A sketch

It seems to be raining more often than not.

I've never minded the drizzle and I have special affinity for the misty gloom of cold November rain. This year it just seems to...I don't know...fit.

I see so much strata to the melancholy. There is the personal level. So many I know are grieving deaths and multiple incarnations of loss. I know I'm struggling with money and finding a job and providing and overall just fearing the future. Then there is the national and international level. More talk of nuclear war today. A daily scan of the news and social media brings more stories of racism, sexism, and alt-right nationalism. Civil war feels imminent. Debates constantly rage over just who will be punished in matters of taxation and health care. Not everyone's unhappy about it.

That's just it. I look around and feel like there's a party going on and I'm not invited. Don't get me wrong and think I'm saying I'm a born outcast. Because I was in the party once. But my invitation was conditional. All our invitations are. Just one false move...and it doesn't even have to be your move...and your invitation is revoked. You're out in the rain. You're face pressed up against the glass...

Sorry for whatever I did to get thrown out. I never meant to do it. Could it be, perhaps, that my invitation was far more fragile than I first expected? "This message will self-destruct in five minutes..."

How do you get back into the party?

All tomorrow's parties.

That very Velvet Underground song and eventual title of a William Gibson book came into my head. An hour later I heard the Siouxsie and the Banshees cover of it on Sirius First Wave.





For whatever reason, the song made me think of "Emma" by the Sisters of Mercy, one of my favorite tracks of theirs. A few minutes later, I heard "Emma" as well. Am willing songs to me?






Wish I could will more useful things to me.

That image above. I think about it a lot as I curl on my 15 year-old couch in my hoodie, scrolling through social media on my iPhone. Living virtually. Either because it's all I can or because I'm afraid/unable to unplug. Is this the best case scenario?

I also read blogs. A favorite is Space: 1970. Christopher Mills hasn't updated in a while, but that's all right. There are plenty of old posts to sift through, allowing indulgence in Star Wars, Star Trek, Buck Rogers, BSG, and Flash Gordon. I feel guilty about it though. Am I ducking the question? Is it the intellectual and science fictional equivalent of curling in fetal position under blankets and sucking my thumb? Is the graphic above, in all of its dour Blade Runner-ish glory, far more realistic? As I look out both the glass and the computer windows, I see a dirty, rainy urbanscape and a world where people have plenty of prescription drugs and ready access to weapons of mass destruction. Is any indulgence in gleaming rocket ships nothing short of cowardice in the face of the problem?

Depression is a feedback loop.

A thing in your brain and in your chest, clawing from the inside every waking hour.

Deontology falls to a chemical skew.


“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

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