The Redundant Vortex
Afternoon
I enjoyed the change in my approach to writing that I took with the last story (or post). If you haven’t read the resulting output, I have great News for you: you can, in just one click:
9:44PM
Alright now, there’s some ground to cover, and I might not have a full grip on where it is, but that’s irrelevant, really. I’ve just come back from my AA homegroup, where I’m the little white boy coffee maker, at least 10 years younger than everyone else, it was great because it always is. I already covered all of that ground in previous posts and I’m not fond of being redundant.
“Redundant!”
My fifth grade teacher in Manomet Elementary School’s (Plymouth, MA) name was Mr. Bill Sheehan. When I first started 5th grade, I was horrified because he was kind of a hard ass about stuff, it seemed. Having come from a very chill kind of friendship type 4th grade teacher who was not only a computer nerd, who would loan me CD ROM point and click games, but also a consummate super Nintendo player, at first I wanted to change classes. I’m sure glad I didn’t, though because Mr. Sheehan taught me a lot about how to write. I would bring my chicken scratched compositions on lined paper (the kind that was yellow, and more textually soft than a basic Mead composition book page) to him at his desk, and I’ll never forget one of the things he would exclaim if I had reused the same kind of verbage or style of sentence too frequently. It’s one of those things I can actually hear in my head, about 30 years later.
“Redundant!”
I had no idea I was going to go there when I sat down to get typing. In the last story I expressed the desire to have the audience take my mind for a spin around the block of events that make up the (true) stories that I tell, and to me that’s equally as important as the events themselves. If you’re going to be cruising around in the perceptual vehicle I drive, it’s important to know that my memory is freakishly vivid. I think that’s the reason i’m able to communicate some of the experiences of my life, but it’s also a contributing factor to how fucked up and traumatized by those experiences I am . Nothing is free and I doubt any gift comes without it’s equal counterpoint.
I had to go to sleep, I had no choice
Thursday 11/21
11:15 PM
I had fully intended to be asleep, hours before now. I’ve been doing this thing where I listen to spiritual lectures as I drift off to sleep.
Maybe that’s what happened. but now it’s
Saturday 11/23
11:07 PM
So, I’m actually writing now with a reason: because I really don’t feel like it. I mentioned the lectures I listen to at night, and one of the people I listen to Is this guy Duncan Trussel. Duncan Trussell is a comedian, podcaster, and actor who has a very psychedelically informed blend of humor, philosophy, and spirituality. He’s also an acolyte of Ram Dass, who was really the only speaker I listened to for the first few months of this night time listening, which has become part of my practice.
Duncan trussell deals with depression and I was just listening to him talk about how he makes himself do the things that depression doesn’t want him to do like going to the gym. I was thinking about what my version of that practice is, and so I opened my little Chromebook and now i’m typing away.
I’ve been dealing with (and bitching about) this whole energy deficit thing. In keeping with my longstanding tradition of avoidance of redundancy, i’ll just say this: energy, I hardly ever fucking have it. If your curious about this, there are more elaborate descriptions in many of the blog posts before this one. As someone who really appreciates having eyes on what they write, perhaps even pathologically, of course I can reccomend that you trip back to the various other things i’ve written if you are curious about any of it.
I’ve tried to pick apart this drain on my life force from many different angles, and none of them produced any answers, so I thought “oh wait, what about a good ol’ fashioned bi-polar depressive state?”, and it clicked because depression is such a crafty little cunt of a thing, all stealthy in its operations of undermining everything that is good. Depression doesn’t want me to do things like writing, because they are good for me (and feel good). Often, I take depression’s orders, and I don’t do the things… only to then feel guilty or ashamed of the fact that I have not done the things in whatever amount of time, which of course way too long to not be doing the things. It refuses to allow me to acknowledge the things I do, and the ways I've grown because it only shines a spotlight on the what I haven’t done and all of the places I failed to show up.
I was talking to my brother yesterday, because my mother is in the hospital for colon issues, and I wanted to call him because I know he’s in Boston, and he’s there for her and my sister, where I can’t be, and I know it isn’t easy. I don’t know when he came up with this, but he calls it the vortex, and the act of furthering it “vortexing”. This is an apt description.
I realized something, and this is what i’m going to end my little trip to the gym (for my brain) on. There was a time, when I wasn’t even aware of all of this stuff, and I just took my thoughts as indisputable truth, because they spoke to me in my own voice. I would use this as the information that informed decision making, I would take action based on fugazi bullshit just because it seemed credible. There were literally times when that action was very bad for my well-being, even like “ok, I should kill myself, because this is how it is and it’s bad enough to justify that”. Fortunately, I was never successful.
Trust me, i’m not anywhere near able to do it all the time, but there are many times where I can look at the vortex and sort of go “oh there that thing is, look at it, doing what it does…fucking cunt.” That’s really saying something. I am going to put it right here in print: that’s improvement.
There are some things coming up this week that are exciting (the film i’m in has a screening at a college), and i’m sure to touch on them so maybe subscribe to get emails when I do: https://evr0ck17.medium.com/subscribe
I’m not even remotely close to running out of things to write about, i’m actually cooking up quite a few, at any given time when my eyes are open (and maybe when they aren’t).
Did you know that you can help further the goals of the evr0ck initiative, which don’t just benefit me but the community I operate in… shit, it might even benefit you (the reader):
https://ko-fi.com/evr0ck17
