It's Been a Month
Almost exactly a month to the day since I last sat down to write something without giving it too much thought beyond saying "I should write something" like the Persona 5 kid every time you press the Start button. This isn't going to be nearly as interesting as Persona 5, but it's 10 pm on November 6th and I'm listening to Valhalla, Definitely, a thing I didn't know existed until today.
Not the World/Inferno Friendship Society as a whole, mind you, no I was introduced to them about... twenty years ago, actually. Jesus. Made a mad dash down to North/Six for Hallowmas, and now neither of those things exist anymore, which is a thing to think about if you feel like getting really maudlin about our mortality and the transitory nature of existence but I fuckin' don't right now. Jack Terricloth might be dead now but I'm not and I'll carry around a little bit of his spirit with me, especially on a day like today when, well...
When the country proved me right. I don't particularly like being right about things, because it seems like every time I'm right about something, it's a bad something that I'm right about. I also don't want to sink into despair or be a doomsayer or anything like that, because it seems like an exhausting way to live. I've had my despair, thank you, and I've somehow learned to live with it, and it does not dominate my life in the ways that it used to. There's still art in the world and there's still music, and sometimes that's enough to get me through.
Last time I put words on this website it was about my son getting older along with me getting older, and I wrote that we're marching towards oblivion and I suppose you could take that as a dark outlook on things but I don't know if oblivion is as bad as it gets made out to be sometimes. Is that nihilism? I dunno, I'm not in any hurry to interrogate the thought, nor am I in any particular hurry to get to the promised land of oblivion. There's things to do and see and read and live and experience along the way, and some of them will be nice and some of them will be wretched and I will spend some time crying, probably, along the way.
You might have noticed by now that none of this is really hanging together as an essay or anything, and is more like various fragments of thought thrown at a text box in an attempt to justify having a blog at all, and you'd be right. If I were James Joyce this would be profound, but I'm not James Joyce (not nearly into farting as much as he was, for starters) so I'm afraid it's just me stretching my syntactical muscles and reminding myself how grammar works and how keyboards make letters appear on a screen. Is this helping me in any way? I don't know, but I don't think it needs to.
There's only a few songs left on this World/Inferno album, which means that I'm probably going to wrap up. I didn't start this blog with the intent of writing until the music stops, but between you, me, and the ghosts that haunt my psyche, it's as good a way as any to mark the time out and decide when I'm finished with this whatever-it-is.
There is a part of me that really wants to talk about the Election (United States, mind you, I don't have any experience with others) but I think I'm good on that. One more person saying "Yeah, this is pretty much how I thought it'd go," and then listing off the various clues that led me to that preemptive conclusion - we're supporting a genocide, we're rehabilitating our own war criminals in real-time, the wealthy will never know consequence, we're an empire in decline etc etc etc - it doesn't help anything. At the end of the day I still dragged my ass out of bed. World kept turning, bills still gotta be paid, had to go to work. Life went on, continues, in fact, to go on, without asking me whether or not it should.
Probably for the best that it doesn't ask me, I've been known to give bad advice now and again.
Album's over, guess we're done here. Thanks, Jack.
