A Dilemma

X-Boxing for 9 straight hours.

Staying up really late, drinkin' and tokin' and yellin' real loud over the ear-bleedingly thunderous club music.

Heroin. Oxycontin. Percocet.

Net porn. (Porn, period.) (Or, if you're into that sort of thing, Period Porn--like, daguerrotype-based stuff.)

Pizza.

All of these things? Things that you enjoy, but which don't make you feel good.

Now:

Exercise.

Salads as entrees.

Sitting down and writing that novel.

Reading your way through the Moralia of Plutarch.

Learning another language.

All of these things? Things that you fucking hate doing, but which make you feel really good.

Why is it, pray, that the things that we enjoy are almost invariably bad for us, while the things that we agonize our way through are all too often good for us? It's not a simple matter of instant gratification versus long-term payoff, since one who lives entirely for the moment is a self-destructive fool, but one who lives entirely oriented towards the future is losing precious moments of life that could be better spent in a more 'present' state of mind/body.

I think that the reason why we love sex is because it's one of the few things that feels good at the time and (STDs and emotional psychos aside) is good for us as well.

Do we live for the now or the then? If we live for the now, the then will never happen--the problem with living each day as if it were your last is that there is no more certain self-fulfilling prophecy. ("Hey, officer! Go fuck yourself and your pussy-ass costume! Do those come in men's versions? Yeah, that's right, pull out your gun--you ain't got the balls to use it!" And hello to the morgue attendants.) But to live for tomorrow is to live for a day that will never come, as the Buddha probably said on one of those days he was just phoning it in.

I know, alas, what I should be doing with my time/energy/life. I also know what I want to do with my time/energy/life. But one produces ennui, and the other guilt. I'm sure that somewhere out there, there's someone who can flip those emotions around to their positive equivalents, and to that person, let me just say: Fuck you and never cross my path unarmed.

Pleasure or progress. Enjoyment or achievement. Not an easy choice to make, and don't tell me to 'balance the two, silly,' because real achievement takes a hella lotta time and effort--Milton didn't write Paradise Lost whilst dicking around on the clavichord. ("But he was blind," you say. "Ray Charles? Stevie Wonder? Get a clue," I reply.) Devotion is the only path to achievement, and it involves a powerful sacrifice of pleasure. And yet, and yet, and yet--

I have no conclusion to all this. Hence the title--it's a dilemma, and there is no good answer. I'd continue to ponder, but as that's neither pleasurable nor productive, I would appear to be screwing myself twice over in doing so.

And people wonder why I'm generally saturnine.

Trainspotting

The life of a junkie is no damned fun, lemme tell ya.

Those of you who know me, know that I have a quite-controllable case of chronic depression. Nothing that can't be maintained with diet, exercise (oh, most definitely exercise), and a daily regimen of the finer products of Wyeth and GlaxoSmithKline. But in the latter condition lies the rub. I need that stuff. Badly. The fact is, my brain don't quite work right all the time. (Allow me to compare it to a Jaguar--when it works, oh my God does it work beautifully. But it also spends an uncomfortable amount of time in the shop.) But I've got, as they say, a handle on it. I'm not self-pitying about this; we've all got our own row to hoe, and while some may be easier than mine, most are not. God gives us each a little Special Something just to remind us that, while He loves us, He's a very dysfunctional partner. Still--diet, exercise, drugs, and I'm basically cool.

But I need those drugs. I am, folks, an addict. A legal, medical-insurance-subsidized one, to be sure (and don't think I'm not thrilled about the subsidy--goodness me, but the thought of having to pay for my pills...to have to choose between them and, say, food and shelter...um...yeah, I don't want to go down that road of thought--it leads nowhere good, to judge by the bleached bones that litter the highway--I think that was Sylvia Plath's femur we just passed! Anyway--)

Point is, I forget, sometimes, that I'm a junkie. And when I forget, I get careless. Doesn't happen too often. And the reason it doesn't happen too often, is that when I get careless--when I forget, say, to take my meds at the end of a harried day and I just want to get into bed...

