Postscript to An Apology: Making Goodbyes Stick...

So, what’s the hold-up? You’ve written your apology. You’ve gotten your mind clear and the guilt has dissipated. You can move on from your supposedly Spout-derived depression and begin taking the Cinema 4 Pylon to the next level.

So why haven’t you written anything, you whiny bastard?

All good questions that I ask myself, and probably questions that a couple of you out there may have muttered yourself.

But the answers are aren’t easy. So much has happened in the past week regarding the apology. Part of it is due to the anti-climactic nature of the response to the apology, and part of it leaves me wondering as to why I assign such significance to one small event that really doesn’t matter to, well, anyone else… apparently. But then there was something that followed up that response that leaves me wondering something else altogether.

First, the response. After posting the fourth part of my epic mind-cleanser -- sort of a concentrated Drano for the psyche -- I then devised a quick and very polite email to Ryan over at Spout, pointing him to the links for the four parts, and also instructing him that he if really wants to get to the heart of the matter, just check out the last part. After all, therein lied the apolo-wogy.

A couple of days later, I received this from Ryan:

It's all good. I understand how problems in life can affect the way people choose to react to changes in what they would rather not see change. I appreciate your sincere apologies. I realize it wasn't meant to be a personal thing. Anyway, it is good to have you back. Sadly I will not be here much longer, at least not in the capacity that I have been. Feel free to reapply to the spout mavens group if you want.

Peace,
Ryan

And that was it. Nice, but that was it. At the time, it was all I wanted. But then something bothered me about the end of the reply, and I am not reading anything into the last sentence and I know it is just business as usual over there, but it still struck a nerve with me. I never applied to the Spout Mavens group in the first place; I was invited because they liked the regular writing I had posted of my own free will on the site. I fully realize that I caused myself to get knocked out of the group, and I also sense that perhaps the ultimate key to worming myself back out of this mood is to work my way back into their good graces. At the time that I posted the series of four apology posts, asking forgiveness seemed to be only the first step; humbling myself and asking back in to the group was the next; doing good, solid work for the group would have been the final step.

Suddenly, after reading the accepting email response, I found myself ruminating over whether I really did want to reapply to the group; whether it was worth the effort or perhaps I should concentrate on my own site and wash my hands of the whole thing. Then, my buddy The Working Dead -- who is still a member of the group even though he hasn’t, by his own admittance, written anything for them for almost six months, even though they supposedly have (or had) rules against such a thing happening -- received this email from the Mavens group:

Subject: Farewell and changes in the way screeners work, again

Hello folks,

Today is my last day with Spout. I have enjoyed interacting with each of you, and reading the very different styles of writing you all have brought to Spout. I won't bore you with details, but obviously things are going to change a bit with me gone. My sister will, most likely, be facilitating the screener program from now on. Due to this the way the program will be run is going to be very different.

The new screener program:

First, all previous requests concerning formatting, manner of contact, etc. are hereby forfeit.

You may format your "review" however you please.

You DO NOT need to tell anyone your review has been completed, or include a link. Of course this is a good idea if you want others to read it and they aren't subscribed to your blog via rss. All communication will occur on the Spout site. We will not be using this email address for the screener program anymore.

If there is a screener you want you should reply in the thread that is titled with that specific screener. (I.E. if you're interested in "Hazard" you should reply to the "Hazard" thread requesting the film.) If the film is available you will be contacted and sent the film. If the film is no longer available a post will be made in the thread so that everyone knows that we no longer have that film to share.

That is basically it, we don't need to know when you get your review done. There are no time limits any longer, and you will never be removed from the program. Of course you must make requests in the group if you actually want to receive screeners from Spout.

I hope this format is more simple and palatable for everyone. If you have any questions feel free to reply to this email.

Peace,
Ryan

Well, all I wanted was peace, but it seems, as it does in most of the world, to be in very short supply. Peace is fine, but I started out on this journey fighting for some form of ideal, however mislaid my ideals tend to be, and just when it seems that I have achieved a seemingly peaceful state, I read an email which would almost seem to be majorly passive-aggressive if it had actually been sent my way. Now it just reads like it missed its main target.

