I haven't written one of these for a while. Mostly due to laziness, I suppose. But also, at least partially, due to what it opens up in me, when I write one. Then, of course, there's the following...

I woke up this morning, remembering what it was like to wake up next to someone. I was thinking of my ex-wife. I remember some mornings fairly specifically. Like, my consciousness slowly creeping into awareness and my eyes flatly refusing to look upon a new day. Just listening. I'd hear my heartbeat, in the warm silence of the morning. I'd listen to birds singing their morning praises, just outside the window. Then, I'd realize that I couldn't hear her breathing. No snoring, no breathing, no noise coming from my wife, at all. Eyes open!

Well, fuck! As I open my eyes, I realize that those are old memories and not, at all, this morning's senses. As that realization made my heart sink, I remember what would have followed that roaring silence next to me... terror. Fear that the love of my life, the reason for my being, had died in her sleep. The feeling would only last a couple of seconds but... that's enough.

Then, I found it interesting that this morning's shock wasn't really all that different from the type I was remembering. That sudden shock of being dropped into a painful abyss. Where the word devastation seems like such an immense understatement. 'Mount Everest being a bit of a hill' kind of understating the magnitude, here. The infinite abyss of solitude.

I seem to have a love/hate relationship with solitude. I love being outside the skirts of urban infection. I hate not having someone to interact with. I love the peaceful sound of a breeze through the trees. I hate not having internet, or the creature comfort of temperature control. I need someone inside the fortress of my soul and, at the same time, I need the echoes of its vast halls.

I kept letting my mind go. (Some would say that I let it go some 40 years ago and it hasn't been seen, since!) My thoughts wandered through the morning without purpose and without restraint. I mindlessly started up a couple documentaries, just to get some noise going in the room. One on the music group The Band and the other about Marianne Faithful. I've no idea what either show said. It was just simply noise that didn't really stand a whelks chance in a supernova of distracting my aimless thoughts.

Interesting, though, that overdoses and drug use permeated my thoughts and were undoubtedly covered in those documentaries. Don't get ahead of me, here. Back to the abyss and my torn desire to be in it as well as away from it. Memories of my drinking and heavy drug use seemed to flood-in with the idea of a painless, impenetrably defensive, infinite abyss. It wasn't that I wanted to drink myself to death, you understand. Or that I wanted to snort, smoke and pop myself into mortal oblivion. I enjoyed the numbness. The high was an escape from feeling. The pleasure came from dulling certain emotions and amplifying my other senses. That kind of explains why acid was one of my favorite avenues.

So, onward we go. Life. Death. Marriage. Solitude. People. Love. Music. Death.

I don't want to die! I really DO want to live. (Despite my apparent obsession with the extinction of all humankind.) But on that same note (Note. Is that musically or hand-written?) fear and pain are far too omnipresent and overwhelming. My depression, for instance, had to be a foregone conclusion. I tend to think that losing my sanity is, as well. I don't want to live alone, is the problem. As is the fear of dying alone. So, I wonder then, is that why I don't want to die? I want to see it through, so to speak, until my time of dying? Well, there's nothing like stating the blatant, there, Captain Obvious!

What about living? I want to live, learn, love, laugh, experience the joys... I want to see all that LIFE has to offer. Yet, I lack the motivation to go out and meet new people. I lack the funds to travel to the places I've dreamed of. I lack the social skills and personality to overcome my contempt and distrust. In order to find those things I want, I have to do things I don't want. In order to be where I want to be, I have to go where I don't want to go. In order to be myself, I have to be someone else.

What fresh hell is this? Time for breakfast!