Daily Archives: May 28, 2013

The new groove

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Still working on cutting a new channel for myself, a new container for my ever so liquid self.

After all, if a liquid takes the shape of it’s container, the only way for the liquid to change its shape is to change the container. Right?

I have been passive for too long, and while I do not expect to be able to make myself into a new person by sheer force of will (that way madness lies), I do feel that by working at it a little bit, all the time, I can change the shape I am in.

That shape being “round”. Ha ha ha.

But I am staying positive and fighting off the demons of self-hatred and self-destruction. It;s tough going sometimes. It would be so easy to let go and resume my previous passive, self-hating shape.

Because that’s the thing about all that self-loathing nonsense : it’s easier. After all, I have been pacing back and forth in the same groove for a bloody long time. My tireless treads have worn away at the floor of my psyche until this groove of mine is mighty tall and steep on the sides.

And I spent a long time thinking that I had to climb those sheer steep sides in order to be well, and that was clearly impossible, so I figured I was fucked.

But that is the classic kind of all-or-nothing thinking that depression uses to defend itself, and I am not my depression. I am a wonderful, talented, intelligent, sweet-natured fellow who happens to have let an unwelcome house guest called depression vastly overstay its welcome and take over the whole household, and I am damned good and ready to kick it out no matter what it takes.

Even if it can only be done by steady, focused erosion, rather than the earth-shattering volcanic explosion that part of me would prefer.

Just get it the fuck over with already! Yank that Band-aid off, scream like a motherfucker, then get on with your life.

But no. While there might be small landslides like my recent fox based emotional meltdown, for the most part it will a process of filling myself with the good and thereby displacing the bad, pushing it to the borders where it belongs, and then out of myself entirely, never to return.

It’s about letting in the good things. Look around your life for the things that are good. Friends and family that care about you. The music, television shows, and so on that you like. All the good parts of your personality and your abilities. Reach out across depression’s chilly void and touch them. Defy the little voice in your head that says it is dangerous to embrace the good in life, that everything that brings you up will only lead to a bigger, harder fall, that to do this is to change everything in a frighteningly unpredictable and uncontrollable way. Better the devil you know, right?

Wrong. That voice is the voice of depression and it is not you. That voice is a cheater and a liar and does not have your best interests at heart. It merely wants to maintain the current fascist state of your soul, with depression and fear in total command of your capital city.

So reach. Stretch. Connect with the good things in your life. Let their warmth fill up that dark and terrible voice inside. Ignore all other voices. Let the goodness push the bad stuff into the darkness beyond where it belongs.

And it might take some doing. You might have to drill through a lot of layers of habit and lassitude and fear of change before you truly reach the mother lode.

That is why it is so important to reach and stretch towards it. Once you can feel the warmth of these things, even if it is very faint, it will provide the motivation needed to keep on drilling. Every inch closer becomes another inch warmer. The activity becomes inherently rewarding.

That is how I feel about what I am doing now inside my head. Filling myself with as much of the warm pure light as I can, and letting it illuminate the path out, the path I must make myself, but which beckons me ever onward toward a better, brighter future.

A future without depression, where I am free to simply live my life joyously and freely, unencumbered, able to translate all of my inner energies into outer action on the world without the constant deadening echo chamber of self-doubt and hesitation caused by the eye that tries to see all directions at the same time. A future where I accept whatever comes along, and accept both the intensity of my personal power and the limits of it.

You are not responsible for every single thing that happens to you. That is a naive and ill thought out New Age notion that sounds good and empowering at first but is actually a recipe for insanity.

Some things, in fact, a lot of things, you can control. But there is a whole big bad world out there with its own idea of what to do, and you only control your little piece of it, and that, imperfectly.

Accept that there are a lot of things that have happened to you that were not your fault and that you could not have possibly done anything to prevent with what you knew then.

The past is over. It cannot be changed. You do not live there and never will. Life cannot go backwards. It can only go ever forwards and choosing to look backwards all the time merely makes it much harder to avoid the obstacles in your path.

And that is as true for dwelling on the bad things as it is for dwelling on the good. Nostalgia or trauma, both can be easier than facing the uncertainty of the future.

The past, after all, is quite certain and entirely predictable.

But it’s over. Time to wake up, and move on.

Remember the 80’s?

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Tonight’s entry is all about this fun list: 50 Things Only 80’s Kids Understand.

Being mostly an eighties kid (ages 7 to 17, and it’s not like I remember anything from the first two years), I enjoyed perusing this little list.

Some of things I remembered fondly, other things I remembered but didn’t really care about, and some of the things I flat out do no recall at all.

Well, the culture is rarely evenly distributed and not everybody gets every update.

I don’t think Muppet Babies is the greatest cartoon of all, although looking back, it was high quality kiddie entertainment. I watched it, but only because it was the Muppets. The Muppet Show was a huge part of my childhood (70’s kid!)and I was Muppet deprived.

But looking back, it had a great deal of warmth and imagination, and had the very comforting message that you can go anywhere with your imagination, but if things get too scary, you can stop and instantly be back at home, safe and sound.

