a flash of Jerry Garcia tie + a bent wire earring

For more people than not, the expression “broken record” likely carries no literal meaning at this point. That generation is a couple past. Hell, even my own old-guy turntable has a broken lid and the stylus is duller now than even my late-night senses.

So a new metaphor is likely in order here.

See, I can never seem to get this right; it is too big, and just too wrong, and ultimately too hard to get at. All I really ever do is poke words at the perimiter, then wait on an echo that doesn’t sound too much like failure. I keep trying because maybe it helps, though thus far, that claim itself is suspect. Nothing really seems to help, not in any lasting way, else I wouldn’t be here, again.

Broken record, and like that.

Tonight, propped up in my big bed in the soft light of my evening room, crowded by insistent cats and a gently slumbering wife whose snore is adorable, and whose love is strong enough to outrun even my worst doubts, I nonetheless find myself too many miles removed from who I am. Certainly from who I wish to be.

“Some days are better than other days
And some days are better than those
But then there are those days
Those days are bad days
Those days are bad days
Oh, God only knows”

I wrote that way back when I had delusions of being a singer, thinking just because I could warble on key a bit, and write even a bit more, that the rest would take care of itself. It didn’t. But I did get that particular snatch of writing right.

Which is to say that there are indeed those days, kids. The last several weeks have been very much those days.

I never can say where they come from, but come they will, and come they do. Days when I start slipping loose from my own orbit, and while I see it happening, cannot prevent it. When I can find too little purchase in myself, drifting out into cold and empty space, a seemingly endless dark horizon preceding nothing, where breathing becomes short and sharp, with what I still sense as me receding in the distance, a flash of swirly Jerry Garcia tie, perhaps, a bent wire earring and a pile of hair-gelled Bay City Rollers hair that no longer is quite enough to hide that patch of baldness in the back. Clearly a planet that should be avoided, right? But there you go. It’s what I am, when I am. It’s where I live.

To be fair, with the weight I have put on, and kept on, these last months, even at this increasing remove, there is still plenty of me to see, for now.

Houston, do you copy? It seems there is a fat man floating out in open space, past Mars …

That is a joke, by the way, meant to lighten the discussion here. Ha, ha, and like that.

I hope you’re laughing. Someone should be laughing.

I have been much further out before, to where I felt I could almost touch the end of everything. It is a soulless cold out there. So godawful dark. So much like an open tomb, where the stars that the original metaphor suggests have all gone out.

So maybe this metaphor stinks. I don’t know. It’s certainly incomplete. They all are.

Because metaphors, hell. There is no way to get right at this, so let me take another pass.

My mind is like some long knotty thread knitted into my heart, and the thread has snagged itself loose, caught now beneath one foot as I wander in greater circles around myself, unraveling in traveling nowhere. As in the more I circle what increasingly feels like a drain of my own life, the more I work loose the thread, until in no real time at all, I have largely unwound myself; I am hollowed out. Behind me, a dirty tangled path back to what I was, and I am terrifyingly bewildered by the mess. You see, I do not know how to knit.

That last bit of the second metaphor is also a joke, I suppose, except it isn’t at all funny. Some jokes just aren’t.

Still. Metaphors. They are easier than saying it.

But, saying it:

Today, the depression is back. It didn’t even knock; it just waltzed right on in, went straight to the kitchen counter and drank all the wine. And it is hardly anymore pleasant drunk. And now I have no more wine.

I have felt this coming on for days now, like some internal foul mist, welling up in me to fill even the fringes of my life, leaving me little but a walking bag of bad air, impossible to see myself through, a mind and heart at a distance from me, a jumble of chaotic mental static, heartburn, aches and pains, and permeating sadness.

The insatiable bleakness at my core may yet slip away before becoming too profound to navigate; thankfully, it typically does, after dragging me through the mud of too much wretched sorrow. But there is always that nagging, loathsome sense of what-if. The overwhelming dread of the metaphor overtaking the man.

What if I drift too far into space, and can no longer see myself to return to? If I simply drift until there is nothing left but drifting?

What if the thread breaks, and then no one, no one at all, can stitch me back together again?

Perhaps it’s time to look into whether anyone offers knitting classes out here in the great back of beyond. Or somewhere to buy a new turntable. Because if the past offers any hint of the future, I could once again be out here for a while …

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