SWINNEY LIVES!!

writers:
lin
@le
mute

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Researches of lost time reveal a plenitude of delicious nits

by Jojo

2001-06-25

Let it be, if it must be. One tries to ignore depression, but it surfaces like the submerged body of a dead sister, acrawl with leaves and infant maggots, floating across the swimming pool of one's consciousness. One tries not to dramatise oneself, trying to live the Dhammapada: all is fire, everything is on fire; trying to reason that nothing is important, not even this; trying to convince oneself that there is no I, and who gives a fuck if there is an I anyway? and did I finish George Bataille's L'histoire d'un oeil? and I must concentrate on what I'm doing, if I'll sever the vein completely and enough to stop thinking. Stop thinking of the I and let it be, if it must be.

Oh, this is fucking lunacy. How do you people deal with despair? Do you dismiss it as illusory, as a momentary surrender, as a wrong genuflection of the planets? Can one surrender? If so,

tell me how

le : surrender through acceptance. don't blame yourself. let yourself feel, but allot yourself a time period. "i feel like wallowing, like hating, like crying" but only for two weeks. after two weeks i will move on. until then i will feel as hard as i want, even it keeps me from moving, from feeding myself, from leaving the house. if despair is beyond your control, seek help. if it goes on and on and on. but if it's because of a situation or a time, let it be.

kv : hi. i don't know if you were being sincere or if it was a rhetorical question, or an expressive question, but anyway. you know how anorexia (the eating disorder) is a symptom of other problem(s), like helplessness, lack of control, insecurity, neglect, etc? i believe depression is, similarly, a manifestation, psycho-somatic, symptomatic. being sad and/or disliking yourself is your way of dealing with issues that you don't even know you have. yet.

so, without knowing you or knowing your history or anything, all i can suggest is: attempt to voice your unvoiced concerns. think about anything that's bothering you, and then re-think how much it really is bothering you... and so on.

sorry if it wasn't a sincere question. -kv

Veer Moll :

I don't know what to say. I don't really get the despair.

I'm a Moll. I'm a temporary boy. I take naps and look at things. I have no friends. I throw sticks into the water and stare at clouds. Someday soon I'll be kaput.

Maybe the key is keeping it isolated from a reality which it may or may not have anything to do with, keeping it in perspective.

But that's bullshit. I don't know what I'm talking about. I never have to deal with these things. I'm disposable. Here today, gone tomorrow, hope you find a way.

joker : i tend to agree with le's assessment regarding a prescribed wallowing time. this can also be dangerous, however, as when the end of the wallowing time comes and goes and the despair hasn't budged.

concentrating on no "i" is very difficult, and because of the way we all interact in this ordinary world (that is to say, conceptually) one should understand that it's IMPOSSIBLE to, "just kind of imagine" a world without the "i".

this is why meditation. meditation is all about letting the so-called IMPORTANT things in this ordinary life go by. it is IMPOSSIBLE to keep them from arising in your mind. the key is, not to give them energy, not to chase them or give them emotion. meditate on stillness, meditate on breathing, meditate on love and/or impermanence, but leave the worries of this life outside of the meditation.

my own meditative practice leaves much to be desired. perhaps, if we're lucky, one of the many badass practitioners that frequent this site will say some words.

Peter :
everything is rarely fire for me, also. when other routes fail, i find myself grateful for my lover, whom also shares a periodic heavy coat of despair - we end up trading tidbits of our lot, and more often than not, we find that the fresh perspective relieves some of the weight. As in- she explains her down-ness to me; i vicariously take it on. I explain some things that are getting me down, vice versa. The idea that someone who understands can share pure empathy with me is very relieving. As you mentioned, its only a momentary solution (surrender) but its a very sweet one. of course, it makes us somewhat co-dependant. i guess you take the bad with the good, though? there's no easy answer- do be sure to let me know if you find one!

uhuru : few things:
*depression inevitably adds depth to your personality. it adds beauty to your face and deeper, more lumninous essence to your soul. remember this.
*the prophet has lovely words to say about grief and sadness: "Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight."
And this: "Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief."
I have also been in deep depression lately, and these things help me to remember that it's a necessary part of living a full life.

Danielle : Whenever I feel real despair, I take a pill. I know this is wrong but I just can't deal with it. I went through many years of agony, of wanting to die and not wanting to move. I don't want to deal with that ever again, so every morning I take a little blue pill and when I get too sad to care about anything, I take more.

s5 : two things.

interdependence is not the same as codepedence.

this quote: "The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain," repasted again for emphasis.

Jojo : It's thirteen hundred o'clock. The method I used to bury my depression was self-medication. Self-analgesia, self- amnesia, whatever; it's a sublimation of my want for annihilation, that thing my doctor calls "suicidal ideation" and that I call wanting to fall asleep. So for thirteen hundred hours, or what seemed like thirteen hundred hours, I spun and floated away from my bloated corpse, and waited for death to extinguish me. It has not extinguished me, which (vainly, vainly) I knew it would not (stupidly, stupidly: how recklessly we live our lives, impatient for the thrill of becoming, achieving what summits of extacy for a delayed payment of what despairs later). Is this making sense? Ask me to make sense when I am depressed.

