Proud and excited to announce this week’s post is featured on Medium! Please go there and show me some applause (icon of hands clapping at the bottom of, or just beside, the piece). Feel free to leave a comment, too, so they know we have arrived.
Thanks motherfucker!
There’s colors on the street
red, white and blue
-Neil Young
…I have no worries.
-The Dalai Lama
Time is runnin’ out I’m comin’ right down to the wire
gotta go do something to get myself higher
-The Velvet Underground
I’m sitting on a backlog of posts that chronicle my road to recovery from my homeless hometown beginnings to my modern day battles with depression in Paradise. These posts offer a more definitive and specific timeline than my unusually hyperbolic tellings of devastation, sexual conquest and ego mania. They’re a good answer to questions like “Did that really happen?”. I’m at the end of my rope here but not for creative reasons. The blog is cutting too close to the bone. I’m sober now, and there’s a whole world of drama and conquest I’ve sworn off. I’m reduced to surgery on myself, without anesthesia, and live on the world wide web. There was no better grist for the wheel than my decades long fall through the Night Kitchen. Boredom could be a root cause of alcoholism, which is to say, existential dread. Down here at the Office we got nothing but, good Reader-malaise and anger, agitation and the rest. These are the colors of my palette and of course the canvas is you.
Those posts and essays were drafted for what I thought would be my weekly column. My work was refused though, and I never tried that again. I figured I had you and we had this blog and I’ve always done better aloof, on my own and conquering my own world. The truth is I’ve only drifted further and further out-dangerously into my own orbit. I suffer 100% less of their bullshit, but the full 100% of my own. I’m depressed. The beast in me is winning the round. Stories on the radio have profound psychic effect. I’m paralyzed in the prime of my life with almost any option I choose open to me. Weeks gone by, Thursdays, 3 and 4 day weekends sleeping late and staying in. I’ve held to my obligations, I work, but I haven’t been writing, and this blog’s been the only thing that’s kept me in line. It’s not as bad as it used to be and to the depressed mind this is somehow supposed to be good.
There are certainly more important matters on the dais. Tomorrow this country could roll back to the 20th Century, we could find ourselves working around the clock to pay exorbitant medical bills or just fuck off and die. People are enraged and roiling and the New Dumb would rather wage war than show compassion for their fellow human beings. I’ve never been here before, where the storm within is only matched by the storm without. I feel fucked and the world is getting there. It’s not news to me, or you or anyone that somewhere someone is always getting fucked and it’s usually by this country. It’s gone unchecked for too long, our selfishness and exceptionalism have gone too far. The beast is eating itself. Then again, if you ask the poor, the black, the disenfranchised, it’s been going on from the beginning. I have no solace for you, good reader, let alone a point of light for us to focus on. All I know is, I’m getting depressed again, I can’t stay here and the New Century is about to take a dark turn. I’m hoping my backlog of posts written at the request of Brother Bean and Raw Paw Magazine will get us through. The shit is here, it’s landed and I’ve got to move or I’ll be crushed.
Hope to see you on the streets motherfucker.
Going for the Throat 