There is no way that you can convince me this email doesn't contain traces of my involvement in this affair. Tell me that I didn’t have any impact over there with my idiotic, deeply programmed rebelliousness: the phrase 'You make format your "review" however you please' is a clear take on my mocking "review" quotes throughout several posts that I did for the Mavens group, including the final one for More Shoes that led me into my most recent depressive state. And suddenly, all the things they wished for us to do -- i.e., having us format our "reviews" for easier use by the mainstream users of the site -- are now gone, like they were never foisted upon the group in the first place.

And the only surefire reason that would convince me that I need to kowtow and ask admission back into the Mavens group is now gone as well: the randomness of the DVD screeners. Now it seems that one must pick a screener that looks interesting and ask for them to send one over if there are any left. Maybe it is too much work to just randomly grab the next disc on the stack and drop it in a bubble-encased envelope. Myself, I preferred never knowing what was going to show up in my mailbox, and my short career with the group was marked by numerous occasions where the most pleasant part of my day was finding that a movie, of which I had never heard previously, just really blew my mind or turned out to be a complete surprise in quality and depth. (There were crappy films too, to be sure, but those are the breaks...)

And these are the brakes on which I am now jamming my foot, hard and fast. However I might have been using this whole period, and these past five posts, to break myself out of an emotional rut, I now feel, with the discovery of this last email, that my apology was completely in vain. It may have helped me wash my hands of a supposed past transgression against innocent others, but clearly it was only considered necessary on my part. It really had no bearing on anything at all, except for as a dartboard on which I could pin my miseries, aim and fire. And while I can, as I just did, pick out small things which my ego allows me to use to convince myself that I have done some ultimate good, it is just as likely that this was merely the path that was being taken already in my absence, and it is equally likely that they received any number of other complaints from users in the group with like minds.

Not that I will join them again. I liked a couple of them pretty well, though I am deriving this opinion chiefly through reading their reviews -- which more often than not fulfill the supposed true purpose of criticism, unlike mine -- and I wish them all well. Me, though... I am choosing to move on and concentrate fully on my own sites and projects. I have wasted enough time on this by now, and with these latest developments, my interest in doing anything for the site is gone. After all, while I received a handful of nice responses from members on the site, it did nothing to drive people to the Pylon. In fact, the most interesting responses that I have received -- from comic editors, cartoon producers and directors, and an occasional rock star -- have been straight through the Pylon or on my sadly underused sister site, the Cinema 4 Cel Bloc.

And thus, I must say this for good: Goodbye, Spout. Good night, and good luck.

For me and the Pylon... Onward...

Stumbling Thru the March of Time, Pt. IV: Apologizing by Not Apologizing Seemingly At First but Ultimately Doing What Must Be Done...

[Editor’s note: If you have not read Parts I-III, please do so, and make sure to read the post that is referenced at the end of Part III by clicking here. Thanks.]

I am assuming by this point that you have read my Spout.com piece for the DVD More Shoes, which was written after weeks of moping and teeth-gnashing and under the general impression that my rights as a citizen of the supposedly free world (though it never really is) were being trampled upon without mercy. Just because the good people who run Spout.com were trying to make things a little easier on their members and visitors to use their site, I went off on a mad, cynical rampage, basically just trashing the place… though, I might add, I did still fulfill my duties as a “reviewer” and focus at least a handful of paragraphs on the movie at hand.