There is a book out called The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon which speaks to me now. I haven't read it, perhaps I will buy or shoplift it when I rouse myself out of bed (hangover, hangover: better that than actually hanging myself). One chapter describes how Mr. Solomon actively tried to infect himself with HIV with lots of unsafe sex. I thought I had come up with that idea. His rationale was not to die malingeringly from AIDS but to kill himself using HIV as an excuse. I think this meme has lost out in popularity these days to "suicide-by-cop" --- something you people in the Bay Area must be overfamiliar with, especially whilst watching "Swordfish" and its ken.

When my brother was god, everything was different then.

moebius :
for those unsure of what the reference to "Swordfish" is all about, look here. I was there that night with my parents and girlfriend. We were watching another film, but we were evacuated along with everyone else.

JoJo, it sounds like you made it through the cosmodemonic wastelands yet again. I've been worried for you. love, moe.

darwin :

"At least three officers fired as many as 20 shots, hitting Stelley several times, Pera said."

This indicates extreme police incompetence. One man with a knife on a piece of chain is in no way justification for application of deadly force. At most one shot, properly directed at the legs of the victim would have caused him to drop the chain he was swinging the knife around on. For almost anyone (except, perhaps, those on PCP or the extremely drunk) being shot once anywhere on your body is enough to make you fall over in shock. I'm certainly not an expert in the application of force, but it seems like if the Secret Service can handle a guy with a gun on the white house lawn without killing him, the SF police should be able to handle a guy with a knife.

Suicide by cop only works when the cops are stupid enough to kill the person. Sigh.

-darwin

moebeus to darwin : even though at the time it was a frightening moment (we had no idea what was going on: hostage situation? random killing of moviegoers? mass hysteria at the awfulness of "Swordfish?") i agree that this killing was a gross overreaction on the part of the SF Police. (weren't tasers an option?) apparently a few others do too: there's already been a protest against the killing at city hall where the victim's mother and girlfriend spoke out. i hope they manage to take the case to court.

Jojo : I preach to you from National Public Radio, specifically All Things Considered, which if it does not consider all things, selbstverstandlich, considers a heckova lot of more things than I do. Monday afternoon's edition of the PBS FM NPR/ATC, at least here in St. Dead Ego, had a report on the number of mosquitoes that alight on the skin in 30 seconds in Houston, TX (answer: a fuckload) and then a discussion with a police chief (or chef) in Kentucky (or Kosovo) where they had had five "suicide-by-cops" in the last month (or month) alone. Our cerebral, never-touched-a-gun Noel Whatsisname, you know who I mean, the host guy who sounds like a reliable fuck if not the most pyrotechnic (his voice intimates that he will cover all the important details of your fuck thoroughly and wittily, whereas Linda Ellerbee resonates stridently impatient vibes in her voice, whose journalistic style in contradistinction to Noel Steadyboy can only be described as pulsing with a nervous urgency; oh, whilst you spread your petals bewilderedly on the public radio couch, quivering and trying to anticipate where Linda will next thrust her strapped-on dildo (arse or Madagascar?), Linda is already striding towards her next headline: coincidentally, her path of sources leads through you. It is patently irresponsible and irrelevant to imagine the fuck-prowess of the one's daily newsreaders, especially if you make a point to pledge a healthy 15% of your annual paycheck to them; such thoughts remove the religious tinct of tithing and impugn calumny. Anyway. I like Noel.), whatever, Noel and the police chief had a broadcast conversation which remotely resembled the following reportage:

Big Noel: Dude, why didn't you like tell your homies to like, you know, fuckin' chill, you know what I'm saying? Like 'stead of zeroin' dat gat straight up a brother's viscera and splattin' his li'l chilluns all up his chinos, why not fuckin' fire a warnin' shot or sumpin? Word.
< Police Chief: What?

The end result of the report was that the use of deadly force was much more prevalent than one would ordinarily assume [that is, in a country of civilised citizens]. The police chief's response to Noel's question about "a warning shot" was an incredulous snort: "That's in the movies," he said, "shooting to disarm, shooting only to wound -- that's pure Hollywood. The truth is, if someone is coming close to you wielding a sharp edge" [italics mine: to add emphasis to what seems a rationale for police use of deadly force: possession of a sharp edge] "--- you're not going to think. You're going to have to protect yourself and the innocents around you. You're going to have to take care of the situation."
This is not a defence nor dismissal of the pathetic soul who decided to complete his life by dying in a hail of police fire in the world-famous Metreon. (Nor shall I comment on the quality of a life lived with a girlfriend who believed watching "Swordfish" would cheer someone up, and who apparently believed "I will die tonight" is proof that that cheering-up had been achieved.)[I should be taking such events, such real tragesies, blah blah blah, less lightly. Ah but in this as in all things in life, Simpson's Law of Tragic Parsimony prevails: 'It's funny 'cuz I don't know them.'] All I wanted to say (and maybe I will say it) is that I predice suicide-by-cop will become more prevalent in the future, for any number of cultural theory rationales (for those, I refer you to Herr Moebius) and also because of these two mathmatic certainties that almost amount to a theorom (hanc marginalis) --- because cops, apparently, will kill at the flash of an incisor (don't smile at them) --- and because as you and I live on and on, everyone else will want to die that much sooner.

It's now 20 minutes to 1 million o'clock. By this rate I should be dead by Thursday.

Pong Moll :

You are on fire, girl. You really are. Make more.

Jojo : It's 16 million o'clock. It's Thursday. I made myself a promise, and my goddesses I shall keep it. Fare well.