Day 77: Fissures

Wait, where am I? What year is this? I remember only a blinding light, a rushing sensation - and pain, indescribable pain. Hold on... Yes, it's... coming back to me. I have journeyed here from the future. My lifeforce ebbs away. Travelling back enacted a great price. I have only minutes before my mind and body crumble. I have been sent to warn you. That thing you are about to do. Do not do it. Please. Do not do it. In the future from which I was sent you doing the thing you are about to do sets in place a chain of events that culminates in a great and terrible tragedy a year from now. But if you act immediately you can change the timeline. My world will cease to exist, but the universal horror that was unleashed will be reversed. My people's lives are but a small price to pay to prevent the darkness, the bloodshed. I only give thanks that I was able to arrive here, in the year 2017, to tell you these things. You do not have much time, but you have some time. You must-

-What's that? It is the year 2018? Oh, no. Oh, God, no. The machine must have malfunctioned. It is too late. The evil cannot be undone. The cracks open even now. The fissures spew forth their agents of torment. The horror begi-- Oh, Christ. I feel myself fading. Oh, it hurts. Ohhhh how it hur...

...

...

Hey there. That's just the introduction I've been doing every post for a while now, as I'm sure you're aware. It's weird, I know, but it's my thing. I like it.

Anyway.

Wet streets outside my window. The smell of rain. Away down the hill, over the rooftops, the nightclub's solitary searchlight clawing at the sky.

I was useless at work today. I was so tired. I snoozed as long as possible this morning, eventually rolled over in a daze and wrenched myself up, my hamstrings tight and throbbing, stood in the shower, somehow made the bus, somehow got to work.

I guess it's nice to be like this though because I'm pushing myself, because I'm holding down a job and blogging daily and trying to maintain the bare bones of a social life, rather than because I'm drunk constantly, or because my mental health is bad.

I mean, my mental health hasn't been great. I've been feeling a bit blank of late, a bit empty. Like I go down to the well of creativity and find the well has an inch of turbid water on the bottom with a decomposing rat floating on the surface, as I think that saying goes.

But it's important, I reckon, to work on separating reality from my opinions about reality. Being tired is not suffering. Going through a trough on the necessarily undulating ocean of creativity is not suffering. Feeling blank, even, is not suffering, if that is what reality truly brings.

It is the thoughts about these things not being right, not being fair, being somehow a sign of my weakness or lack of ability or unsuitability for writing that is the suffering. And I can't do anything about the essential tiredness or the ebb and flow of inspiration or whatever life brings, but I can do something about my opinions about these things.

Not that I can stop them once the thoughts have arisen. And getting worked up about them is just more suffering. They are just more of that essential reality to be accepted, to not be clung to. But it is worth getting used to sensing them, their shape, their taste, their specific emotional valence, and when I notice them arising to remind myself that they are not truth, but value judgements placed on truth.

There is what happens. And there is what you think about what happens. And the two are not the same.

So all is as it should be, then. I've got to go pass out now, and rest up for another day of it tomorrow, but that's where I'm at. All is as it should be. All is good, and bad, and everything in between - and that, it turns out, is all good.

Take care x