True, these paragraphs were sandwiched between my various ravings regarding having to put the word “review” in all of my titles, having to include recommendations of at least one other film in either the beginning or ending of each “review,” how I do not recommend anything to people blindly, but only through the course of knowing each person individually and, if at all possible, well, and then a rapid-fire progression of ways people should discover films that are far better and more organic than having people thrust their own opinions upon them. And here is something else that I must add before I get around to the true purpose of this piece: I stand by every word I said. Well, I stand by every word but the final two: “Goodbye, Spout…”

These two words were meant largely as a kiss-off, though they were laid down, perhaps in the most cowardly part of the piece, in a way where it looked like a mere sign-off to some people (who did take it that way), even though I was fairly resolute at the time that I would not return to the website. In fact, I have not returned to the website, except for the rare checking of emails on there, which is mainly just people saying they added me as a contact. But I have not posted on there since, and frankly, I haven’t written anything since then that is worth posting on Spout. Most of what I have done since, as I related in Part I, has been of a more personal or space-filling nature.

And it is all because of the cloud that has rested over me since I told Spout.com off in November.

Ryan Sprague, one of the fellows who runs the site and had taken over handling these issues and the Spout Mavens group at that time, has always been exceedingly polite with me, and when I first posted the More Shoes piece, he sent me a personal note asking why I didn’t raise these issues with him directly, rather than take it into the public forum. He hoped that I wasn’t really planning to quit the group, and pointed out how he felt much of what I had to say was worthy of note, but that I had discussed my anger over the policy changes beforehand. But I was still fired up when he sent the email, and I didn’t respond to him, and continued to be pissed off for several days after I posted the piece.

And then it all came down. I really started to feel bad about what I had done, and if there is a true moment where my depression of the past few months could be said to have begun, this was it. For those who may feel that I am merely playing with the idea of depression for attention’s sake, and those who may have noticed that I have, over the past couple of years, mentioned other periods of my life where I have struggled… no, you are wrong, this is not play… and yes, part of having depression overall is finding yourself in regular periods where everything just falls apart, whether it really is or not to those on the outside of your head. It’s just that for once, I have the unique sense of just where things went wrong. And through the evenings where Mr. Forced Focus just can’t do that anymore, where the ADD becomes almost completely insurmountable, everything becomes a scramble… and the headaches, the headaches, the headaches… and nothing tastes, reads, scans or looks right or even interesting, and where I see the uselessness of everything and everyone and every instant.. well, through all of that, I could still tell myself that I could fix all of this with just a simple response and apology.

But this is all months later. Back in November, I dearly wanted to respond to Ryan, but my evil three-quarters would not allow me. I had constructed the beginnings of at least a half-dozen emails where I was going to announce that I would work around their new policies and remain on the Mavens group. Because I truly did love writing for it, even if I have a host of criticisms about the site in general. But that’s just me – I am very picky about certain things: the ratings system, the choice of DVD covers, etc. – and while I don’t really use the site for anything but to post, I still appreciated and wanted to support the site, if only because it was a group of people who had accepted me as a member in good standing, even if such feelings went against the Groucho maxim. But they had seen fit to include me in their special writing group, and for that, I was and still am entirely honored and grateful.

But it is also very “me” to not have ever completed nor sent any of the emails that I had begun constructing to Ryan. And so I never replied to him, and more time went by, and I let the guiltiness nag at me for having disparaged a group that had been nothing but very kind to me. Finally, after not responding for a week, I received a very direct notice from Ryan that read this:

“Rik, I sent you a message via email, which you have not responded to. At this point I'm going to assume you no longer wish to be a part of the screener program. I am going to excuse you from the group. If you change your mind just let me know. Thanks, Ryan”

And there it was. I had been, through my own reticence and guilt, excised from the Mavens group.

But not from Spout, though I decided then that I would not go back on there for a while, if not ever. I must stress that this was not out of any malice towards the site. I still think the site is a good deal of fun, and would suggest it to those in my realm of influence that are movie-oriented as a place they might want to check out. Yes, a recommendation. Not as an artistic piece, mind you, which would run counter to my professed opinions on doing so without personal acquaintance, but rather as a tool through which any novice movie fan can obtain movie knowledge or catalogue one’s movie experience. And while I haven’t decided if I wish to return to the site, at least as a contributing regular member with regular postings, I am hoping that divesting myself of this emotional burden will help that status change in months to come.

