The Old Dude Gloom
Tuesday 30 January 7:30 a.m.
Red Sky At Morning, Sailor Take Warning. A storm is approaching. Yet another storm. Set to land this time tomorrow morning. The wind’s already kicking up.
I’m up and around. Eager to begin working on the next chapter of my life.
But what if there is no next chapter?
Say your life has no next chapter. No chapters, period. No story, no book, just one day following the next like an endless row of empty dryers at the only Laundromat in town. That’s the reality of life. One day follows the next. Shit happens, storms, earthquakes, etc., but nothing with a narrative structure. Shit just happens. Human Beings invented narratives. We make up stories to kill the monotony of life. Life is not actually monotonous. We just think it is. So we make up these chapters to give our lives meaning and we pretend we’re evolving.
I did my laundry yesterday. All the dryers were empty. Then the Mexican ladies arrived and filled all the dryers like they were cornering the market. I snagged the last empty dryer.
This is a kind of a half-ass story.
At the moment I’m sitting aboard Scruffy.
Staring out the window at at hungry bird.
And another hungrier bird.
Little Prick won’t leave me alone…
Better give the Peeper some crackers. Best way to get rid of him…for a while.
Another story!
The Old Dude Gloom
The Old Dude Gloom. A malaise I suffer now and then. I used to call it simply a Gloom. Then I got old and the condition acquired a more poetic title. When I get really really old I’ll give it an even more appropriate title. Like Death Rattle or…Rotting Corpse. Death Rattle would hopefully be a condition of short duration, while Rotting Corpse would involve a tribe of Heathens leaving my body in a field to decompose while I’m consumed by insects and scavenging urban beasts. There are Tribes that weather their dead.
Sky burial is common in Tibet among Buddhists who believe in the value of sending their loved ones’ souls toward heaven. In this ritual, bodies are left outside, often cut into pieces, for birds or other animals to devour. This serves the dual purpose of eliminating the now empty vessel of the body and allowing the soul to depart, while also embracing the circle of life and giving sustenance to animals.
Brittanica
All this time I’ve naively allowed myself to believe Buddhists are non-violent tree huggers. Not so, apparently. Marin County Buddhists will chop my ass into pieces. Scatter my parts on the dock.
Hearty scraps for the gulls.
Lately, I’ve been feeding Peeper cuz I feel sorry for him.
Now I’m gonna let him eat my ass?
I’ll eat his ass.
How To Cook Seagulls
Seagull is typically cooked by roasting, baking, or grilling. First, the bird is cleaned and soaked in salt water for eight hours to remove the fishy flavor, then trussed and roasted in an oven.
I swear to God I’ll eat his ass.
Sneaky Deaky Facebook
Often, something triggers my Old Dude Gloom.
That’s usually how it starts with me. An event triggers it. But not necessarily. Gloomy moods can overcome me for no reason. I like to think that’s rare, cuz I’m normally a happy person. But it could be that for no obvious reason my gloom is triggered.
Yeah? how?
Like I’ll be kicked back on my salon couch, reading The Waste Land…
“April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.”
…just kicked back with a bit of light reading to pass the time. Then, out of nowhere, this Gloom settles in…for no good reason! Now, I’m depressed. I’m thinking defeatist thoughts. What’s the point of doing anything? Should I do something rather than nothing?
Oh…okay. I kinda get it.
Usually, though, there’ll be a trigger.
The trigger can be innocuous.
Something as silly as Facebook.
Facebook used to be on my phone. I deleted the App. But it’s still on there sorta. My phone thinks it is. My phone thinks I like Facebook. My phone will get bored with my Hitler shit and my Dillinger shit, and It’ll toss me onto Facebook. It’ll say to me, “Hey Asshole! Time for a little Facebook.” I don’t go to do it. My phone knows I still have a page on Facebook. Me and a few of my dead friends are still alive on Facebook. If I could unsubscribe completely to Facebook, I would do it. But they make it hard to unsubscribe. They don’t have an UNSUBSCRIBE button you simply push and you’re off Facebook. They do, but it’s hidden. It’s behind all this click-onto-this–shit–before-we-let-you-unsubscribe shit. Facebook is sneaky. They don’t want you to leave. Why would they? YOU are how they make money.