Yeah, the next day? Not so much fun. Kinda the opposite. And when that day happens to be Thanksgiving? A day when you're surrounded by loved ones and you don't want to spoil their good time and inwardly you're a shrieking void of withdrawal-based anxiety? Even more the opposite--pushing the edge of that other side from 'fun.' Urgh. And oh how I wish this were a hypothetical instead of a 'How I Spent My Thanksgiving Break' confessional.

Did I lose it? Mais non--like I said, I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm one who at my worst of worst times has never missed a day of work, or failed to get out of bed, or succumbed to that dark temptation to End It All. (Suicide, if nothing else, is so utterly rude that, if for no other reason, I find it repugnant.) No, I did what we lucky ones do--not that we feel lucky at the time, mind--I sucked it up and carried through and rode it out. And when, later that evening, I confessed to a few people what I'd been going through, they were shocked--I'd shown no signs of being even slightly disturbed. (Not to creep you out, but those of us with mood disorders and other lesser forms of Icky-Brain-Syndrome--we're usually really good at covering it. Chances are, you know people who are, beneath the smile, absolutely batshit, and have just learned to hide it. OK, so yeah, that did creep you out. Sorry. Still, I say this because when lunatics crack and do horrible things, we all tend to 'tsk' and say "Couldn't someone have seen this coming?" As someone who felt as bad as I did and gave no sign of it to people who know me really well, let me just say, "No, probably not.")

I managed. I dealt. But it was a reminder not to forget. Chronic depression, alas, is like diabetes--you can treat it, you can hold it in place, you can push it to one side of your life--but you must respect that it's part of you, because only by respecting it, can you defang it. I forgot that this week, to my cost.

Remind me not to do that again, m'kay?

Fulminator's Block

Several folks have pointed out recently that my attitude of responsibility towards my blogging has been roughly that of our current administration's towards black gay Muslim single-parents. (Which would suck as a demographic to belong to, wouldn't it?) This is true, but what with the writers' strike, I suppose I'll have less to do with my evenings when they run out of backlogged episodes of House M.D. in a few weeks, so I should just suck it up and get back into the game. I'd be lying, though, if I said that the thought wasn't a little tiring--I'm nearing the end of a semester that has, for various reasons, just kicked my ass--job applications, prepping two new courses (I mean really, what the hell do I know about poetry, when it comes right down to it?), a general seasonal malaise, and a few other personal matters that approach the trivial, leading me nicely into the segue of: But you didn't come here to hear me bitch about my life.

Truth is, though, mid-way through the Thanksgiving holiday, I'm not finding myself inclined to bitch about much else. The world seems to run on cycles, and we're most definitely in a trough at the present. Bush et al. haven't done anything truly revolting recently--though whisper the word "Iran" to me with enough portentousness and yeah, you can see a little cold sweat break out on my forehead. (Somewhere in me the skeptic says that it won't happen, that expansion into a second national war. Bush has no capital, and really, all he has to do to make something unpopular is to get Cheney to say that he's in favor of it. I just can't see the Congress voting him a blank check on this one. Bottom line: to invade Iran, we'd need to reinstitute the draft. Ain't Gonna Happen, that. But then, somewhere in me, the cynic says 'Yeah, you go ahead with that rosey picture. See where that gets you.' I hate that guy, mostly because he's right just a little too often.) It occurs to me that maybe the reason the Bushies have been so silent of late is because of the Writers' Strike--so much of this administration has been fictional (badly plotted, terrible dialogue, to be sure--but still, you can see the strings and pulleys of forced narrative), maybe they've lost their script-writers to the picket-lines. Without these merry elves to tell them what to do or say in some kind of plausible way, they've got nothing to fall back on but their own abilities of improvisation. And if you've ever seen Bush at a press conference, you know just how far those'll get you.

So maybe the reason they're quiet these days is because the scribblers who made up this terrible, unfunny farce have left the building. If so, I can only hope the strike goes on for months. About 11 more months, to be exact. Sure, I'm jonesing for new episodes of The Daily Show, but if it means silence from On High, I'm willing to revisit my Complete Works of Dickens during the interim...