Nothing means anything, fuck.
I feel like i’m just going through the motions, but at least I can do that. This post is very forced, and doesn’t feel as natural as it usually does, but I have to go through this motion too. One of the constant topics of my writing has been trying to explain living with bi-polar disorder and what its like. Once i wrote something like “Depression, real depression, robs the human experience of any meaning”… which is unfortunately where I seem to be at currently. I cant manage much pinpoint grammatical and spelling accuracy today, so apologies for that.
Part I, Jan, 2023
Fuck, man…I’ve been in this funk and it’s stopped me from doing the things i really like to do, like writing and making music. I though I might pull teeth a little bit to try to shake some of it off, and type a little bit. Maybe i just dumped so much shit by accident in the last two posts that I didn’t know how to bounce back, and get at something else. hmmmmm.
I haven’t been able to do anything, it sucks because I was so creative for a while there, and now I don’t even try, which is what i’m actually doing here (Trying, at least). This fall, I set out to practice writing every day, and i was doing pretty well for a few months . If i fall out of practice writing gets harder to do, but when i’m keeping up it glides out, which is not what is happening at present.
I don’t even want to write this. nothing means anything, not even music (any reader should know how much music means to me). I fear that i’m in a bi-polar depressive episode, and i hope it doesn’t destroy my progress, I’ll be careful not to let it. I guess the least i can do is capitalize the “I’s” i forget to capitalize every time i write anything and hit publish. i hope the ceiling cracks open soon, and lets some sun in. I’m fortunate enough to be aware of the fact that these kind of moods are not eternal, which hasn’t always been the case. when you get really depressed you cant even imagine that it will lift, ever. I’ve had it worse though, I can still get up every day and show up where i need to show up, today i’m even doing my laundry!
Small Victories, baby.
I want to share the memory of a deep depression lifting, to remind myself that it does:
Part II, Fall 2018
In the fall of 2018, I was returning from the relapse that had ended my longest sober stretch (4 years), and i was living in a sober house in Bradley Beach, NJ with one of my best friends and some other pretty decent guys (and one of the best cats I've ever met). I was unemployed and very defeated by the events of the prior 8 months or so. I was pretty sure that i was in love with a young woman that really wasn’t having it and the whole “unrequited love” trip is a real downer. She ended up as a close sober friend, and i cant really get my brain into why i was feeling that way about her, i think it was the ill conceived physical encounters we had in the spring.
That November There was even one of those rare Occurrences where i landed in the psych hospital without any intoxicants involved. it was that deep existential dread, meaningless existence type shit. It must’ve been pretty bad, because my ex girlfriend called me on the hospital phone over a year after we had broken up… the whole thing with her is another story altogether, ill put that down and walk away from it for now.
When I was unemployed and near Asbury Park, NJ i had a daily routine. I would ride my bike to America’s Cup (a coffeehouse) on Cookman ave, get a 2$ medium black coffee with 4 ice cubes, and cross the street to this little mall type establishment known as The Shoppes at The Arcade. I had taken to loitering at Kill Screen Games, which was (and still is)a retro video game store owned by a straight edge, vegan, hardcore kid named Phil. If there is one thing i know a lot about and like to talk a lot about, its the video games i grew up on. Kill Screen was adjacent to a reclaimed wood working shop on one side, and a record store on the other. I had developed a friendship with a lot of the shop owners (and their dogs). It was a cool little community vibe, and i miss them.
It must’ve been late November, a few months into the depression when the record store next to the video game store played a Rolling Stones song that i had never heard, and it was seriously like hearing music for the first time after being deaf, it was beautiful and i knew at that moment i’d be ok. my mental and emotional reaction to music is always the indicator that I’m going to come out of the darkness again.
“Sway” is on the album Sticky Fingers, and maybe i should listen to it now.
Here is the link of links to things i made when things meant something, and i was productive: https://linktr.ee/EvR0cK17
and it wouldnt be a blog post without a word from our sponsors \
yes, i have 2$ to my name, so… yes, well, you know:
