Under a Black Rainbow

Tough year. Tough several of them, honestly. Feels like I've been put through nearly all of the different emotional ringers, pinballing from one to another to another with barely a moment to stop and breathe. But every hurdle gets cleared eventually.  My dear friend (and birthday twin) Mel has a thing she does every year. A kind of "lessons I've learned this year," and it's an idea I've always enjoyed copying from her as it really forces me to take stock of the past so I can move differently (where needed) into the future. These are in absolutely no order whatsoever.  *     *     * 1. Grief is relentless and doesn't give two shits about your feelings. It never goes away, but it does change; it does evolve. And you'll get dragged through that evolution whether you like it or not, but do all the things you possibly can to get yourself to a steady place. Your boat will constantly continue to fill with water until you learn your best methods of addressing...

I'm sure I've talked about the milestones one experiences in life that end up changing an individual's trajectory. I can point to a number of them in my own life. And while many of them cause a fair amount of regret on my part (mostly due to my behavior rather than someone else's), none have affected me quite as much as the job I worked in San Francisco. It was the only one and, because no one else would even give me the luxury of an interview for different, better work...I left the city.   However, my time there was a perfect example of how far I'm willing to go to get what I want when I find it attainable (this often does not work in relation to other people; no means no). I took on a physically exhausting job during the day and attacked the mentally exhausting grad school work at night. My first three years out there were tough, but REALLY good. Solid friend group, solid writers to lean on and drink with, great living situation. The job was whatever, but it paid ...

Perhaps this is my pinnacle; maybe this is where I top out.  I sincerely hope not, but everything feels very uphill from here. I am so much better now at processing and evaluating the inner workings of my brain and the motivations for what I do and who I talk to and how I move forward in all things. I am regularly scraping out the skeletal bowl that is my skull in search of answers or guidance for these new versions of me that are populating in the moment so that I can pivot accordingly in the hopes that I retain some version of the self I knew.  My doc and I assumed a bump up in dosage of my Welbutrin would help return some of my long-missing focus, but that hasn't seemed to have made much of a difference. It remains incredibly difficult to read; it takes several minutes to read a single page, but then I need to read that page multiple times to read it all. And even then, it's about a 25% chance that I've comprehended what I just worked my ass off reading. As someone who u...

'Tis the season for spooky shit and gory stuff and mangled realities. And after all the years consuming all the movies and all the books...the best and most efficient of the horrors is that of the self (should you choose to reflect upon it fully and appropriately). I've spent much of my last 15 years dissecting, trimming, and flat out destroying old bad habits and toxic personality traits. Doing so has made me feel more solitary than not.  I can look back and see the bad behavior and the unintended douchery if I peel back the veil on my own hazy memories to gaze upon the truth. While it's completely ridiculous and illogical, I worry that this phase of my life is experiencing a level of karmic retribution for the things I did as a younger man.  I have an exceptional group of friends who all enjoy many of the same things. And, I've been fortunate in later years to find romantic partners that fit my particular likes and dislikes in lovers, though nearly every instance was ...

  I currently stand upon the precipice of some good changes. The start of the year had me wound up and anxious - one of the many reasons I also chose to drastically cut down my drinking from "nightly" to "once every couple of weeks or so." My grief was starting to seep back in and take hold of things and my personal constitution couldn't seem to fight it alone. I'm good in tough moments; I thrive in chaos, as my coworkers know. I keep my shit together and I rarely break, but I knew I was close to a very bad breaking point.  So, after chatting with my doctor and a couple therapists, I went on a month-long leave from work and started a daily regiment of Zoloft. The problem with these types of drugs (SSRIs) is that they come with a number of physical and physiological downsides: lack of sexual interest, weight gain, a loss of purpose or sense of spatial ambiguity, and a pretty clear dissociation of your real self (all of which I hated immensely).  And so we add...

Life is transactional; every part of it comes with a cost.  Your first transaction comes as soon as you exit the womb. Have you been born into poverty somewhere in the world where water is scarce or do you find yourself amongst the obscenely rich? Your life comes at a cost, and so too does anything you choose to do with that life.  Each decision you make is another transaction.  You want this trip? Work these hours at this job for this long.  You want that body? Spend these hours in the gym and eat these foods.  You want this level of success? Know you may have to lose some friends to get it done. Know that you may have to forget the idea of starting a family. Know that you may have to forget being as social as you once were. You get better at saying 'no' to the short term things and 'yes' to the longer term things.  You want this intangible goal that you must strive for? Good. Understand that it comes at a cost. You may lose a lover (or several) or you may...

  I don't know if this is simply a part of the aging process, but the number of people I know who can legitimately say they're happy is smaller than those that say otherwise. The walls I've spent decades erecting in order to keep out the malaise have started to decay. Their cement is crumbling, failing, allowing eroded stone to become loose and dangerous at great heights. Holes have begun to form on either side of the wall, letting in whatever it is that sours me from the inside out.  Personally, I am in my own worst timeline. My creative spark sputters on good days, but never fully lights. My nights are mostly sleepless, averaging around three hours of super lucid dreaming. When the nightmares come, they are vivid and they are tangible. I can taste their grime; I can feel the deep rumble of their insides; I awake and feel their sweat along my body. The landscape of my imagination is hot and hardscrabble, pockmarked with the animals that thrive in the absence of nourishment...

During the early days of the pandemic, I stumbled across a few different things online that caught my interest. One of them was a role-playing game by the name of Call of Cthulhu (CoC). Based on the writings of HP Lovecraft (a super problematic dude, even by the standards of his era), I often describe the game as "like Dungeons & Dragons, but set in the 1920s and revolving around the nature of cosmic horror rather than anything having to deal with high fantasy."  The two are really only similar in that both are games played by people who roll dice to see how the narrative plays out. Where the characters found in D&D become better, stronger, faster, more powerful and can potentially go to war with gods...the characters in CoC are normal human beings, pushed to the edge of their mental stability as they uncover more about cults, cultists, and the cosmic, uncaring beings they worship during the time of Prohibition (though other settings in other eras exist as well).  I...

(A work in progress) I've been falling asleep to voices. Before the still and quiet comes, before that time of hazy present, I can hear them crawling and chittering in the walls, their secrets slithering through my linens and into my bloodstream. I can feel them filling every pore and then wasting away through my skin, disapparating slowly.  I can feel them climbing up the veins and arteries - expanding or thinning out where necessary - before finding their way up top where they take to circling around the folds of my gray matter. There, they navigate the memorials of so many dead moments, maneuver around the nearly dead ones, and take stock of those that will die eventually.  Smoke dreams. I smoke the dreams. The letters of their phrasing meld into the wisp, melt, drip down into my crevices. "Ride the abyssal black of Alecto; paint the sinners in Megaeran red; dessicate it all with Tisiphone's rot and poison." The smoke becomes a part of me the way the voices do, mel...

Everything remains in strange stasis.  I am drowning in the listening of music, but have lost interest in seeing the performance of it, as well as any interest in my own live manipulation of it.  The last few years have been an interesting foray into more droning, ambient soundscapes. The sound of wind being clutched and stretched and scraped across the earth's surface; a chorus of haunting cherubs whispering faint discordance behind cloud cover; the earth's molten skeleton hardening and grinding against itself, slowly toppling continents above.  I'm currently enjoying an album called "The Great Blizzard," which is a great title for it. Weirdly, I don't recall the album that was my first introduction into the genre, but I do remember the radio program Hearts in Space, which played a lot of this stuff. Nocturnal Transmissions was another show on local radio that I'd fall asleep to back in the mid-90s.  I think I like the expanse of it. Like turning time int...

I've been thinking a lot about a previous post recently. The aspect of burying myself in my work when a life catastrophe happens, in particular. More exactly, I've been thinking a lot about my behavior and how that manifests.  I saw a therapist for a while. Saw a couple, actually, with only one of them really jiving with me. And she was great. We got right down to my percieved issues in need of addressing and talked about habits (work and play) and feelings/reactions to life things in general. And also about all of those things happening now as compared to a year ago, shortly after mom died...and then again about the time shortly after dad died.  She posited (not incorrectly...in most situations) that perhaps the writing had gone away because I no longer find myself in the same kind of struggles as previous. I am mostly happy; I have a job that I love, I have a stable housing situation, a stable transport situation, I make good money, and I'm creating in other ways. And whi...

This is the longest I've gone without doing much drinking. Aside from a drink here and there at dinners or lunches out (which are both rare), I don't keep any booze in the house to drink and I don't drink when I go out to the club (which is super rare). It hasn't been a difficult thing to do, but I also haven't seemed to experience anything new from the abstention.  May, June, and most of July are turning into a very introspective and creative time for me. I'm trying to make time to read, which I'm hoping will also jumpstart some writing. There is some of that already at play for my gaming table, but that's a very different kind of writing, but which is really forcing me to carve out some deeply interwoven narratives. It's been fun.  I took medical leave off from work for the entire month of May. The only vacation time I'd taken in the last year was to handle business surrounding mom's estate or my own new place up north. Very little of that ...