Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Depression Shit…

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I am sitting here at the internet again fighting a terrible flu. I am fighting a flu and I am suffering from having ripped two fingernails while trying to weed the strawberries.

Have you ever had this happen? You know, where you grab something with your hand and the nail gets pulled away from the finger? That’s what happened. Both the thumb and the index finger now are black and the thumb is kind of pussy not as well. And yes, it hurts.

Did I spell that word correctly? It was meant as in pus, the filmy white stuff you get after an infection sets in.

So anyway, yesterday after about 11:30 turned out to be kind of a non-day and after a few false starts as for as being social is concerned, I found my bed and began what was to be a 24 hour sleep. I mean, have you ever been so completely without energy that you just lay there without even the slightest electrical impulse there to motivate your limbs into action. Really, it is profound.

And so I pretty much stayed that way until it was time for my bus to come around. Some friends at the village tried talking to me but I couldn’t even focus my eyes.
And then to top it off, I started to get nauseous on the bus. If I had the capacity to kick myself for not tossing my cookies back at the dacha, I would have. An hour of self control trying not to let whatever I had eaten last come back out all of the grandmothers and dacha people sharing the bus with me. Being the kind of control freak I am though, I had already picked out the tossing spot at the train station and so it was only a matter of making it there. I did, though I pissed off a couple of maintenance people who saw me retching there next to the tracks. They of course would be thinking that I was drunk, but I could see how they reacted to my walking a straight line after that this was an illness thing and so they gave me some quarter.
So what is the point of all of this beautiful imagery? None. No point at all. I am so depressed I am thinking of all of the writers who have chosen their ways of writing their own final sentences.

Can you relate?

Now Hemingway was old and sick and felt he was simply finished as a man and didn’t want to suffer any more. He had guns, a hunter he, and found an easy shot between the bicuspids one morning while the Mrs. was sound asleep. Maybe if he had caught the damned fish, right?

Jack London, who’s every written word I have had the pleasure of reading found a sextuple dose of morphine to his liking. He just passed the bills over to his dearly beloved and laid down for what has now been something of a 90 or so years of sleep. Every read Martin Eden? Great book. A wanna-be author works with an abandon only London can describe and eventually finds that he has not only found the success that he wanted, but the trappings of success aren’t worth a shit in the end. Even the girl who had been his muse and inspiration turned out to be rather vacuous. I mean, what is the point of fighting for clarity if you can’t stand what you are looking at, right?

Jersey Kosinski? He went there. Hell I probably stole the title of my book from him. Pills, plastic bag over the head; classic Hemlock Society form. There’s a man who is not fucking around.

Lots more right? Lots…

But a funny thing about this flu of mine: I simply can’t find the energy to do it. Well, I am also scared. Scared of the dying part. There is permanence for you.
The Undiscovered country. That was a Star Trek title, that one. But of course that was from Shakespeare, right? Hamlet…

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.


Of course, he also said this:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it
offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such
a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it
out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.


As if to simply ask to cut the unnecessary drama and just get on with it. All interesting I suppose…

Sorry about the paraphrasing. And I think that this was not the first time I have quoted the bard. Acche, can’t sue me: Public domain!

Be back like Saturday.