#388

Guess the thing for me to worry about right now, besides all the seriously material shit in my immediate surroundings and the world at large that demand strained thought, is to wonder if I don't merely have depression, but bipolar disorder. Suppose I should have wondered more about this earlier, but maybe it just morphed into this over time. 

I was a very happy child. Until I got depressed for the first time when I was eight, nothing got me too down for very long at all. Happy baby, happy toddler, happy little kid. Bad shit was bad shit, but you rolled on, found the joke, picked up a book, got a hug from someone, and time would go on under the light of God. The first intimations of a more durable maturity and the depression was immediate and tactile, and basically instantly, I wondered if it would not be better to be dead than to feel this way.

Got over it, but after I turned eleven I got depressed again and that never really went away till I was maybe twenty-three, though it turned inward and became a hot and accessible rage that fueled my teenage years especially. Then it was matter of riding out feeling normal and riding out feeling depressed, outside of those occasions in a given springtime when I'd lose my mind and hit the eject button on my life. Yes, manias. Sure. Mania is certainly not outside of my experience of depression. Neither is joy, nor satisfaction, nor feeling free of the extremes. Felt like I understood myself pretty well since I turned twenty-eight, and till this summer things were as stable between my familiar highs and lows as they have ever been. Maybe the lows have been lowering the last couple years, but in a way mostly grippable.

But the way it played out this summer and fall, I have to wonder if things are the same. The up was too up, and I didn't realize it at all until the crash almost killed me. Still skidding and rolling. Some days literally can't do a single thing outside the confines of my property and only a select few within. 

In this darkness there is still contentment and satisfaction, the happiness of accomplishments and love and play, friendship and ice cream, etc. There is still this here, this text field, and the other ones in which my service as a conduit brings me to life. Reading Martin Buber's I and Thou translated and magnificently introduced by my beloved Walter Kaufmann, and that has brought me feelings similar to reading Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, which is the highest compliment I am probably able to pay a writer of thoughts. 

There is no denying or leavening of the bare fact, though, that being that I feel as bad as I have ever felt in a life extremely intimate with bad feelings. As Kierkegaard would put it, I am deeply and profoundly ill with despair. 

*

The only way out is through, having become stronger, with time. Ah, time! But time is so precious now, here, in this maelstrom of irresponsible acceleration.

Nevertheless, I won't be rushed. Hate that. Clinging like ivy to the wall of this world is an act of patience. That's all I can say. Sometimes ivy grows and sometimes it doesn't. 

You cannot rush it. You cannot help it. It just has to hang on.

--JL

#350

Man, I'd rather be doing something else, but I risk posting nothing at all for November, and that would not do. Though no one may give the percentage of a fuck in the world at large, that factually pointless should update on occasion at the least does matter to me. Obscurely, and to no utile end, but it does.

Suppose with me, then, that a fairly dry and straightforward update is prefferable to continued silence, and read on. Perfectly whatever three hundred and fiftieth fucking post, sailing on.

*

Reading books has been kind of in the shitter, sad to say. I'm nearly halfway through Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but I've lost steam power on that and broke off to quickly read and be amazed and rent emotionally by Helen Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Rd. Other than that, I've been raising a lot of Pokémon and watching a lot of different Star Wars. Star Wars makes me feel ok. Wrapped up Super Marios Bros. Wonder, which was also very extremely fantastic and good in every way. Slowly working my way through old Kingdom Hearts games in preparation to play the newer ones I didn't get a chance to yet.

Recently I completed my thirty-fourth solar orbit on this planet in this body, and I am pleased to be able to report that I am still raising Pocket Monsters. Soon it will be a thirty-year enterprise, and by 2027 I will be a thirty-year Trainer, if the world should so endure. Rest assured that even if it is from the scant shelter of blasted-out hovel cringing amongst ruins in a post-apocalyptic landscape, I will be training Pokémon, even if I have to write the text adventure on scraps and roll handmade dice myself.

*

Writing, yes. Writing books, now, and getting them made, that's a different element. Steps are being taken graphic design-wise by my excellent compatriot to produce three brilliant covers for the three volumes which shall replace all extant versions of my published works. I have condensed my two books of poetry into a single new volume of collected works, titled Asambléa Lux Verdi, with the outlines of the old books preserved and reformatted for improved reading pleasure. The Tetrahedron has been properly formatted and two errors have been repaired; it is many more pages now and actually has margins. Imagine. We shall forget that I essentially put out a broken product; thankfully, it was not one anyone purchased. Haha! Incompetent ike a fox. Finally I have reformatted the Symphonic Minor Heresies, and have decided to append a second collection; the Movement #2 to the first book's Movement #1. Yes. To add further value, I shall add opus numbers to each. Now I simply have to write/finish them, and my works will be condensed into three superior editions. The prior two will be relesed very soon, upon the finalization of the covers; I will produce the planned material for the third as quickly as possible and release it upon completion and review. 

*

Since I described my office in this text field, I have put up a bunch more art and stuck stickers of various descriptions all over the place. It is vastly cheered and better charmed for protection. I have done powerful magics of late, here and elsewhere, but more spells are required, more power. Timing and energy levels both being factors, however, one must have patience for the arrival of better days.

One must always have such patience ready to hand even at the best of times, maybe.

*

My arm is much improved, and I can do pushups again. Pretty keen. I'm doing ok. At least I can do this again. 

--JL