Today is one of the bad days. It is pay day. It should be a good day. However, paying mortgage on a house you no longer live in as well as rent for a flat where you do live is exhausting. I am exhausted. I am once again on the verge of giving up. But that is not an option. It would be so much easier to just quit, but that would mean art unmade, words unwritten and life unlived. It is not an option, no matter how tempting it may be.
I am drowning under a mountain of debt. A mountain built high upon so many past mistakes and bad choices. Mistakes and choices I could easily forget existed back when I was perma-baked. But as I am no longer smoking cannabis, it is a lot more difficult to pretend those errors were not made, those decisions were not taken and that the debt did not exist.
Denial is so much easier when you are stoned. Confronting reality is one incredibly difficult task.
A task made that much more difficult by the turning of the season. The gloom is powerful today, inside and out. Rain is threatening, yet fails to fall. It is a perfect metaphor for my internal turmoil.
I have to confront what drove me to this place and all of it is my responsibility. I cannot outsource my responsibility, not any more. I need to own my choices and the paths that I have taken that have led me to where I find myself. 40 years old and for all intents and purposes, an objective failure.
Failure in my marriage. Failure in my art. Failure in my life. Failure in my finances. I have taken all the privilege that life can give a person and I have fully squandered it. Whether that has been substance abuse, ignorance, stupidity, video games or choosing to marry the wrong woman, all of it is on me.
I need to own that in order to move forward.
I need to own that in order to squeeze out the poison in my mind that may still influence poor choices in the future.
She is not a bad person. I want her to be. She simply isn't. It would be easier if she was. That is certainly true. But, given the fact I still love her, calling her names, screaming, shouting and raging or even simply weeping, won't help move forward and beyond bad days like this.
Once more, however, I have no clue how to move forward and beyond other than through hard work, discipline, exercise and the continued mantra of: "out with the negative and in with the positive". Words I repeat again and again as I walk to work, haunted by her memories, as I walk home from work, to an empty bed, absent her memory and her fragrance.
I want to be alone to find myself, but I also want companionship to forget. It is an awful knife edge on which I walk away from misery and towards mental health. And I really want to give and just curl into a ball, smoke fat joints, drink whisky, and forget. But that helps no one. It in no way aids the creation of art.
And that, to my mind, is the purpose of this awful purposelessness.
Art.
There is no meaning here apart from the meaning we create. This in turn places heavy responsibility on all of our shoulders to make certain that the meaning we create is worth it. And not just shallow consumable rubbish that merely exists to fill the vacuum of meaning which predates us all, us ponderous primates plodding through infinity towards an impossible destination of hope.
So, today has been a bad day. I had to speak to her. I got angry and said things I only half mean. Any thoughts of her are so entangled in her choice to choose another.
"I chose me" she says.
I disagree.
But, that is her path, not mine. At one stage, it was our path, as we were a we. A team of two. Us against the world. And that meaning was so comforting and useful. Now, set against its failure and collapse, I need to find a new path, a new meaning. By myself and for myself. Even when on bad days such as this, days which will inevitably occur, all I want is to quit and stagnate, it is on these days when hands need to be raised, shoulders squared and backbone firmed, raise head up and say to the universe:
"out with the negative and in with the positive"
Again and again until no breath is left with which to speak and repeat.
Today was a bad day. A reminder of my failures. But it was also a good day, because it also reminded me just how much work I still have to do to be worthy of this life and to pay back the privilege that I so thoughtlessly have squandered.
