forking paths

Shortly after I start crying on my keyboard over Oscar Grant, to my great surprise, I decide that I will in fact have one small whiskey.  I’ve had no taste for the poison since New Year’s Eve.  The project leaves me with some time to kill and so here I am.

I don’t cry very often and I’m bad at it.  In fact I went six or seven years at one point without crying once, although it was pretty clear that this was a condition of pathology.  Some time not too long after that particular dam broke I got some help, as they say, and these days I cry over normal and even mundane things like the death of a favorite cat.  But it also pops up in strange, unexpected contexts from time to time, always associated with a reaction of empathy rather than sadness over my own life.  Which latter thing definitely exists, but makes me depressed rather than weepy.  Since I became a father I am particularly unable to tolerate the suffering of children, and in fact it was thinking about Oscar Grant’s four year old daughter that set me off.  I wrote, somewhere out there in one of the online text-holes I haunt:

Oh I am tired of this place.

Earlier I was fighting ideations, not bad ones, exactly, but unwanted.  Daydreams, I suppose, except it’s hard to call this daytime, but what do you call it when you are dreaming at night but not asleep? In any event I got sick of watching my brain spin out yarns, scenarios with no touchstone in reality, and lashed out at them with a little directed visualization, a technique I picked up from a somewhat lurid sci-fi novel by Philip José Farmer, which nevertheless works sometimes.  Nothing like a placebo to cure something that’s all in your head.  I project my mind’s eyes into my hands and fling them, double fisted, into coruscating fragments; let them glitter and disperse.  Because I have not been so diligent about being compassionate towards myself a certain self-reproach lingers even while the thoughts themselves recede.  So easily bored, so starved for novelty, I castigate my mind.  Weak, indolent.  Deprive you of a couple meals and you’d stop all the restless questing past the mundane quick enough, wouldn’t you?

No sense to that either, good money after bad.  What it gets me started on again is wondering, what in the world is this I and what does it think it is dressing down? The can and a half of dog food in the bone box? Some Freudian construct, the ever popular id perhaps, or maybe an Archetype?  Are any of the other questions about the set-up down here even meaningful with that one hanging out there, coiled in the nest of its own constructs?

It’s relevant, it’s still going somewhere.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 9, 2009 at 1:31 AM