It came on me here on the back porch, not so much in a flash of revelation but more like a shrug of shoulder resignation. No big sigh, just an uncomfortable slip into a slump. I have been struggling lately. The ride home this evening was like a slog through a bitter syrup. Indecisive drivers holding back forward motion, large 18 wheeled trucks jamming side roads, traffic signals malfunctioning. The realization of how little I could do. How little I cared to do. How little of life was used to just sit there and accept it. Listen to the topic at hand on the auto speakers. Stupid. A pod cast.
It is all invasive the struggle. The stress of life. There’s good stress eustress and bad stress distress. Yes, I’ve read my Marshall McLuhan, who in those old days seemed to have an answer for each with a brief firm nod to Hans Selye. There was further illusion of understanding in my early day readings. Marcuse worried the one dimensional being, Norman O. Brown held the Life After Death until the Closing Time. Even old Joe Campbell inhabited mythopoeic regions hence unexplored at least by my tender psyche. Jung was I and not easily Freuded. Norbert Wiener manned the helm steering humans humanly as possible and The revolution would not be televised. It would be writ in a language sempre più dolce, molto oblongata.
Who knew it would come to this. We wallow in shallow intellectual ruts of spiritual excess. Defined by lurid thoughts far more pornographic than any raw sexual act in the nonfiction and d-i-y list of endlessly bickering best selling crud. Tired beyond relief, stripped of most belief. There is not any longer so much an adventure of the spirit and the mind, but a combination regimen of sackcloth and ashes and the buttered balm of a cloying conscience. Beat me daddy eight or more hard. Is this what they call depression still. Cruel aches of the mind reflecting badly on the spirit.
Racking around in the muck and the mud. A church bell, soft in my suburbs, chimes in intimation of a Big Ben and there is a smell of garbage blowing in from some unknown location. The incessant susurration of tire wheels in even time commercing up and down the street. Heavy water molecules ringing out of the air on to my skin along with the gnaw and suck of a far less than extinct insect species. The truly ugly caw of a crow. Every cloud’s overcast, obscure every star’s in the sky. And I am tired.
It could be worse. I suppose it has been worse.
People suffer from cruel human conflict inhumane. Atrocities are caught. We are the terror. And I sit here in comfort and cry over a glass of Syrah, sirrah. How little I can do.
Opinion foisted, in my face, like a bad smell of undigested onion from the horrid breath of some bullying lout. I hear it as I fall asleep the radio set on the tawdry amplitudinally modulated dial. Ideas wailing from some circle of hell. Propped up and blowing by a foul wind. I hear it as I fall asleep with the High Definition Television blurred in my eyes. Uneven thoughts raging from the minds of the minions.
It is there in conversation as innocent as a water bubbler on the floor of a thousand tan carpeted offices. An overwhelming wealth of opinion, mostly ill considered and well intentioned.
Oy, the politesse…And Yoy, the poletics……as if it was important. It is mostly just an excuse for ill tempered people to massacre other folk. Murder in mind. In intellect. In spirit. In body. An intolerant nation, moving, more intolerant. Closing all avenues, shuttering every area, enclosing our world in the bubble of a field of rude force, creating a hot house of inhospitable breeding, a runaway greenhouse effect of conviction.
I’ll take another small sip of whiskey and then go in to sleep. After all I say, tomorrow could be another day.
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