Tag: dark mood

Sunday’s Theme Music

After peeking in through windows at 5:38 AM in Ashland with shy pale goldens, the sun boldly shouldered in, shouting, “We got your sunshine. We got your daylight.” Such a bold sun plans to put out browning, sweat-inducing heat, don’t you know. Temperatures will hunt the lower nineties before the sun, still in its place, disappears from the valley at 20:39.

Got the darkness trying to throttle me. It’s a debilitating but brief trough experienced when I ponder what’s the use of all this nonsense? I was walking as it struck, like a bolt into my soul, just before sunset last night. Because a wildfire is being fought and people evacuated, I was thinking about wildfires and water shortages. Many new homes are being built in Ashland. Development is the daily cry as the trucks lumber in with supplies and workers busy with foundations and walls. We were already being told to conserve water. Now there is less water to be divided among more households.

Dev is good but with that shrinking water base, we also have an expanding wildfire season. Before COVID-19 shut down activities, wildfire smoke did the same, cratering the local economy becoming an annual thing. The first time it happened, businesses dismissed it as a one off. Second time, some pulled the plug. Third time, dark mutterings about what are we going to do were heard.

City council lacks the leadership to move out of this mess. Frankly, the mess is bigger than them. Is it climate change? By the time sufficient data is collected, we probably won’t be around to know. Meanwhile, the new houses being built are closer together as land becomes a precious commodity. Streets are narrower. Traffic density rises. Did I mention that a two-lane state highway longitudinally bisects the town? Only one way in and out, not a reassuring realization for planning evacuations. Every street feeds into it.

With the darkness and these bleak realizations colliding, on came an old song by the Smiths. Here are the lines.

This town has dragged you down
And everybody’s got to live their life
And God knows I’ve got to live mine
God knows I’ve got to live mine

h/t to Genius.com

The 1984 song is called, “William, It Was Really Nothing”. Yes, it’s really nothing; just a little darkness nibbling the psyche. Stay positive (you know, like me!), test negative, wear a mask as needed, and get the vax. Cheers

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Find A Club

I sat down to write and poured out a paragraph.

Then I stopped to regard what I wrote.

Yech, I said. It was as appealing as a dirty cat litter box.

I don’t wanna write, I whispered in my inner vault, aware of the blasphemy that I was uttering.

Nor did I want to walk. I’d completed two and a half miles. The thought of another step depressed me.

I wanted to be on the beach, basking in sunshine as I listened to the waves and watched them crash on the shore.

I wanted to be reading a book, sitting at a restaurant, enjoying food that I don’t allow myself to eat because it’s not healthy. I wanted to be listening to music and laughing with friends. I wanted to be flying away, driving away, buzzing away.

I didn’t want to be writing, walking, doing yardwork, cleaning the house, or eating healthy.

Just like that, I knew I was into one of my dark moods. It was overtaking me like a terrifying storm.

Nuts, I said. Nuts.

I returned to writing. Every word felt like a struggle. I kept pushing, looking for a carrot to use, urging myself, just finish this paragraph, and then doing it again. I really needed a club. It’s a day like this when I could use a personal training urging me to push myself. Without one, I had to do it alone.

It was a gritty session. I actually counted the words. When it was nine hundred fifty, I said, good enough, and shut down. Then I grit my teeth and braced myself to walk. I wanted at least two more miles before going home.

I know the words that I wrote today will not seem any different from my usual output. It’s just the mood that’s affecting me. Sometimes I don’t need a carrot or a club. I just sit down and write. And then there are days like today, when neither a carrot nor a club seem like enough.

It was a terrible day of struggling to write like crazy, but tomorrow is another day.

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