Sometimes Survival is Enough

It’s always helpful to let the hope die. Hope isn’t doing this project any favors. I have poured myself into this project and only found depression when I have any hope for it going anywhere. Because I have been at it for five years and no one is beating down my door to pay me to read any of these thoughts or experiences. The musing of a curmudgeonly ole hermit is not exactly the most marketable product in this economy. Nah, I think it’s more apt to say I have been thrown out into the alley—our 21st century city hedge—with the evenings trash more often than I have been embraced. So be it, let me be the garbage of a dying empire warming in a slushy, oil-slicked gutter in the noonday sun in the winter. Let me give up those petty hopes of that smaller man inside me that thinks I have some wisdom to sell to a dying world. Let me just experience being this nobody who can tell stories and weave webs after he has been used up for the day.

Mary Oliver used to say that she would give her best to her work in the morning before working for anyone else. I find that damn near impossible with a toddler. I don’t find I can give my best to anything with all that is asked of me living in this moment. I could just forage my own food, quit my job, and hope it all turns out ok, like Oliver did. Yah right, I would prolly poison myself from some environmental toxin leeching out of the superfund adjacent lands that surround me. And yet, so many writers we take advice from come from a different place, different time. It could be argued that no one but those of us here now in slow motion collapse can really understand how we can make art and on what timeline it can be done. Maybe it should be an Instagram slide series to post a piece of artistic advice and note why it doesn’t make any sense now.

I’m in the throes of some professional upheaval. It looks like we are going to have to come back to working in our office space after 3 years of working from home. The same office space where our windows were shot out during a dispute outside. The same office space where I have worked in 40 degree temps and picked up rat droppings to clear my cubicle. So, it’s all up in the air how I will juggle all my responsibilities with having to factor in commuting times for the first time in 3 years to a space that no one in our office wants to be in. The hermit is being called back to court to dispense his skills in person. Ugh, what a drag.

I have real fear about my ability to keep up with writing on a weekly basis with the added emotional and commuting labor I will be asked to do to return to work. The cubicle farm is truly an awful place and I dread having to go back there. I am scared that what little energy I have right now will be drained by this change and I will blink out in a barren, death period. That fear makes me feel hopeless, like I will have to devote even more of my free time to ensure that I make money to not starve or die of exposure. Naturally, I cannot give any time away from Juniper or Lily, so that time must come from my time for myself what little leisure, health, and spiritual pursuit I have left. It’s these sort of issues that bring to life Buried Inside’s lyric , “Mechanical time is an imperial installation.” Yes, time has been organized for us so that we feel its weight, “as albatross and as anchor.”

As an act of resistance to this albatross of time, I write these desperate words from a despondent place. “Time politics are power politics,” Buried Inside noted. Yes, and I choose to utter these cries deep in the night, only hours removed from a 101 degree fever brought on by my COVID Booster, as my own from of pushing back against my own spirit being pulled into the void of oblivion. Are these my best words? No. Are these words that will move mountains? Certainly not. Are these the words still meaningful? Yes, I think so. I still believe in the words of ordinary people, not the ghost written books puffed up on marketing dollars. I still believe in the words that flow forth from me as I try to maintain my own devotional discipline amidst a world that feels like it it trying to tear me apart. 

Honestly, it’s something to just show up here each week and log something. Sometimes all I have to offer is evidence of my own survival by sharing the reality of my own condition.  As I struggled with anxiety and depression this week, I thought of the people I have lost due to mental health complications. This system we have designed for ourselves is awful, isn’t it? It chews people up and spits them out. Despite this, I am still here. You, dear reader, are still here. We keep fighting every day, don’t we? We will give space for our complicated emotions to surface and keep fighting for our dreams and our own promises we have made to ourselves. So, dear reader, to paraphrase Have Heart with the weight of the things we carry, watch us rise.

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