Because that is what I have done to myself. I have weighed myself down for numerous months now with something I could have cleared up with a simple email long ago. I could have responded so easily to Ryan back in November, and let him know my feelings (most of which I have spared you in this series, because then it would go on twice as long) on writing freedoms and censorship, none of which were in actual jeopardy from Spout’s largely benign guidelines which were only given to help bring some cohesion to the site’s efforts for their membership. I realize this now, but in the blindness of stupefying rage, I didn’t care to recognize it then.

So, this comes down to an apology. An apology to everyone at Spout.com, its members (except that one gorehound asshole with the board who threatened bodily harm on one of my closest friends and for whom the bell will hopefully toll with a most ironic tone when all is said and done), and especially to Ryan Sprague for having to deal with an immature jerk such as myself.

And let’s now consider that “Goodbye, Spout…” as more of a “Good Night, and Good Luck” than as the “suck it, bitches…” that it seemed back in the day. I should have treated the people who run Spout the same way that I have treated any of the people who have been good and kind enough to take me into their friendship and families over the years: with gratitude and loyalty, rather than seeing them as potential threats to my personal liberties, which they were weren’t close to being at all. So, all apologies, my friends. Hope to make your acquaintance in the future.

And now, for my own concern, I sincerely hope this hell has burned itself out. Or at least gotten some proper ventilation...

Stumbling Thru the March of Time, Pt. III: No Braveheart References in a World Prone to Inappropriate Braveheart References...

I created this current hell for myself.

Were it so that everyone admitted their faults or mistakes so easily, this society might be an easier one through which to traverse, let alone become one slightly less litigious in nature. But not everyone is afforded the unique opportunity to reliably observe their current state, as I believe I have, and identify precisely what has gotten them to that point. And even less people are willing, once they do find the initial progenitor of their anguish, to actually do something about it.

This is something I have put off since late November, when I first had the idea that I needed to do something to right the ship. And then I didn’t do anything, and every single day since then, I have thought “I need to fix this,” and I haven’t, and it has nagged unswervingly at me ever since. Up to this day. My salvation shall gush forth in the form of an apology – an apology to a group that I believe that I have wronged, even if what led me to believe this I did under the assumption that I was just protecting my own standards and beliefs. But enough of the mystery… let’s get to the facts:

On November 11, 2009, I published the latest in my series of non-“reviews” for Spout.com, the movie website with whom I had been connected for about a year or so by that time, and for whom I was a member of their Mavens group, a small band of about 35-40 Spout members who regularly received DVD screeners of independent films, which we then wrote about in return for our being given the screeners.

For the first few months of my membership in this group, I futzed around a bit, somewhat half-heartedly fulfilling my duties, even though I did receive many a swell comment back on what I had written. As much as I enjoy hearing comments from my network of long-time friends, getting comments directly from people as obsessed with films and movies (there are differences) as I am is a major high. So much so that I then went nuts with the writing. I not only went full bore on taking great care in writing my pieces for Spout, but I even took a DVD of 16 short films and wrote 13 mostly quite lengthy pieces around each short, or group of shorts, in the package, rather than lumping them all into one four-paragraph piece which would do little in the way of justifying or denigrating each respective film, should I end up loving or hating them. In short, after a sputtering start, for a brief few months, I was truly earnest in trading my written pieces for Spout.com’s offer of fattening my film collection.

