There are times, sometimes lasting days, when my essence – my soul, if you will – feels mortally wounded. When what I am feels used and abused like my head and mouth and guts did after a hard night of liquor and chain smoking. What triggers it – the weather? Some bio-chemical reaction? A series of events or trivial tragedies that, in succession, reveal and reaffirm the pointlessness of most everything?
And what do you do about it? Find something to worship? Live according to somebody’s rules and recipe of virtue or vice (whatever those are)? Or ride the wave in hope that when you come out, a song will sound better than it did inside the malaise? Hope that a word or two from a stranger or friend will seem kinder or more sincere once the languor passes? That’s all there is, I guess. That and maybe the cure in finding the right words to describe it and those words, exposing it nakedly for what it is, will somehow abate it. That they’ll snap their whip at the lion, putting him back on his pedestal to roar and hiss. Maybe it can all be tamed with mere words. That would be a curse and a blessing, see – an endless cycle of cursed torment and blessed relief. For fuck’s sake, why can’t there just be more blessings?
But true lion taming takes courage. The only courage here (arguably) is willfully abstracting oneself from all the nonsense that attempts to explain the way things are. But that abstraction leaves you feeling like this – a cold pancake without butter or syrup.
Tragedies have a beginning, middle and end. Pointless tragedies have none. Tragedies have big time conflicts like the killing of a father or king or lover or the loss of a child. Pointless tragedies are a lost filling that requires a crown. A dead alternator in winter. Preparing taxes. Indigestion. A shirt you liked that’s now too small cause you’re too fat. Romantic love losing its luster. Beauty, like childhood passions and fantasies and expectations, fading with age. The intoxicating drama of professional wrestling replaced by the faux-drama and faux-intoxication of a fluctuating retirement account. I deal with it all just to go back to a job that I have no passion for. All that bullshit just to keep on rolling that boulder up the hill while every year I grow older and weaker. The boulder never wears down but I do and I haven’t found a set of beliefs that makes it any easier. Fuck.
I suppose you could give a point to the tragedies by going out with a bang. But I’m not much of one for bombs or mass shootings or suicide missions or Harakiri, just words. So I’ll continue trying to deal with it that way since the other ways might take some courage too – courage to have conviction, no matter how misguided.
And now that I got these words out, my soul still aches. That either means these words aren’t very good or it’s just a bad plan, like trying to tame lions with a kazoo instead of a whip.
mrobins71 