Archive for August, 2008
Having nothing to say but not minding because there’s no one to say nothing to. Like I’m practicing lyrics, some kind of indie lyrics, the repetition the self-absorption. Painful as hell, this desire without ability. Funny, because I’m taking something called Abilify. I almost wrote that I was “on” something, but saying you’re on something sounds too much like a diet plan or fitness regimen.
I’m not getting used to the idea that I need these drugs for the rest of my life.
In the morning I pay attention for about .5 hours to the newspaper and RSS feeds. I pay no attention while I am on the subway and I miss being able to do that. I pay attention at work for about 2 hours before lunch and at lunch I pay absolutely no attention. 3 hours in the afternoon while at work again and a little more attention on the subway ride back home, usually to some radio show podcast. When I get home I really stat paying attention, then I pay less and less attention past 9. I used to pay so much attention in the late evening, and that’s one of the reasons I’m here, trying to pay attention.
I wrote about a character who believed he was, as he put it, paying the wrong kind of attention.
I think about this attention too, and I think that the rest of the day, when I’m not sleeping and paying attention, I’m paying the wrong kind of attention. Attention to the most boring sides of myself, attention to how wrong I’m going about things, attention to how other people are so far away, I’m paying attention to what would happen if tiny things were changed — if this door were a little over from where it is, if this short apparently successful man were a street person, if this woman started laughing and how it probably would, if she did, have something or other to do with me. I pay attention and I pay the wrong kind of attention, too.
How much does it cost? The attention I do pay pays me, mostly in paying attention while I’m at work, but sometimes the other kinds of attention are paid, too. The wrong kinds of attention are costing me something, I just don’t know what. It’s almost like I’m only paying attention when I think I’ll get money out of it. And this is because I’m worried about money all the time. And this is what happens when you don’t have enough money: all your free time costs you.
On my theory that depression is a mental virus, a whopping, wholistic meme: it’s global and permanent, like the thought itself. Its vector is talking about depression in certain ways, and a sick mixture of stigma and pride. Early on, pride in not sleeping, in being stressed out expressed itself in the culture (see the Slow Movement’s attempts to blow out that furnace with a whisper). This was a good foundation for the petri dish we all live in now.
The problems with our friendships has been talked about in plenty of places. I believe that the idea of friend has been changed to include contacts, while true friendship hasn’t been similarly buffed up. In other words, contacts have become friends while we still only have the same small amount or fewer real friends. Also, the society of besting people, the hatred of stars and the time spent hating them. This is group loneliness.
Economic terms being simply that most of us earn much less money for the amount of work we do, with the focus being on those who earn far more than they deserve (and the lucky few who earn a lot for doing a lot), the average person is made to feel alien.
Is this how depression can spread? Because I’d always thought of it as genetic, but the World Health Organization is predicting an increase in depression world wide. It must also be a virus. A bug you catch no problem when you have the wrong genes.
Can individuals spread it?
every thousand years
this metal sphere
ten times the size of Jupiter
floats just a few yards past the earth
you climb on your roof
and take a swipe at it
with a single feather
hit it once every thousand years
`til you’ve worn it down
to the size of a pea
yeah I’d say that’s a long time
but it’s only half a blink
in the place you’re gonna be
where you gonna be
where will you spend eternity
I’m gonna be perfect from now on
I’m gonna be perfect starting now
stop making that sound
stop making that sound
I will say I forgot it
but it was only yesterday
and it’s all you had to say
Begin again the reassembling of the routine that was blown away and atomized out of memory by the bipolar. What did I used to like? Working back into the desire for something real tends to open up the memory bank, and out tumbles something painful. I just wanted routine but I got memories of old routines from better times. All old times seem like better times. Remember.
From its parts try to make a whole that works. The kludged robot shudders and stumbles around and you’re proud of the little mechanism, and a little sad for it too. Watch it work its way across the carpet, the whole world. You never thought of the walls in quite this way. It’s going to hit one and fall over. The effort of walking all the way over there again to pick it up. Which direction to point it in next? In your hand its legs are still moving, and you’re faintly put off. Like an insect rowing the air.
Put it down and aim it at something for god’s sake.
Something needs attending to. Whatever happens in the moment between sleep and waking it takes me up and out of sleep and sits me on the side of the bed hunched over, swaying. Coursing through me a wakening and a broadening like an animal sense taking over and blooming outward. It’s night and I’m safe. It doesn’t matter that a bipolar needs the sleep, I don’t this time.
Something needs attending to.
Dudes are walking by the window drunk, calling to each other. Are you kidding? And dopplaring into the dead of night. Fool myself — it’s not the dead of night, it never is. Brightening somewhere for someone else, some impossible people in some impossibly other place. So sitting on the edge of the bed, swaying, kind of awake. I got to get up because come morning everything’s going to be different and I won’t like it. This is my life here, now. The morning’s so pleasantly far away its almost unendurable. Putting off living. This is the great stretch of freedom.
Other people’s evenings are inconceivably alien and distant. I drove through suburbs three months ago feeling homesick. Wanting the kitchen, the wandering around loneliness, the TV in the bedroom and the quiet. The impersonal hollowness and the sadness of my kid years, when I wanted to live in the suburbs.
The underlit garage awnings and the blue glows in the windows. When smoking, do so under those underlit awnings and stare emptily into the black middle distance until you can make out the pebbles in the road, those ones someone down the street guards against with the plastic on the front bumper. Small libraries, the irritable and bored women.
Get a coke at a drive-thru using three words. Rent a movie.
