Friday, January 24, 2014

Better late than never.

It has been nearly a year since I've sat down to do this which is quite a while and yet not very much has changed.  Some would argue that my life has entered into a state of intoerable stasis but I say back to those people that they have no idea what they are talking about.  I am rarely bored, I am constantly learning, I have tons of creative outlets, good conversation, and delicious food.  The Brittish went to the new world and went to war over spices because what they had sucked.  I live in a sub tropical climate.  I don't have a whole lot to complain about.

I did have a pretty bad attack of depression just recently.  I'm not going to lie it started to scare me a bit.  I'd managed to hide it for a good while but towards the end it just started to paralyze me and I couldn't do anything.  It had been lurking around me for a bit causing me to feel a lil down but since it couldn't find anything to latch onto however, a couple of bummer things happened close together and both of them ended up setting it off so I ended up wasting a week being sad for no real reason.  It is for the best I think.  In a lot of ways it is kinda like vomiting.  I can feel this big black cloud of sadness just floating around for no damn reason and at this point in my life I can keep it at bay for a good while.  Next time I should just let it in have a good old fashioned cry, eat a lot of ice cream, and see if that works better.  It is where I end up more or less anyway and now that I know how to effectively fend it off I can wait until it is a good time for me to fall apart instead of somewhere embarrassing like in the parking lot at work.  It's weird I mean people walk up to you and say hi and ask how are you doing and you can't say, "Well I just cried in the parkinglot for 5 minutes for no fucking reason but other than that I'm fine" because I was fine after it happened...well kinda.  The average person might mean well but most people have no idea how to help or deal with something like that.  Though to be honest there is nothing for them to do.  Or rather anything they do has a 100% chance of eliciting a random response from me.  That's what depression is.  It is an emotional state based off of non external or rational internal stimuli.  As a result it can cause unpredictable secondary emotional states like anger.

Oh well.  I don't think this is what Sasha had in mind when she asked me if I still wrote in my blog.  So let us move on.  It occures to me that at some point I managed to make peace with the excistential problem of the inherent uselessness of my life and I am not sure how I did it.  I wish I knew though.

Yeah that last sentence sounded fancy but it really isn't.  I am not really a big fan of existentialism though I think that the questions and problems it raises are more important now than ever.  The thing about it isn't so much that the questions aren't hard but the answers are ugly.  Then when faced with the ugly answer you have to decide what you want to do about it, accept it or change.  Like the question posed by Camus, "Why shouldn't you kill yourself?"  It is amazing how much difficulty people have answering that.  To put it a less ideologically loaded way, "Should you die tomorrow will anything really change?"

For the most part the answer is no, the world will keep on spinning, your possition at work will be replaced, people will mourn so that they can move on and yeah.  Some might think this is an unusually grim way to look at the world but it isn't.  I don't.  I think of it as a challange.  I try to produce at least as much as I consume.  Mostly I produce ideas, conversation, and boring information framed in interesting ways.  This doesn't convert very well into plastic which I seem to use a lot of but I try.  For me that's enough.  I think it is less about what you ultimately end up doing and more of a willingness to look the problem in the eye, and not blink.  To meet the inherent vastness of life head on and to understand where you stand and be willing to work up from there.  Or something.  I don't know.

Depression makes a lot of everyday things very difficult for me.  Sometimes I win and it is grand and sometimes I loose and it sucks.  My personal struggle however is mine and I love it for it has made me into who I am.  I deliberatly sculpted myself and judging from the company I keep I did a pretty damn good job.

Tomorrow is another day.  Next time Imma write about minecraft or board games or something.