In the Stack

You tell yourself, “Today was just a bad day.”

Then remember one does not count, but there is still a stack of bad days.

You open up your Facebook feed to friends’ posts “Remember to be kind to yourself.”

A poet advertises a lyric t-shirt “I love you. I’ll miss you. Be careful.”

In a realm where no one talks ear to mouth.

Not alone feeling alone in the stack.

Play Pen

There is a fundamental question, do I want to be? I try hard to want to say yes, knowing the parts of me that deem it so logical to say no. These parties hold a pathetic argument. Neither wants to speak too loudly into the microphone. So I go through my days neither being or not being hazed in depression seeing little point to life, seeing my being as an anchor for others and self-isolating to minimize the collateral damage. Occasionally I can invent an illusion in digital correspondence until I say too much or too little or utter what feels like the truth at the time. I laugh at how simple a question like an infant that refuses to eat his food. Plop dumb and squalid in a stink playpen. Shit in diapers. Refuse to develop the muscles to stand and climb out.

Reruns on channel one

It is difficult to take yourself seriously when a vision of your hand holding a gun to your head and watching chunks of skull and blood fly out onto the door of the room you are sitting in replays over and over all day long no matter how you try to occupy your time. The humor of the repetition flops in every so often that this scene is always impossible for the human choosing the act to ever see. So it is suicide remains in this fantastical quality of unrealness. That is unless you survive, but even then the failure in the incomplete act stalks the actor as the goal was not to see the film, but to finally un-see it.

A note to my yoga teachers

A note to my yoga teachers, know on the days you see me, more often than not I am present for basic survival reasons. I come to yoga because at least I know I can do this. I can go to a room with other human beings, hear a real human voice, be at least peripherally observed that I still am alive by human eyes and move my body to accomplish something small. At least today I can do this.

I can be in yoga near other human beings and not feel like I am violating other people’s space to succumb to either rejection or complete invisibility. I can smell the scent of visibility even if no one directly speaks to me in the entire before, during, or after process or I to them.

One of you, my teachers, may be the only human I speak with face to face all day, and cumulatively you may be the only group all week in whatever perfunctory politeness or genuine exchange occurs. You are the modern American therapy for the bargain price of less than a hundred dollars a month.

The radio reminds me physical isolation and lack of relationships is a greater risk to shorten my lifespan than lack of exercise or an unhealthy diet.

Robin's Eggs

The irony of emotional availability is that it smells like desperation to the other person’s instinct to hunt what does not wish to be hunted. The animal within senses both the lack of external labor as off-putting and the presence of internal self-reflection to be present intimidating. It is in this dichotomy we teach ourselves to wear masks and go through the world so largely unloved.

Blasphemous Questions

Somewhere in navigating the guts of the machine the labyrinth's darkness became its beauty. The realization the objective was not escape, but that we are the maze itself canoodling in crevices of mustard gas clouds and pear orchards. Bodies die without fanfare and live with contorted enthusiasm. Angelic eyelashes flutter in the fireworks. We sip joy our body feels not so missing in this turn left compared to our last attempt at a due north. The contraption flashes flimflam epileptic seizure screen cellphone gluttony. We stare down the glitter impossible to eradicate like herpes in our delusions. Odysseus munches lotuses. There is a constant hum in the background of everything. The murmur of Thanatos whispering, "Do it." 

The choice to eat fruit in the abyss of a Friday night or clack an animal survival instinct dancing to the Trinidadian drum beats. We paint ourselves in tribal consanguinity. I could remember that once, but now all I remember is the machine, the beautiful shadows of it, that I am the atomic shifts. I want most to have the illusion back. The colossus of boredom stares echoing the hum. I rub the backs of my upper ears with thumbs in tiny circles with my eyes closed pretending these are not my thumbs. In the darkness there is an openness, like an open field away from the machine's walls like somewhere my mother told me god lived. I do my best not to believe her as I savor the realness of a tactile moment.