At first, I did enjoy the fact that the majority of films that Spout sent me were ones that I would have missed otherwise. Not that I seek to avoid the “artier” type of film – I keep very broad interests, and one of my cardinal rules of my life is that I will watch any film once, even ones that I find personally reprehensible in the normal course of things – but the honest truth is that given the choice between a film where a family gets carved up by a maniac and one where the family is merely menaced by the specter of Dad’s alcoholism and abuse, I am going to skip the drama and get straight to the blood-worship, if only because it is more fun, both in the writing and the watching. I generally avoid drama in my real life; why would I want to confront it on the screen? And yet, there is a lie there… because if the family alcoholism film has a Dad played by Jack Nicholson, I would be there in spades, whether I found the topic worthwhile or interesting or not. Also, I would go see straight dramatic pieces if they were in Japanese, Swedish or French, but I would put the ixnay on anything with an American accent, finding them far too shrill (or maybe just hitting to close to home in some departments… maybe So, mainly I avoided a lot of the lower-budget arthouse-style films purely due to my own hypocritical behavior. Then along came Spout.com, and my attitudes changed. For now I was, thanks to Spout – not being forced – but committed to a minor form of contractual obligation to see these things through, no matter the subject or style of the film.

But what I loved most about writing these pieces was the freedom. Well, relative freedom… the so-called “obscenities” of common note would get replaced with dashes here and there, but I saw this as a necessity, since there are people out there who stupidly do like to say “m-f-er” every third word or so, writing or speaking. The turnaround on these people is that such words lose any effect at all when used as nothing more than a mere vocal tic, as common as an “uh” spewed out endlessly in a single sentence. Me, I know how to use “profanities” (clearly, through the use of quotes, you will realize that I find no words obscene at all) for effect, and therefore only employ them when I truly want to get a particular point or, most often, a mood across. So, the freedom of profane language was not a concern at all for me on Spout. No, the freedom I was enjoying was being allowed, in a forum completely removed from my own self-created sites, to say whatever I wanted about a film. Nobody was messing with my words and, additionally, there wasn’t a soul telling me that the pieces I wrote had to be positive.

On top of this, structure was all mine within the confines of Spout's somewhat limited editing tool. Nobody was telling me that these pieces had to be in any certain form, nor did they have to possess certain components or elements within them. I was happy with all of this "freedom."

And then, in September, after completing my run of Shorts pieces, suddenly, the outside request for form and component structure became a reality. I, along with the rest of the Spout Mavens, was suddenly being told what to do. Or, at least, that’s how I, all puffed up with pride and my usual dash of damn-them-all rebellion, was perceiving it.

And I hated it.

Finally, in November, after stewing about it for a few weeks, I unsealed the pressure cooker and lashed out…

[Your homework before proceeding to Part IV: to catch up on the results of this lashing out, please click here to read my Spout.com review of More Shoes.]

[To be concluded tomorrow…]

Stumbling Thru the March of Time, Pt. II: In Brightest Day, In Blackest Night...

You may have noticed over the past few months that the Pylon has been steadily more “substance”-free. Not that it ever is that substantive – though I do try to make a good show of it now and then, but even if one includes the pieces that at least halfway attempted to be reviews of various pop cultural items or trends as what passes for substance on the Pylon, then this blog has become less and less of a place for even that lowly placed regard in recent months.

Take a look at things on here since September, after I had just finished knocking out a long series of “reviews” of short films for Spout.com, and you will find that I have resorted more and more to “puff” pieces than actual reviews or pieces breaking down aspects of criticism, felonious or laud-worthy. I spent a third of September in Disney World, and literally used the Pylon as an outright diary/journal for those ten days or so. Not that I wouldn’t resort to such antics again – September did become my biggest post month of the year (23) for this reason, and I intend on journaling once more this coming December from our just secured awesome two-bedroom suite (with a water view, and monorail access just next door at the Contemporary) in the recently constructed Bay Lake Tower (for which we will pay less than $330 a night for a suite that will run $655 a night off-season – sorry for the diversion, but I just found this out…) October wasn’t too bad – being focused on all of my newly purchased Halloween discs at that time -- but something happened in November which formally stuck me firmly in the muck. And it was all my own doing.

More on that in a bit, but here’s what happened after that November occurrence. My focus slipped more and more, and seeing my brother and sis-in-law in Seattle for Thanksgiving was a grand time, but it led to another round of space-filling journaling. (While it could be considered “journalism” in the truest sense of the word, TV talking heads have ruined that term for eternity, so I will never use it.) I had a lot I wanted to recount, and I was genuinely excited about every minute of my Washington travels. But my attention was clearly wavering, and all because there was a nasty form of nausea growing ever larger within my stomach over my actions in November. The ultimate proof of my heart just not being in it is that I left off with the last two days of that vacation recap unwritten.

