I am back from my mental sabbitical. My wanderings in the desert are over again for a bit. My beard is dusty, hair long and disheveled, teeth a bit more smoked yellow. Other than a few slow healing wounds in my ego, I am basically back from, out of, and crawling away from.

Lucky for me, I had a few people around to keep me from tumbling down into a serious abyss... having an artistic temperament -- in my case, one of a rather morose, pensive nature puncuated by bursts of myth motored mania, is part of why no one should ever want to be an artist. There is a curse that comes with this magic power. A darkside unseen.... anyways, what can one say about getting really depressed? Everyone goes through this to some degree. I seldom read of artists who don't suffer from some sort of meloncholia, as well as certain illusions of granduer (however small). The pain I read of in their biographies is somehow noble and earned in the myth of them that comes down in the texts and the tales. I am sure they didn't enjoy that particular aspect of their life any more than I enjoy them in mine.

So, if I have been remiss . . . sorry. I am just this week starting to feel like I will keep going on in the world. Suicidal ideations are so banal. I always think people who kill themselves are a waste; like they went with one small view of the world and let it kill them. They define themselves as a job they lose, or a woman they have . . . I do this too.

I think the honest way to see any life is to look at not just the person, but the influences that have given rise to the person, and those which are presently creating the person's persona; no one is alive for simply the moment it takes for them to offend me, no matter how much my hot head seems to think this is so on some days. Not even me. I had high expectations for myself that I have failed to meet. Now, I am unsure if the bigger curse was not having the expectations in the first place, rather than their not coming true.

I am what I am and it isn't perfect, though it is by no means without a worth that most people perceive if they know me at all. I am not great at anything I suppose. I write well, at times, but I am not a conventional success at anything at all. I seldom send anything off to be published. Even my most strong bits of prose are basically unpublished. The blog hardly counts.

Or if the blog does count, then I am unsure of how it fits in.

What have I been doing for this last month? The only good I have done is reading. Mostly, I just kind of stared off feeling rather lost, like I had been cut off from the jokester I had been writing from since July. The reading was mostly Tolkein; I read from the hobbit to the return of the king, some if Silmarillion. The myths there somehow comforted me. Mostly they helped me to forget who I was and what has been happening to me.

Forgetting is a shitty way to get rid of a problem, of course, because they only respond to confrontation. I forget this when I am weak, and start to feel like I can do nothing to stop the assaults of anxiety and depression. A sickly child grows up into a pain bag and wants to kill himself before his time. How boring.

I used to love to read stories about people like me, which is my favorite irony about being a tortured artist. Once these stories gave me a way of looking at myself and my life from a very different set of standards than one might expect from a white boy from a small town in the middle of a nowhere. Now? They seem as whiny and small minded as I feel like I am.

So, we'll see what happens from here on out.