Abysmal

Late February, 2013

What am I achieving with my life? A dangerous question since if the answer is nothing, then the reasons for going on are questionable. And yet this deduction is so rife with pitfalls, I must wonder. What do I mean by achievement? What does "nothing" mean? Why must achieving nothing be reason for "not going on"?

First of all, to put any evasiveness to bed, I need to say that implanted in me is a deeply goal-centered person. I am one who identifies what needs to be done and goes after it, sometimes bullheadedly, sometimes covertly, but always with a conviction that what I am doing is in someway the best track to take.

There are moments, days, months in which this conviction becomes entangled with self-loathing and a tenuous malaise, a foreboding sense that nothing really matters and that nothing is more interesting about my own path than a that of a pebble down a cliffside or the lost goose I once listened to, flapping helplessly above me in the fog. A fish has more of a sense of direction than me.

And yet. And yet even as I feel along the side of the long cave in what I take to be the way out, I know somehow it is the true path. Not always the correct path, but true. I stumble and wander. I blunder and fall. Long now in the dark, I create my own light. It is what I do, and I endeavor it to be a credible light, one that brightens as I take my steps, one more or less confidently than the last. And it does brighten, and it does dim. And I sometimes whiff the outside world upon a sensory thread that vanishes just as I grasp its origin. A green, buzzing inspiration lost immediately but lightly planted in the lung of my mind. Am I losing you? Are you following? O, dear poet Blake.

So what is it I'm getting to here? I'm getting to the "nothing." It's dawn outside, but awake now for over an hour, that green buzzes in me like a bowl of mating mayflies. I live in part for these early hours alone and to myself. The nothing sitting somewhere in the dark room, waiting. Is it a Poe's raven? is it a Hamlet's ghost? Is it my own death yawning there across the room, waiting for some damn thing or another from me?

Achievement. Bleh.