so I’ve just woken up and instead of clambering to my phone and scrolling through the sadness of the day.
I’m here typing for you all.
which is a nice change of pace, the monastic ritual of getting ready to write. The making of the tea, orange pekoe, milk, one lump of sugar. The staring out the window at the wild and wet Douglas Fir’s of the pacific northwest as the mind starts to wake up and finally, the sitting down to type, with no thoughts in my head or any idea how these entries will go.
the form they will take unknown.
Sadness is on my mind today. Not to say I am literally sad, but just the idea of sadness and specifically the contagious nature of mass sadness. The last few years have been objectively terrible for a lot of people. I number myself among them. Even though I have accomplished things, one of them, the herculean task of directing a movie during a pandemic, there has been great sadness in my life.
Hardships, some personal, but mostly this shared collective sadness, this dull constant melancholia shared by everyone I know, that we are somehow missing out on something, or that the good days are behind us and ahead of us lies monsters beyond imagination, their dark tentacles with unseeable and unknowable ends, wrapping themselves around our future.
so it’s like fuck it. lets waltz while the world burns.
or at least that’s the generally sense I get from people my age and younger. The sadness has produced this mass apathy. Not even apathy, more like the sort of crazed hysteria of a manic street preacher. “The end is nigh!” we scream “lets drink too much, and fuck people we don’t care for!”
repent you sins.
cosmically, of course, this is all irrelevant. So if we all rot away in a biblical plague or if we are all melted down into radioactive jelly in the nuclear holocaust, it will be as if we were never here. The planet will forget that we ever made carparks, or strip clubs or the metaverse, and like breaking up with a graceful lover, she will continue on, in the way she always had, without us.
and this is what I concentrate on when the baboons of doom bang their monkey paws on my heart, weakening me with doubt and fear of what will come. What settles me is that in the grand narrative of time, we are insignificant.
comically this also leads to apathy, just a kind of euphoric healthy detachment from news of the day. “The end is nigh!” you can scream “Let’s drink responsibly and love people we care for!”
anyway, lets stop here for now
-A
morning mourning
fuck it, lets waltz while the world burns is definitely making an appearance in my journal
Live for as long as you can, love as much as you can. We're all going to die, make the journey to the grave as loving as you can.