Then, strange things started to happen to pieces within the course of my regularly scheduled writing vein: I watched the excellent anti-finning and long-lining documentary Sharkwater, got all riled up politically, wanted to rail against the irresponsibility of the Asian fishing market, knocked out a preface to a review of the Sharkwater DVD explaining my basic interest in the subject matter… and then never wrote the review, which was intended to jump-start once more my interest in working on my Shark Film Office side-blog.

Even more shocking, I wrote the first of a two-part piece on being ten feet away from Bruce Campbell at a special screening of his latest self-referential opus. I even took pictures outside the theatre, and was genuinely wound up over sharing the experience in print. And then, continuing my new trend, I couldn’t summon up the nerve to write the second half.

Horrors on top of horrors, once January hit, I was merely content to put up more filler, like railing against Facebook users and their need to tag me on every idiotic application or overly used meme that drops into their laptops. That this was a largely ineffective rant is proved by the fact that I now get emails that say, “I know you don’t like being tagged, but I knew you just had to see this…,” as if I wasn’t, as a Facebook user myself, equally as open to seeing the same damn list of applications, or as a person with several email accounts, equally as prone to receiving chain emails telling us all to smile because “God loves us” (and please, please, please pass this on to 25 people that you care about or your dog will get AIDS, courtesy of the devil), lists of questionable origin or requests to help out Nigerian princes the same that they are. Yes, I saw all of these, I want to shout, I just chose to ignore them. (See? The rant continues…)

Finally, the bit with the Oscars. My initial point was to see as many contenders as possible before the ceremony. I rounded up all of the available nominees on Netflix, timing it out so each would arrive in time with the variances in the respective schedules of my beloved and myself. Over the course of three weeks, we hit every available film in the theatres that we hadn’t already seen, with the exception of “The Wrestler,” which I did manage to catch on a very tired Thursday night in my hotel room at the Wilshire Grand in L.A. after working on setting up our show at the L.A. Convention Center that day. I was going to update the list of nominees that I had posted and marked earlier, and then I was going to make my predictions, not based on who I would like to win (because that is often an entirely different list of nominees) but who I thought was going to win. And then it turned out that, as the Oscars began, that I would just be leaving our own show, and while I was excited at the notion that the Oscars were being held not all that far away from where I was working, it meant little once I realized that I would not be at home to watch them when they actually started the ceremony. Though I had clear opportunity to write on the laptop through the course of my stay in L.A., with free internet in my room, I was simply too mired in my low state by this point to be any actual good to myself.

By not following up on my list of Oscar nominees in the middle of February, while simultaneously sinking my concentration deeper and deeper into the running of our upcoming convention, I missed surefire opportunities to get myself back in the game. Even easy posts, which seem like mere candyfloss and filler, can be extremely beneficial to someone who relies on just simply continuing to use their instrument. By not following up on the can’t-miss easy stuff, I realized that I had, at this point in time, lost the will to blog, to write, to draw… to create anything.

This is not about being blocked. I don’t actually believe in writer’s block, and this is not it. I can write at the drop of a hat, and about anything. But I must have the will. And this is purely about losing will… misplacing the fire. And in the two weeks leading up to the Oscars (which collided with what is genuinely my busiest working fortnight of the year), I knew that I was once more in the grips of my old demons, where I get lost in the day-to-day, and the mundane takes the wheel. I can no longer feel the hobbled but comforting surface of the yellow brick road, and my fantasy life – which is so very, very dependent these days on my outlet of creative writing – takes a major loss.

And I knew how I got to this point, and I knew exactly what started me towards it.

