have that sort of feeling. It's strange: for years, my convictions have been unshakeable and my goals, so I thought, were permanent. I thought that I would always yearn for the same things, that my ideals were a fixed star in the firmament of my life. But even Polaris won't be the north star forever, due to the procession of the earth's axis.
Suddenly, without warning, I find that the things I once wanted so fiercely mean nothing to me, and goals I would have never contemplated are the new propulsion of my self. It's baffling. And while this is going on inside me, all around me the world is in the midst of upheaval. Everything I thought was constant is shifting.

It seems all the rules are changing. Maybe they were all along and I just didn't notice. But, pow, now I'm struck by the awareness that the game we're playing now doesn't have the same rules as the one we started. 
What's the opposite of rolling with the punches? Being caught flat-footed? Now suddenly I'm required to constantly duck and bob and weave.
At least I'm still young enough and mentally flexible to try to ride the wave, instead of having fossilized and have it just crash over me while I stand gaping.

We Always Had Amsterdam

But not anymore. I'm still achingly saddened by the Dutch government's fuckery, but it's not really about the pot. I've barely smoked in months. As much as I love the stuff, it's not like it ever had the fierce hold on me that alcohol has had.
It's more a psychological trauma, the sudden absence of a constant that was always there.

Amsterdam was my sanctuary. It was one of the few places in the world I've lived that I have no bad memories of. Whenever life's rough and I've been brought low, there has always been Amsterdam, less than a day's flight away, waiting for me with all its joys that I've loved ever since my first visit. Just knowing it was there, waiting for me, has gotten me over many rough patches. And sometimes I said "Fuck it" and I took that flight, and there it was.

In the movie Return To Oz, when Dorothy went back, she found the Emerald City a shattered ruin. It was my Emerald City, the capital of my psychic mindscape, the place where all things were right in the world. It was my Undesolate City. And now They have made it Desolate like the others.

It was so simple. Land in Schiphol, buy a sixpack of Heineken at the airport's supermarket, drink a few cold ones on the short train ride to Centraal Station, and perhaps even before I check into my favorite hotel on the Dam, a brisk stroll to coffeeshop Siberië, and though they don't serve alcohol, the smoking bar The Doors right around the corner does, so I'd walk over, have a seat, order a large draft and get thoroughly stoned, listening to 60/70s psychedelic rock.
A homecoming as welcoming and familiar as the intro to any 1950s American sit-com.

Gone. Oh, the city is still there, but it's only shattered ruins to me, just another north middle European city now, dull and staid, a Cologne or a Prague. I'll never have my ritual again.

Goodbye, yellow brick road.