Anyway, it’s four a.m. and I’m laying in my rack reading all about how Adolf Hitler met Ava Braun. Then I switch over to how John Dillinger robbed the Central National Bank And Trust Co., Greencastle, Indiana, of $74,802 on October 23, 1933…when, for no apparent reason, and not by my own design, I’m on Facebook.
I scroll past Kim’s cat stuff, and San Francisco Remembered (a group devoted to the City’s good old days) and I’m on Angel Colgate’s page, but rather than the usual Tropical Bird pictures with Inspirational tags, I’m reading her confess her recent cancer diagnosis. Stage Three. She sounds…I don’t know, exactly. She sounds non-facebook-like. Which is to say, she sounds real.
It’s four a.m. and I need to go back to sleep. But I can’t stop thinking of Angel. We were together briefly. Like a lot of them. Still. I’m thinking maybe I oughta send her a little note. Send her a message, saying…what? What do you say at four a.m.? I haven’t talked to her in years. It occurs to me it’s been years. I turned back to her post cuz there was more to read. But it’s gone…in its place is a notice:
This content isn’t available right now. When this happens, it’s usually because the owner only shared it with a small group of people, changed who can see it or it’s been deleted.
So this is how Facebook works. You can choose to share stuff with only certain people. Say you wanna share serious shit with only three of your best friends. You can do that. Poor Angel. She didn’t mean to tell the whole fucking world she’s got cancer. Now all the Yahoos, me included, are in the know.
Friends on Facebook. Are they different from your friends in daily life?
Well, but how do you define a Friend?
Wednesday 31 January 11 a.m.
I’m sitting here at my tall corner table at the office. This is a table John Dillinger would choose. Or Doc Holliday. Or any of a slew of Mob Dudes careful to cover their backs. A real concern for those who dwell and do business in the Underworld. A world where even your best friend will “off” you if necessary. I don’t operate in the Underworld. I’m a fringe dweller, sure, but my world is crime-free and upscale and populated mainly by cowardly white people, unless you include the Mill Valley Buddhists eager to chop me into itty bitty pieces. No, I’m sitting here at this corner table because it was the only empty table available.
Yet I like having this vantage point.
Outside the storm is blowing like hell. My Old Dude Gloom? I’m thinking the storm might be blowing it away. I’m thinking it is. Actually, I’m pretending. I’m just saying this because it offers me an off-ramp, a proper ending, say, for this blog post. Because a blog post, my blog posts, anyway, are actually little stories. At least I like to think they are.
I haven’t decided what to do about Angel. Wait a minute! Stop making up shit. I have decided. I’ve decided to do nothing. Like I decide most things in my life. Life is too confusing and I don’t really know how to deal with it. So I deal with it by doing nothing.
I’m pretty good at it.
Listen, I made my bed a long long time ago. I think I’ve learned how to sleep in it.
The Old Dude Gloom? It’s just a part of my life. It comes and goes and when it goes I’m happy again. Am I shallow? I don’t know. Ask my Facebook Friends. One of the dead ones….
As for the next chapter of my life?
There actually is a next chapter.
How so?
Because I’ll make it up.
I’ll make it so….
10 thoughts on “The Old Dude Gloom”
Gloomy.
