I'm struggling and in pain. And it doesn't really matter to me that you probably are, too. Because, really, what good does your pain do me; likewise, what good does my pain do you? And worse is the creeping thought that you might actually not even be in any pain--or leastwise be aware of it--and that what you'll get, Dear Reader, is a kind of warm comfort in reading this. The kind of comfort we feel secretly when we drive past an accident on the freeway, safe and secure in our cars and our good Fortune.
I have valiant friends. Mostly, they try to cheer me up. And...let me be clear...I'm a highly functional depressive. The bills get paid. The groceries ordered, and delivered, and put away. The cars are washed and the gardening done and the laundry folded and the face shaved and shoes shined and the shirts pressed and the dogs fed and walked and fed and walked and fed and walked and on and on and on. I've been in corporate America for 21 years now...as long as my entire life before then. I know how to smile while I...shall I say...dig a fork into my hand under the table. Love that movie.
But lately...like for the last 23 or so years...it's been a merry-go-round of avoiding dark, angry feelings. At night, I dream mostly of zombies. Like at least once a week. Corpses. The best one was recently, I dreamed that a friend cast a spell on me and delivered me into a younger, taller, more muscular body with thick wavy hair and a big fat cock. I delighted at first in my new body, but it quickly lost its novelty, and the price of the spell...there's always a price...was that my old body...ME...was destined to follow me around until I rejoined it. Only it would begin immediately to decay. So through the dream--through the halls of seaside resorts and corporate board rooms--my own corpse followed me, falling increasingly into disarray. I had the growing sense that I wanted to be reunited, but it scared me, and at one point I batted my body away with a broom. I can feel the heaviness of his hands on me now, as those very hands type this post. Until, at last, I was home, in my actual house (about which I never dream), answering the door, unable and unwilling to run any more, but mortally afraid. Two of my friends whom I did not recognize were there, but not the friend that cast the spell. And I knew profoundly that the spell was lost, and that my case was therefore hopeless. And peeking out from behind my second friend, almost bashfully, with desiccated fingers and sunken hollow eyes and flesh peeling greenly away from a shocking white skull, was my very own zombie, dressed in rags (probably Armani), and its horrible, smiling lips pulled back from teeth as white as pearls.
That's when I woke, of course. No, there was no magic spell to bind us back together. No, there was no happy ending. I was trapped and he was trapped, and we were bound together, my Creature and me. That's the nature of these dreams. Zombies and catacombs. Deep, secret, dirty places far below the bustle of civilization.
My dreams never have happy endings. Once in a while, I'll get a pleasant dream, but in some ways those are worse. Like dreaming of heaven only to wake again in the mundane blankness of commutes, and awful Supreme Court nominees, and elections, and wildfires as big as nations, and endless, mindless baby-making, and kind-looking Popes dripping with false promises and polite hatred.
I dreamed once of the Vatican, where I've actually been, back before I learned that every jet flight from here to NYC cost a cubic meter of Arctic ice. So yes, I melted about four cubic meters of ice just so I can barely remember the Vatican. Aren't you impressed?
In that dream, I found my way into a secret chamber behind the nave of Saint Peters, and a narrow stairway that led up and up and into an ornate viewing chamber like the ones surgeons used in the early 19th century. But instead of a surgery, this chamber overlooked, from an angle high above, a long table in a dark, palatial room, richly gilded and hung with heavy tapestries. But there was no Pope to be seen, nor even any Cardinals. For the monsters around that table hurt for me to consider, and I quailed in my observation post in bewilderment. Seated around the table, deciding--as I knew--the fate of the world, were the gods of ancient Egypt. But they hurt to look upon and made me sick to actually consider, like Old Testament seraphim, or modern tesseracts, or my own emotional state. I woke then in terror, too, like I was struggling up out of the deep end of some black pool at night.
So this is the writing. This is what it is. It's not pleasant. It's not hopeful. It's certainly not marketable and it's not even bound to be read. It's pointless. It's masturbatory. It's fruitless and it's a waste. And that's what keeps me silent year after year. The pointlessness. So yes, I focus instead on material gains. More income; that's easy to measure. A bigger, nicer house, or at least a series of improvements that feel...well they don't feel at all, sadly. The house gets nicer, but it never FEELS nicer. I suspect it wouldn't matter how nice the house was, until at last I had the nicest one I could imagine and that might make me feel even shittier still.
That's the rub with trying to feel better, but skipping all this darkness. The psyche balances. Focus on the light, and the dark will balance your dreams. Try to feel better, and instead I feel worse, because I know how I SHOULD feel (better) but also how I DO feel (not better). And that makes me feel shitty, too.
So there you go, Dear Reader. Honestly, I should probably write like this more often. There's reasons I feel this way, of course, that I didn't write about. They go way back, to a house full of screaming and the sounds of gunfire on an endless loop on the television, accompanied by the smells of overcooked vegetables on patterned melamine plates. They go back to standing over a culvert, one end dammed, the other half dammed, filling with water while a terrified animal inside realizes it's going to drown. But it wont! There's hope! There's daylight at one end, after all, however slim and terrifying to a nocturnal animal. Perhaps it will escape, it thinks--I think--though how will it make it in the world in this terrible light, far from home and safety? But the animal can't know that my father stands over the open hole, over and behind its emerging head, a double-barrelled shotgun poised and loaded and cocked. It cannot know that a young, gay boy stands in horror just a few feet away, trying hard to be a man, and not to cry out and not to intervene when something is terribly wrong, and not to cover my ears as the shot rings out and the smell of gunpowder and blood and skunk burn acridly into my nose, as the little creature dies in a hole, he and me alone together in that hole, and the neighborhood echoes around me.
Is it any wonder I dream? Wouldn't you?
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