Shambling through the day..

1. "shambles," (used with a singular or plural verb)
a. a slaughterhouse.
b. any place of carnage.
c. any scene of destruction: to turn cities into shambles.

2. shamble (v)
- To walk in an awkward, lazy, or unsteady manner, shuffling the feet.

What a strangely appropriate word. I feel as though I'm stumbling awkwardly, unsteadily through my life right now. My days somehow hazy, vague, directionless.

A place of carnage. Destruction. Have I turned my life into a shambles by shambling? Has my lazy, listsless, unfocused approach to things resulted in this growing sense that I am living in a condemned tenement, with boards breaking loose, windows cracked, pipes leaking?

I'm at a strange crossroads. From here there are only two paths. Shake it off, get a freaking clue, and start living a life filled with some sort of purpose, infused with some sense of energy, purpose, direction. Wring from it an essential fervor that will drive me forward. WAKE UP!

Or...

Or...

Plan B. Sink into a mire of self-loathing, let the numbness take over completely, like corrosion coating the contacts of a switch, dimming the lights, flickering intermittently. A dull, orange glow barely illuminating. Slack jawed and drooling, eyes unfocused. Atrophied, skin a grayish pale.

Foundering in self-pity. It's tempting, just give over to the depression. Shut out the world, withdraw into a self-imposed isolation, spin myself an impenetrable cocoon

Except that, my mom did that. I bear mute testimony to what it does to the kids. I have kids. I cannot allow myself that ill luxury of just giving up.

Which sucks. At times. A lot.

I hate being a grownup sometimes. Because, well, you have to grow up, with all it's related unpleasantness an inability to escape those imposed requirements of responsibility, of sanity, of remaining "present" to those in the outside world. I swear sometimes just sweating it through the day takes every erg or joule or angstrom of energy I can produce.

I don't really want to die, so why is it so hard to make myself want to live sometimes?

Maybe I won't give up completely. I jusst stop caring. Just stop giving one, ripe steaming shit about anything at all. Or, is that what got me into this situation in the first place?

Screw it. Mark your calendars. Thursday, 15 May, at approximately 12:40 PM, I stopped giving a shit. Of any kind. Whatsoever.

How truly liberating.

Comfort Food

I just ate an entire bag of Haribo Gummi Bears. At one sitting.

That can't be good for you.

Crying in Technicolor, living in Black and White.

What color is depression? There is a disorder called synethsesia wherein events or thoughts or emotions or days of the week evoke themselves as colors in the perceptor's minds.

I often find myself longing to be afflicted with such a disorder. I think that it would be the height of coolness to have this "problem." Thinking in technicolor. Emotions and sound being perceived as purple or gray or orange or green or magenta or puce.

How totally awesome.

And yet, what color is depression? What color would be the sense of a broken valve within the steam plant, a crossed wire in the cortex, a missing spark plug in the engine that is my brain?

A swirling, angry black and red motif, I'm thinking. But no, depression isn't gray. It isn't black. It's a sort of gangrenous green, a sick olive split-pea-soup sort of melange, some sticky puss-laden excrement that stains your best white shirt just before the bar mitzvah.

Depression isn't angry, it isn't sad, it isn't intense or colorful or proud or anything. Depression is an antithesis. It's a singularly inauspicious anything.

Depression is the color of ice left too long in the freezer. Depression is the color of socks worn through a thick, clinging mud, which, once washed, are never truly completely white again.

Depression is the sense of humid oppressiveness that fills your lungs when you step off the airplane in New Orleans in August. It fills the nooks and crannies and crevices of your lungs with a thick, heavy paste, weighing you down like your arteries were filled with a slurry of molten lead and oatmeal.

Life becomes monochrome, or sepia tone. Washed out like the eerie sort of blackish gray and white just after the sunset, but before night has really taken hold. Not one, not the other, and really, not much of anything else in between.

What color is my life right now? What synethsetic sort of kaleidescope typifies my existence from day to day?

Stick your head into a basin of wash water, after you've rinsed out your dirtiest gym socks and filthiest welcome mat, washed the dog and scrubbed clean the grease trap underneath the stove.

Now open your eyes. The color you see? That blurry, gray, stinging sort of glacial silt?

That's my life. Isn't it grand?

Savoring the Unpleasant

Do you ever get an itch, some interminable little cyclone of nerve-ending twitch just below the surface of your skin, something so intense and maddening that you just want to grab a fork, tear away the outer layers, and let whatever it is that's in there trying to get out, OUT?

But then...you pause? You grin that mirthless, empty grin of yours, lean back, and just begin to revel in the sheer, awful, wonderous torture of it? It's like some feral little alien has implanted an egg sac there, just above your ankle, just shy of the achilles tendon, and the thing has hatched, spilling out a thousand hungry little microscopic termites trying to eat their way to freedom.

Your entire body twitches with involuntary spasms as the core of your mind fights desperately to dig your fingernails in and furiously scratch and claw like you were trapped inside a coffin, buried in some lost and forgotten graveyard by a sociopathic gym teacher. You want to take a cheese grater to it until you see bone.

But you don't.

You masochistically let the ravening spasms terrorize your foot, your leg, the entire left side of your body. You grin wider, longer, more sincerely as the sheer ridiculous misery of it forces an hysterical giggle between clenched teeth. You're doubled over, clutching your fists against your stomach, your leg trembling with pent up frustration as something like acid eats away at the edges of your sanity by way of a few inflamed nerve endings.

Finally, you give in, and attack your ankle like a racoon caught in a bear trap. Pleasure receptors overload as the sweet, healing endorphins pulse through your system, bringing a near-orgasmic sense of relief as you scrub away at the little pocket of torment.

Your skin is red and raw, but the itch has grown quiescent, and life, for a moment vibrant with unspent angst, resumes its state of paltry grey and mullish, drizzly indifference.

What does it mean when you don't cry for help?

This blog is here to chronicle nothing except for my own descent into apathy and profound disinterest in all that lies about me.

It exists as sort of a blotter, a rorschach test resembling a bug eviscerated against the windshield as I careen wildly down the backroads of life, out of control, with no destination in mind, content to let the world fly by in an ill-defined blur as I hurtle towards an uncertain and unwelcome destiny.

It's like a dirty little secret, as I hide in plain sight, a guilty little pleasure that I keep wrapped and hidden away, drawing it out only in moments of delusionary spite.

I'm not sure if it's moments of lucidity in the midst of madness, or glimpses of madness breaking ever-more-frequently through the thin veil of coherence I'm able to present to those around me.

Basically, I don't have the energy left to be angry, nor the interest left to summon up more than a token amount of apathy.

When the madman laughs, his once vacuous face suddenly twisted into a rictus of unbalanced mirth, this blog is the string of drool hanging from his chin.

My mind is going...I feel it, and somewhat to my own bemusement, I seem more than content to simply wave a handkerchief from the pier as it sails away without me.

Bon...voyage!