You make Starbucks resemble the Louis XIV chambre that appears before Keir Dullea in 2001 on his fast-track to eternity or oblivion, depending on your view of what’s behind the Oz curtain. The ancients, at least since John of Patmos, have called the collapsing tent of the sky under which you find yourself nightly, the Dark Night of the Soul; when insomnia erupts and you wake alone, even next to another, in a darkness beyond any zip code. All you can do in that terrifying nothingness beyond all light is to pray, if you are lucky enough to believe the big ghost story, or do as you have done to elude the vortex, write. While writing, you escape that spaceless-space and free your site followers of the same burden of knowing whal Blanchot wrote ,”You are already dead in a past that you will never remember or inherit.” What a drag, eternal darkness. Fret not, you are Gloomy Boomer,-who can stare down nothingness to make something appear; I guess that’s a sturdy definition of a writer, someone who believes in meaning beyond all evidence to the contrary. . Cheers! Now back to watching the trembling hands of the Doomsday Clock moving closer to midnight’s global organism. Come again? No, as Rilke wrote, “Once and once only.” Sappy sad that the world has taken, and as never before, what could have been a playground and transformed it into a mortuary, “So it goes,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut emerging from Slaughter House 5 after Dresden’s annihilating. night bombing. He was prescient. Listen, you can hear invisible bombs bursting inside each second in the war of time. We know who wins, all 11 billion of us since the first man was astonished to find himself mortal, Anyway distraction is a bullet to bite on while….well, you know what I am getting at, staying distracted while pretending to believe in meaning. Nothing to lose? Exactly. Reread Hemingway’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. All becomes as clear as the mirror on the wall when the café closes.
A comment worthy of those Tibetans who chop up their dead to feed the critters. And I mean this as a compliment!
You need a little pussy cat on your boat. A little buddy . Definitely will lift your spirits.
With all due respect to Kimberly. I don’t know if you need “a little pussy on your boat,” or even if you need a “buddy.” I figure your spirits, don’t need a lift. You want them right where they are, slack in a dead sea.
I’d have five cats if I could get away with it. Like my pad in The City. Problem with cats, they die and I’m even more depressed.
Even the gulls….well, maybe not the gulls.
A seagull is the perfect pet….like having a goldfish that recognizes you.
A seagull is the perfect pet….like having a goldfish that recognizes you.
I can’t have a cat right now either in my circumstance . Instead , I’ve begun working at the animal shelter twice a week with my special-ed students training them to socialize cats and rabbits. Also, they have a huge need for volunteers to walk their dogs. At first I thought it might be too sad being there but instead I’ve got so attached to the animals . I actually look forward to going. The staff are super appreciative for any help they can get. It’s therapeutic to fulfill a real need in an animal or a fellow human’s life.
I’m seriously thinking of volunteering there once I retire.
And if you find it gloomy at the shelter you’ll have more material to write about.
Animal shelter folks are a real character study.
Some miserable quotes
There is no greater sorry than to recall happiness than time of misery
“Writers remember everything…especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he’ll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar.
Art consists of the persistence of memory.”
― Stephen King, Misery
“People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as ‘nauseatingly miserable beyond repair’.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
“The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.”
― Michel Houellebecq
“A man’s subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sall
“as long as there are
human beings about
there is never going to be
any peace
for any individual
upon this earth (or
anywhere else
they might
escape to).
all you can do
is maybe grab
ten lucky minutes
here
or maybe an hour
there.
something
is working toward you
right now, and
I mean you
and nobody but
you.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense;
“I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”
― C. S. Lewis
“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
tags: change, depression, hardship, misery
“He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
tags: love, misery, obsession, romance
“Oftentimes. when people are miserable, they
“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
tags: humanity, misery, poverty
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“[F]or just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians
“Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned: how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness. Unfortunately the happiness is there. There is always the chance (about eight hundred and fifty to one) that another heart will come to mine. I can’t help hoping, and keeping faith, and loving beauty. Quite frequently I am not so miserable as it would be wise to be.”\\\
― T.H. White, Ghostly, Grim and Gruesome
“Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.”
― Emil Cioran, All Gall is Divided: Aphorisms
tags: aphorism, melancholy, misery, syllogism
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“Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you, –will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, –or to diminish something of their pains.”
― Jeremy Bentham
“It is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to go on with our labor, what it may be.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula
“I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to ‘make a new start’ or to be ‘born again’: Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a ‘clean’ sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov’s microcosmic miniature story ‘Signs and Symbols,’ which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir
“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”
― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935
“I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores
“You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, \\
“…But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice… I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.”
― Charles Darwin, The Life & Letters of Charles Darwin
“A man’s subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally