Failing In Place

This bit of writing is entirely personal and anyone who finds it should not read it. It's private…

Oh, go ahead if you must!

By John Done, as told to Dave Esposito

 Each morning I wake with a thump which is followed by the thought that once again I will have to decide what to do with myself for another day.  That’s enough to keep me lying in bed until I  summon the will to move my arms and pull my covers off, swing my legs towards the floor,  dress, make the bed, make the coffee, walk to the TV, watch the YouTube, and drink my coffee with lots of sugar. 

Once I sink into my morning YouTube, my thumb pressing the remote repeatedly is the only giveaway that I’m alive and not a wax figure in a twenty-year-old bathrobe.  An hour later, still glued to the couch and sipping the last dregs of cold coffee that ends in a wash of grounds in my mouth, I find the same difficulty in moving myself off the couch as I did an hour ago in getting out of bed. Just reaching for the phone beside me on the couch to check the weather, requires such effort, that I give up and, remote still in hand, click on, click on, click on, (while asking myself why I would care about the forecast anyway since I seldom leave the house most days except to walk to the nearby graveyard and back for some life-affirming exercise), 

Yes, I am pressed to the couch by invisible sloth-like arms watching videos that are bereft of any redeeming social value. News: Who’s killing who? AI: It will kill us all! Entertainment: Why I hated Barbie. Stuff like that.

When I was a kid,  I watched my Mother, who lived through the Great Depression, become addicted to soap operas. Just before two pm, she would prepare a cup of tea and a treat and head to our living room where sat the black and white TV. She warned us not to disturb her and then shut the door and sat down for an hour of  “Days of Our Lives” and “General Hospital”.  

This lasted for about two years. At two pm Monday through Friday, tea and treat in hand, Mom would withdraw from us kids and the world and have her private time. On the other side of the closed door, we could hear her talking back to the onscreen characters, crying out, “You’re right about that!”, and then harshly, “Unhand her you ruffian!” “Oh Bunk”,  “He’s a rat”, and, “Hussey!” were also hurled at various onscreen ne’er-do-wells, when they deviated from Catholic orthodoxy, which of course happened continuously. She enjoyed it when common sense and good prevailed and particularly relished when a woman character got the upper hand.

This went on for a couple of years until she quit cold turkey one day, emerging from the living room and stating clearly, “These shows are nothing but trash!” There was too much sex and philandering for her front-row Catholic sensibilities so she turned off the TV and never looked back. Instead, she spent that reclaimed time flower gardening most afternoons, weather permitting.   

Years later, I realized I had inherited a variant of the escapist “Days of Our Lives” gene from Mom, however, my escapism wasn’t a reaction to a heavy workload as it had been for her. Instead, young as I was, I found it much easier to do as little as possible and to wait for a sign that something was worth doing. That oracle or sign was “inspiration”, which I came to learn was a romantic, if not utopian four-letter word if ever there was one.  Inspiration, titillating as it was, rarely led to anything productive. When I learned about matter and antimatter on YouTube later in life, (O.K., six months ago), and how they annihilated each other upon contact, it finally dawned on me that the flash of motivation, followed by a collapse into sloth occurred simultaneously, but in my case, sloth was always the winner…though I had to admit, it could then, paradoxically, become the seeds of future inspiration.  

Back to my desultory existence.  In bed, at night while trying to achieve unconsciousness, just the thought of picking up my phone, (again, the phone!) which I kept under the pillow, to switch to a different podcast if necessary, was like swimming through a gravy boat of molasses. I would lay there half awake absorbing a four-hour, probably AI-generated science podcast, on whether we all live in a giant simulation.  And though I craved rest, I would let it play because I needed podcasts like these pumping into my head to get to sleep. It had to be a long one too, at least a couple of hours or more so I would have time to achieve the state of slumber, and preferably delivered by one person, an English man or woman, with a soothing East Midland accent. If the podcast was four hours long and I fell asleep after two hours, the remaining podcast invaded my dreams which I often remembered but which provided no useful psychological insights except probably the sensation upon waking that something was controlling my mind.  If this sort of dreaming possibility interests you, I can recommend podcasts with titles like “Journey Across the Universe” which suggest long hours, if not light years of floating in space so long that they don’t have Star Wars sound effects wooshing and exploding. Describing a supernova explosion is fine; just leave out the atomic blasts for restful repose and to prevent a blown heart valve. 

 On other nights I would wake suddenly from dreams featuring some celebrity or public figure yelling at me, or me at them, which was unnerving until I realized my Bluetooth earbud was sandwiched between my pillow and my eardrum auto-playing a Noam Chomsky video which, obviously,  is painful on multiple levels. 

So at 71 and limping lemming-like towards my final destination,  I’ve come to rely on absorbing thoughts and experiences like a sponge, media-tubing everything up in front of me. Lectures, debates, histories, rants, raves, product reviews, and stories alike beach themselves not in my long or short-term memory, but in clouds of recollection like flotsam drifting off to the horizon before sinking in the blue-green coral reefs of vague thoughts and subtle philosophies. 

Again, I  take things in, provided I do not have to interact or engage with them actively. Further, I no longer judge this osmotic system of self-education. Moreover, I repeat,  I’m not depressed. Or if I am, it’s a rare unengaged-in-life pathology where I’m content to be alone, doing nothing, and being nothing. And come to think of it, It's actually rather blissful! Could this be what they call enlightenment? Is this a paradox to follow up on?

Beyond my mental state, my level of media saturation has a physical concomitant. This is where my eating disorder activities come in, (with perfect timing!), as I’m about to repair to the kitchen and engage in making a cup of hot chocolate with, what I like to call,  Endless Marshmallow Topping. The following was a proposed footnote that is so important that I am incorporating it into the page with no footnote follow-up.

Endless Marshmallow Topping: 

Difficulty rating 3. Health Warning: May be dangerous to your pancreas. Serves one, (of course).

You can do this yourself easily if you heat milk and hot chocolate to nearly scalding, then add marshmallows allowing the chocolate and marshmallow to fuse. Use a teaspoon to skim this cocaine-like slurry just above the hot chocolate surface, adding fresh marshmallows as the old ones are depleted. This can go on indefinitely or until you’ve run out of marshmallows or you feel sick. By no means do you have to drink any of the hot chocolate itself. Its only purpose is as a vehicle to melt the marshmallows and add chocolate body flavor.  

Well, I do admit that the above sounds like further proof of a useless if not depressing existence. That is until 9 am when my wife usually rises,  (I’ve been up since six, but awake since four and tossing and turning since two).  She calls out from three rooms away, “I love you, John, I love you, John, I love you John, and, immediately,  I hustle with horsey clomps down the hall, bathrobe flapping,  and pull up at her bedside snorting and prancing with entreaties and blandishments of my own. This can go on for quite a while and sometimes results in me trying to climb back into bed fully clothed with my bathrobe overcoat. She banishes me with specific threats and I return to cantering around our love nest. Then I move on with my daily activities which include reaching out to others and taking pleasure in these communications as they only total about ten minutes per day. Any longer and they would become annoying interruptions. I take and place these calls while looking out our front window in the morning between oatmeal and YouTube sessions, and then bologna sandwiches and YouTube sessions at lunch, and finally, carrots and hummus and YouTube sessions followed by dinner. After that, my wife and I will take in a movie. I will finish the day by retiring to my personal scholarship and musings on the depression/enlightenment paradox I previously touched on. Self-referentially and again, not to give my mental health short-shrift, viewed from a clinical setting it would be easy to say that I am depressed, and if not clinically depressed, then well seasoned with a stagnant sort of anxiety nurtured by a melancholic ennui. (see DSM5, Chapt.4, Page 5).

 But I think there's more to it than that; it's an inability born of tortured logic and errant reasoning to arrive at a philosophical framework and a motivating force that would otherwise guide one toward a more fruitful and fulfilling existence. I guess, if I could believe that there were any ultimate positives to existence I would have an easier time. But there isn’t and I don’t. And so everything comes down to we die and it all ends and eventually everything ends for everything in a bleve of images; the conqueror worm, the scars of thunder, the sagging jowls; the meteor falling into the sea, the lost pleasures, the forgotten directions, the broken promises,  the ebb tide… It is here in the space between reverie and lassitude, that I mull over the punchline of the joke that is my life, (and possibly all lives), though I won’t speak for others of course.  Further, it has been my long-held belief, and the subject perhaps for future scholarship, that I was hatched, not born into this world, and this has implications that I would rather save for another day.

I'll be 71 next month and although I know there’s more to my life than I know, I feel that I'm ready for whatever is next too, and although  I am 98% certain it will be nothingness, who knows? Maybe I’ll awaken in another being and a billion years have gone by in an instant.  Or maybe consciousness is simply what is, and just one instance and one thing;  the same for everyone and every living thing that is, well, conscious.

I've occasionally played this little game where I'm waiting to go on a trip, which I don't want to go on, and I say to myself, from this moment in one week I'll be back home sitting here comfortable and not doing anything. And then I make the trip, and it is endless, with all sorts of trials and even a few pleasures.  I come home, I sit down where I'm sitting right now and I say, wow it's like magic, I said it a week ago and now that moment is here and it seems instantaneous. That's how I picture my end which is closing faster and faster too: I'm sitting here right now, and the next thing you know I'll be taking my last breath ten or twenty years from now and it will all have happened in a flash, my whole life, and I'll be gone and I’ll be glad that I had done absolutely nothing so I could savor every moment of life free from distraction. Then I can let go and be OK and arrive at the victory of life and into the realm of no knowledge that I ever existed…

There! If you’re shaking your head after reading this, I’ve completed my job and I’ve seen it all and  I’ve said it all and I’m Done…John Done!