If you had asked me at the time what the greatest cartoon of all time was, I would have said “Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends” without hesitation. It’s kind of hard to watch as an adult, but when I was a kid and that show was on, the rest of the world just plain ceased to exist.

And unlike other children’s shows, it didn’t treat me like an idiot. That was a very big deal to me.

As for “Team Madonna” or “Team Cyndi”, I was never aware I had to choose, but if I had been asked at the time, I would have chosen Cyndi hands down. Madonna has done some great music and some extraordinary things both with her public persona and her business sense.

But I love Cyndi. She just seems like such an awesome person.

Looking over the list, I remember 24 of the fifty things. So, not quite a pass. For instance, I didn’t even know what “pegged” jeans were until I saw the picture.

And I sure as hell don’t remember kids going to 50’s-themed parties. Honestly, I am pretty sure I would have thought that was totally lame.

I mean, it’s not like those were my Happy Days. But I guess it was kind of like the kids with their 80’s parties today. Somehow, they inherit our nostalgia for a while.

We had a bunch of Disney Book and Record sets, though I listened to them on the family stereo, not my own Fisher Price model. Between that and my Disney Encyclopedia (seriously), I was indoctrinated into the world of Disney quite early.

Maybe that is why I still consider myself a Disney fan even though they have behaved quite badly over the years, and why I still admire Uncle Walt and the empire he built on the feeling of magic, despite knowing some of the ugly truths about the man.

Disney has a place in my heart that nothing can replace. Ditto the Muppets.

Oh, and speaking of movies (kinda), I was definitely traumatized by one of those movies, namely The Dark Crystal. My Dad took me to see it. The whole movie was a trip and I was absolutely rapt throughout the whole thing.

But at the end, when (spoiler alert!) the Skeksis and the Mystics merge into one race of beings, I was absolutely blown away. Mind went PING. It was so unexpected and so, well, wrong to my young mind that it threw me for a lot of loops.

I mean, the Skeksis were horrible, horrible creatures. I still think of them as some of the most disgusting, vile, detestable, awful villains ever. I spent the whole movie waiting for them to get their righteous comeuppance. After all, that’s what always happens, right? The good guys beat the bad guys in the end.

And I wanted the Skeksis dead, dead, dead. Not just defeated. Dead. No mercy, no negotiation, no hesitation. Children can be quite bloodthirsty, and I wanted those fuckers dead.

So to have them actually merge with the good guys, the Mystics, was a total mindfuck and I spent a long time trying to come to grips with it. You can’t merge with them. They’re EVIL.

That movie really expanded my little mind. I had to reconcile myself to a more Taoist and less Zoroastrian view of the world. Balance, not victory.

What else… I sure as heck loved Scratch and Sniff stickers! I had a teacher who gave out stickers if you did well on a spelling test, and so the sticker collection in the back of my spelling notebook was not just fun, it was a trophy room.

And I had a lot of stickers, bright lad that I was. But you had to get a perfect score, 10/10, to get a Scratch and Sniff sticker, and that was rarer for me because I always made some little dumb mistake on one answer, like not forming my letters right or mishearing the word or the like.

So my Scratch and Sniff collection was my Gold Medal trophy room. And they were just plain fun, too. You got a little reward every time you scratched one.

I scratched my strawberry one so much that I basically shredded it.

A lot of the stuff on the list passed me by, though. I never played Oregon Trail, presumably because I was a Canadian kid. I never had a Trapper Keeper. I never wore British Knights or L. A. Gear sneakers.

And I watched Double Dare exactly once, and thought it was completely horrible. A total nightmare. So I mostly ignored it and all its clones.

But I definitely watched 3-2-1 Contact (but not for the Bloodhound Gang, they were lame) and Square One Television (yes, entirely for Mathnet, the rest of the show was laaaaaaame). I played in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and watched a ton of the Cosby Show. I drank New York Seltzer (though I preferred Koala)and blew on my NES cartridges to get them to work. I remember the dark day of the Challenger explosion (I watched it happen on Canada AM, poor little me) and the phenomenally awesome day the Berlin Wall came down. I remember trying to figure out why everyone was watched the Baby Jessica rescue (not that it wasn’t important, by why her, why now? That kind of thing happens all the time) and being extremely impressed by the idea of Hands Across America while also being pretty sure they could not pull it off (and they didn’t, but it was still a wonderful and amazing thing to see). I collected Garbage Pail Kids cards and got told to Just Say No, or something a lot like it, so very, very, very many times.

I am serious. If you grew up in the 80’s and you didn’t know drugs were bad, mmmkay, then you lived under a very large rock.

And the only reason I don’t remember being traumatized by the death of Optimus Prime in the eighties was that I didn’t get to see the movie until the nineties, and it traumatized me then.

It still does, honestly.

And you know, looking over the list, while I was only directed involved with 24 of the things, I was aware of all but 7 of them at the time.

So maybe I got a passing grade on the 80’s after all.