DEPRESSION#
the blues has bore through,
I’m hollow in the hard wind
stars in the city at night
look like
ground glass in a black wound.
COME HERE OFTEN? went live last Tuesday and is featured below. I’ve had work accepted, I’m seeking gainful employment and depression sways me like a dry bender.
I come to after weeks of going dark, punch drunk at dawn with a tomcat familiar and dwindling funds. I need you but what else is new? We’ll live to see stranger things than our own mortality in the Anthropocene.
COME HERE OFTEN?
Of all the things I should’ve done that I did not do
I should’ve been smarter, I should’ve been stronger
I should’ve been you…
—Two Cow Garage
Boo. I’m back on the masthead if only to assuage a bad bitch of writer’s block and anyway bleed a little and speak freely on my urge to die. I don’t mind the plebeian eye of the casual reader, and certainly not anyone paying to read these words but things have gotten so serious in the Anthropocene. I’ve missed some deadlines recently and other than letting my readers down I’ve got to deal with me, which, I’ll be honest isn’t my favorite.
Country simple, on Bukowski’s birthday last Thursday I filled a 30′ dumpster with the contents of a house full of lonely people. It was 100 degrees at 7PM and I was high off ElectroLit sugar and vape-hits from a Juicy Bar. It fucking sucked but coming home was worse. Worn down and battle-scarred I could only stare at a Patreon draft-bubble before loading up Schitt’s Creek and cracking open a jar of peanut butter in bed. David was taking his driving test and Alexis was trying to tell him ‘No one cares, David’ while out my window the sun set on one of only so many summers I’ve left in the final century.
Truth is you don’t have to be Bukowski to appreciate that time spent fucking-off is time well spent. It’ll take a minute to get the boot of empire off your neck and anyway slip from the parasympathetic nervous system and into a more natural and easy way of feeling. There’s nothing natural or easy about making a living and if I’m beating writer’s block writing these words, it’s only by the grace of God and to tell you what you already know—there’s got to be a better way and if there isn’t, well…why go on?
Who doesn’t want to kiss it all goodbye? The rich and charmed of which I am neither. I was born lucky in a hard time, or hard in a lucky time and anyway I’ve thought about killing myself a lot this summer. Will ’round Christmas too bet and I tell you this to destigmatize suicidal-ideation and anyway get real but, country simple I tell you Good Reader because I must.
I had to tell you when I was doomed in the depths of alcoholism, fucked with by fanatic fans and berated by borderline bitches. I had to tell you when I was in trouble last summer and I am telling you now. But I don’t have to tell you at all. You get it and after all these years together we know—the only people taking offense to my work are the ones who are supposed to.
Other than that, who wouldn’t wanna, ya know, lay in death’s breast, suck the cool, thick air of dust and float above the pain and sad triumph of the human race? Isn’t death just the final and lasting neé unconditional love we’ve been yearning for since we left the warm and safe oblivion of our mothers’ womb?
Point isn’t that it’s worth it to stick around, or that we’d cause our loved ones to suffer if we checked out early. The point is that between meting out our time on a dying planet beholden to invisible corporate overlords, inhaling petroleum products until there’s plastic in the bloodstream, hemmed in by exhaust-spewing traffic while suffering another sucker crying on NPR, with every stroke and pace of our time tabulated on ledger and our very lifetime measured in capital—between living this way and dying…well, what’s the difference?
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