I live with the a constant tightness below each set of ribs, pinching an anxious vice of "I do not want to be here." The notion repeats in annihilation piano keys. I missed my 401k payments the past two years. The accountant is negligent on the tax advantages of retirement planning. The thought of ending it sits like a constant bird inside the room. I rummage through the fecklessness of talking to other humans about the bird. I decline. There is little or any aid but to regain the illusion. Pluck into the change purse for the magic bean of sex or love or a suppository of human connection. Twist the wonder capsule up into the hole. Fill the void with high school intelligence and television sparkles. Weigh the first blasphemous question. Am I more frightened of dying or living?   

Depression is under each glitter fleck in a permanent readiness to return. Any flicker of hope is a dual hook sharpened in the pang. We know its potential yet hope anyway watching ourselves fall back into the pit, a new face to mourn in the rotating masks we call savior of the solar and lunar cycles. The heaviness in the lie that we say we know there is no savior. There is only the second blasphemous question, what makes me happy? An honest answer is the sphinx's requirement for exit.

I miss the sunlight. 20180626

I told my family I think about killing myself sometimes eight months ago. It is always in there like looking at my own nose. There was a perfunctory we would rather you not, but a summarily understood exhalation that there is little any of us can or will do. So it is, as before, and for these decades, I am on my own. Fart. To be or not to be. I think about work, unemployment, America, personal relationships, art…I figure write a few books and when the gas sputters out of the bank tank say goodbyes. I don't want to say goodbyes. I never have. 

I manufacture a story that the kid wants something to do with me, but that’s mostly bullshit. Occasionally I get to text. We have a call. Laugh. it's god damn beautiful, but compartmentalized. 

There is this radiant numb sort of perpetual weight. I cannot afford to get a diagnosis or drugs or a person to talk to about it because why bother. I tried the shrink. It didn’t shrink. The irony in America is if you seek professional help and get diagnosed the check boxes on forms change, employers or reports or people who want to extricate you from the subways or court proceedings get notified and the gyro of the world starts the pariah stigma of labeling the crazy one.

This is my fight with the voice that is gleeful that this could all end. In all the meditation and trying there is a voice in the subtext of everything that just says it is all illusion. None of this is real and every waking day requires theatrical performance to conjure the self-deceit about why anyone would want to be alive. I have my reasons. I choose to stay. 

I stare into the ledger of joy. I look out across the world. I feel the awfulness people do to each other. The ooze baby of our self-hatred elected to the throne in D.C. I taste the steel in my mouth of the dehumanized corporate mechanics. The lack of kindness feels lethal like a big fucking snuff film with an orgy scene before the grand finale for the march of the pigs.

I do not want to be here for this. Imagining faking it for another person feels Sisyphean. Then I think about the child in me, the one who cannot imagine anyone wanting to stay around. I confront the paradox doom loop of depression repellent, the contagion, the way the kid talked to me, the way her mother did, the way my family looked at me so bored when I told them I think about killing myself. Hard to convince me inside they do not feel the same. All faking it, struggling, stirring the roux that this world is worth staying in if we can just lie to each other well enough.

Maybe we each find different drugs. I wonder if I ever had the capability to love, like really be in love, if I could get there. I feel like my ankle is roped to a hole and it’s just a matter of time. So meeting new people or talking about it is just a disservice to others. Whatever illusion other people can muster, I hope other people can keep it, because the rawness of all of this is just too much. Then I think that's all bullshit of course I could, I just need the right season. 

I have not felt safe in years. I think about if there were suicide stores where we could just go get an injection or a breathe helium and off ourselves, millions would do it. It would be the only thing to get the Orange Slut off the news. All the world would need is a tipping point and the bodies would just be leaping into pits to end this farce. Fuck it humanity, if you don’t want to be here…if you are this cruel, I am exhausted and an asshole. I am no hero, no voice, a shitty writer whose best talent of saying no to his demons is quavering.

I miss the sunlight. But I know it exists. I stay for the sunlight behind the clouds, knowing as Eric Draven taught high school me, it can't rain all the time.