And it was all my own doing…

[To be continued…]

Stumbling Thru the March of Time, Pt. I: Slowly Unfurling the Curl

It wasn’t supposed to be this way…

For those of you (and I can name at least a dozen of my good friends and family who have made inquiries) that have wondered why I have remained largely incommunicado for the past month, worry no more. For those slightly fewer than that dozen who have asked why I haven’t posted anything on the Pylon for thirty days – oh, thirty days! – or the whole of February plus some spillover into the current month-strosity, the answer is at hand. For those fewer still who have wondered why I have left everyone hanging with the Oscar coverage, well, I quite simply had more important things to do than further ponder who would win in the Sean vs. Mickey battle (though I will tell you it should have been a tie), and especially more important than getting catty over the preponderance of mermaid dresses on the red carpet, fashion issues for which I care not one whit.

Early in January, things looked good. On or around the third of that month, I looked at the Pylon and thought, “Wow, I am feeling good. I am going to try and post every day this month.” By the fifth, that statement proved a lie, but I still hoped to post for most of the month. By the tenth, I had given up hope. After the 31st, I could no longer even bring myself to log into Blogger, not even to update my Oscar coverage.

It has nothing to do with that mythic and largely idiotic “syndrome” called “writer’s block,” something off of which Stephen King has made a pretty good living, because, even more than horror, what he likes to write about is writers. (This is no knock on The King… I still dearly love the guy. Danse Macabre sits by my bedside forever, and I am still hurting over the fact that I sold off my King collection when I married, since I happened to wed the second biggest King fan in Alaska at the time and we clearly needed the bookspace in my cramped abode. Years later, I think about the loss of those many first edition hardcovers and crave vengeance…)

But back to the syndrome at hand. This is nothing like “writer’s block.” I will never have “writer’s block.” I can see a mere stop sign on the roadside, and immediately start creating something out of virtually nothing in my head. Whether it makes it to paper or the computer screen is another matter, but the fact that nearly everything compels me to impulsively create or be creative is proof that such a syndrome will never occur to me. I write in my sleep, I write in the shower, I write on the bus, I write when I sneeze.

No, what I have is different. It is a swelling of the same old depressive state into which I have fallen since a child. The kind that makes me gradually shut down and curl into a ball at the head of the bed. The kind that slowly saps my interest in anything outside of my own mind. The kind that leaves me staring blankly at a television for hours, not really taking in shows I was purportedly invested in watching. The kind that has gone largely undiagnosed in all my years on this sphere, though one doctor did see fit to finally realize I had some form of ADD and dropped some pills into my for a number of months, off of which I weaned myself rather quickly, preferring instead my old manic self and the impish demons that came with it and got me into trouble from time to time.

For someone who usually watches, walks, eats, reads or does everything with a determined purpose and intent, the return of this cloud of depression is grim news indeed. My old friends would scoff at the notion that I “intend” anything in my actions, but ask Jen. Live with me for even a brief period, and you know that there is something, however misguided or selfish, behind every move I make. Even goofing around is serious for me. As I am fond of quoting, and as Frank Black sings in his melancholic ode to the Three Stooges and their career drive, “Some gibberish, it is so serious…”

I am not saying, “Ha ha! When I am finally a great success, you will all regret laughing at me!” in the manner of an old, megalomaniacal movie villain. It is not so self-delusional a drive where I believe that I am ultimately going to come out a gazillionaire. My intent is personal; my goals are mere happiness and content. My purpose is merely to wake up in the morning, feel that I have spent the day in some satisfyingly creative fashion, and retire to bed with dreams of the next day already building in my mind. Yes, like anyone of a creative bent, I dream of something I have written or conceived one day becoming a monumental success. I have plans and plots, both by myself and in concert with others of a similar purpose, where we seek to leap, through our own creations, into a better life. But my personal drive is of the inch, not the foot… it is not career driven, but rather emotionally driven. It is squarely and simply centered around getting through each day in the most soulfully pleasing fashion that I can.

And I have gradually ceased to meet this purpose more and more each day, over the course of five long months now…

(To be continued…)