Temporary

After I wrote the previous entry, I decided it's time for a break. Shit's been a little dark in my head this month. I've been stressing myself out over all these words I want to write, all these projects I've come up with and all the deadlines I've assigned myself -- when I don't finish something in a matter of days, I get this awful darkness over my head and I can't snap out of it. I just sit there and think about how little I've done. I stay up all hours of the night staring at sentences that I want to believe in, but none of them seem to have any motivation of their own, and I don't have any to lend them.
I thought I had given myself plenty enough time to recover from my stint as a full-time writer, but now I'm pretty sure I haven't even started.
What I've been doing is experimenting with madness, on a level that feels far more serious and permanent than any darkness in my past. Depression is not something I've ever been good at, but I'm looking at it eye-level right now, and I finally understand how it's possible to stay in this state indefinitely. It's almost addicting to watch the world swirl around me while I sit still, waiting for it all to mean something...waiting for something to strike me enough to stand up and join the party.
And I know better than that. I've seen enough people in this state to understand that the thing I'm waiting for won't happen if I'm not standing up to look for it. I understand that waiting for the world to strike me is more selfish than sad, and that depression is what grows in the absence of awe. And jeez, there's just too much of that around me to justify my hiding in the garage this month, claiming a lack of inspiration.

I might still find it in me to write a blog entry here and there, but I won't be writing anything else, nor working on any of the dozens of giant writing projects I've been stockpiling. I just have to turn the lights on for awhile.

Lifetime Guarantee

There's a crack in the bricks.

A space created between
supporting concrete,
where spiders and other
delicious pestilence will
pass through to your sterile bedroom.

The patented mortar fell short  --
"but it was guaranteed
for a lifetime!"

You fell for it.

Of course, you know that a lifetime
didn't mean forever, don't you?
You know you can't take it with you?
There are no guarantees or lifetimes
in the eternity you're sure that your soul will float off to
and that mortar doesn't care what a lifetime
means to you.

Still, we like those kinds of words;
the ones that anchor us
to things we think
are too heavy,
too strong,
too important
to crack
or fail;
to die
and rot.
Like earth and concrete
and the stuff that
glues it all together.

It's not false advertising, you know;
they meant what they said.
At the end of your life,
there will be no need
to shop for mortar.

Guaranteed.

 

I went into the old War Room today.

 A choir of keyboard taps and cellphone buzzes scored the approaching deadline as the musky scent of questionable editor hygiene filled the air. The hiss of that blasted overhead fluorescent light was familiarly missing; an absence that good editors have taken comfort in during after-hours panic sessions. Their faces glowed in the wake of laptop screens, both aware of the other's presence, yet silent in understood acknowledgement.

No other room on earth has the ability to make me more aware that it's Monday. And, boy, did that produce a malfunction in my nostalgia valve.

I didn't miss the room so much as I was overcome with gratitude for the time I spent inside of it; for all the things I learned in it and for all the amazing people I met through it. At its crux, it provided a location for my feet when they had no ground to stand on, during times so unstable and adventurous that I wasn't sure if the whole world had been built on a foundation of eggshells. It was alive and the paint was always wet and willing to be mixed with any color we chose; it was creation and destruction, never equal parts of either, and the scale only balanced once a week when we were reminded that it was our job to produce a newspaper from all that chaos.

And out of that chaos, I came to understand, among other things, what it means to have a case of the Mondays.