A TERRIBLE LUXURY

…We watch the fireworks in an open field
and stay so late we miss the train
We grab a taxi on the busy, busy street
and race across the city once again…

Depression is a beast.  It could be we sufferers must always up the ante, lest we get pulled down to the dark depths.  What thrilled us before won’t thrill us anymore and we’ll need to search out new highs and steeper thresholds, all the while towing a great weight somewhere between exhaustion and dread.  Maybe that’s just life.  Either way it’s mine and there are things I won’t ever be able to live down and anyway I’m mostly bored with living, to tell you the truth.  Even though I miss Europe and Guate, I was bored there, too.  Maybe I’m just ornery from being back in Texas too long.  Or else it’s post-book and one man show comedown.  Ultimately my thoughts seem to return to the idea of smoking a cigarette, that a cigarette might tighten my focus just enough to squeeze out the malaise of everything being so dreadfully the same.  Such is the plateau.  I made it and it was a fight and fighting is what I’m used to.  Victory feels like boredom unless it’s knowing I could be doing so much more with my life.

That last part’s the bugger, I can’t really think on it too long.  It triggers the dread, and overly critical thought, and anyway the self-abuse that fuels this twisted carnival of my psyche.  I’m somewhere between thinking my life needs a complete overhaul and that I’d do well to just relax and smoke a fucking spliff every night.  I know marijuana works.  I also know that moderation is not in my vocabulary.  All this is to say I’m dreadfully bored but getting by.  And I’m writing a ton which is never bad but most of it is CNF and anyway all of it is about me.  I’d do well to do a lot of things and all of them different from my normal routine of delivering lunch for 2 hours a day and tweaking my website every night.

This is to say I’m bored, Good Reader, and since I quit drinking and the Life, Jean-Paul Sartre ain’t got nothing on me.  I’ve still got big dreams though.  Luckily they won’t let me be.  I’m still inspired by rock and roll and radio, poetry and print media.  Life is dreadful and euphoric and there is still work to be done.  I wish the world would stop ending.  It’d do wonders for my anxiety and I can’t wait until I’m regular again.  This post is as exciting as my life by which I mean not at all.  How long is this charade supposed to go on?  Can I still consider myself a writer if I don’t commit 600 words here every week?  I can see the chain of logic and succession of events that got me the columnist gig I always wanted and I know a writer writes.  I’ve taken that credo with me down every back alley of boredom and dissatisfaction you can think of.  I don’t know why this week should be any different.

I suppose I could give it back to you, Good Reader, and let you know it ain’t all roses and that this, here–these 522 words and counting have been a real fucking drag to write.  Everything is blasé down here at the Office and, as mentioned, if it is or isn’t clinical, it’s my life.  If I didn’t write this I would’ve been bored doing something else that wasn’t writing.  I’m upping my reading game anyway, so I can be creative when I’m doing nothing, take Editor Phil’s cue and get up to speed on the other malcontents and n’er do wells of the written word.  In my end of year column at The Coarse Grind, I said I hadn’t read much for the year, which isn’t true.  I just focused on fucking off.  Kind of like I just did with this post.  You either hang yourself or you hang it on the wall.  All this one needs is a nail.

Ab irato,
Trainer
AUSTIN TX

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