A Report, after Exhaling

A couple years ago, my mother lost her job, and because it happened shortly before the holiday season, she more or less lost any festive spirit; for a while, it seemed she had lost any sense of purpose. There are few things more disturbing than the sudden occurrence of the long-expected, much less the long-desired, and both of them fit my mother's relation with her job. So it seems from my position. As we all knew then, this was a blessing, and being freed from a despised obligation, despite stunning her for a while, has allowed her to pursue a better way in life. I allude to this episode to point out either that proximity can breed disease, or that traits and thoughts and actions can happen along strange familial lines. That is, I write my mother's above story with a feeling of much self-recognition: nearly two years after this story, I too live a similar plot.

My friends, or at least my audience, will likely know of my pains and travails and general depression of the past several months. I shall not go into it, for it bores even me even now. Defeat is only fascinating in the moment. But we (at least we Americans) crave victory, and the ambling progress I have made in the past month is the reason for this post.

Some background points, first, in mosaic: I'm not much for making resolutions; by September of last year, my politics had become overbearing; I have a friend who likes to focus on a word for the year; there was much that I had relinquished; a deadening job; a dead love life; an undead outlook on life; cynicism is dead: long live cynicism; whatever. . .; something I can't quite remember, and another I can't quite put my finger on. I have occasional stomach cramps, and the simple relief for them is deep breathing. I have begun breathing (again). But first, I had to have one last hurrah in abject self-pity and misery; it had to be done devoid of cynicism, yet as to produce irony; it had to find the sticking place. Despite the arbitrariness of our time divisions, we revolve around them nevertheless, and in acceptance of this knowledge, I chose New Year's Eve. I had been invited to a party or two, and my best friend asked to hang out. Instead, I chose to begin a new solar revolution with tears, with the shortness of breath attendant upon the thickness of loneliness (there is nothing more suffocating than nothing), and with the rehashing of all my unglück, my faults, my failures, my vices: "after great pain a formal feeling comes." Then I went to bed, then I woke up, and then I decided, simply, that I had not wasted my New Year's Eve, that despite tossing aside all friendship the previous night, it was necessary. After rehearsing my nightmares, I could come to my dreams more willing to be prepared (or something, words fail me in this sentence).

Presently, I have had mixed success, but I don't feel despair anymore; it calls to me every now and then, and I'll never escape a natural decline towards melancholy, but it is there, and I am here, and I move and it moves, and sometimes I give it a nod, and often it will speak. I step forward right now by means of my resolution, which is my word of the year: Fundamentals. A return to what I had been before I stumbled, with the obvious differences that age requires. I have been writing more, an activity which long preceded my musical life, and indeed have started a novel (still deep in the planning stages). Stances I had given up out of social cowardice I hold again: gnosticism, aestheticism, et cetera. My former politics, which also crowded out much, I have almost completely dropped. For I have aged in a life as an artist, and dogma and cant have almost completely slipped from me; at the least, I have shown them the slide, and most have given the slip. My nutrition and activity are better, though I am still quite imperfect. I am seeking again newer lives, but again, without the flailings of despair, grasping wildly about. There are several avenues I'm exploring, but I don't feel a deadening anxiety about them as I used to: I would like to go to grad school in Britain come August (or September), but if it doesn't happen, something else I will try. I have been out and about more often, and though I wish I could see a greater variety of my friends, I know we all have our disparate lives. There is perhaps a flicker in my romantic life which may yet ignite. And finally, I have reached a paradox with my job: I have come to accept it, but for some reason, such acceptance gives me the courage to give it up, to quit. My thoughts these days aren't "I desperately hate my job and can't stand to be here" but "I'm able to live with this, and feel ready to move on." Don't ask me; but I feel myself very, very near to finally making an end of my time there. So it will be that the same employer will have done something to my mother and to myself. The one thing that comes to mind is something a writer said: "I don't enjoy writing. I enjoy having written."

Now for a thing of beauty:

I am obsessed with this song currently.