I'm writing for the same reason people get married or drink beer. There's nothing else to do. Not for me, at least. The psychology teacher during my first semester at Grossmont Community College said a lot of students experience a depressive illness around the winter. So it's been for me many times and in getting out of 2018 and stepping into 2019. I hide it as best I can from my daughter, who lives with me. I take four pills a day for depression and anxiety. Without them everything would be 10 times worse -- a bleak, black hellscape. Forgive me, but there's no nice way to say you'd be fucked.
The bright spots are my daughter, Gabby, writing me notes saying "Best Dad ever!" or watching my son, Max, wrestle or the friend who contacted me through Facebook Messenger, saying, "If you ever need a friend, call me at ________." I only took him up on that once. It was when I was living in Liberty Apartments in druggie pod of artists, pornographers, bohemians, musicians and criminals. But this person out somewhere else, invited me to his family home and there's solace in that.
It's cool knowing some people just exist whether you see them daily or not because the thing is I'm sick of trump and tweets (not just from trump, but from many except when they're cool and then I love them) and how the rich keep the middle class content, albeit tenuously, so they don't have to care about poor people, cults (political and religious), social media, misunderstandings, Gucci dressed shoppers and whores. I saw a picture of a woman on a dating app on my iPhone. We were said to be 86% compatible. She wore a sweat shirt that read "Trump Girl" and I imagined the ugliness inside her heart.
There's my real life and my Facebook life and they're not the same thing. In Facebookland, people take selfies of themselves in Sweeden, South Africa and Dutch Amsterdam, their kids always make the honor roll and they have the most loving relationships with their significant others, the kind of deep love expressions that get a shitload of "likes." Like every technological advancement -- television, is a big one --- Facebook is a filtered representation of life, not life itself. Fakebook, you might call it, but hell, I use it like I use television and my blog; it's cool.
Actually, one of my favorite Facebook friends is about as close to real as you can get on a digital communication medium. For my own selfish reasons, I love her posts about sleeping in her mini-van, wrangling for government checks, her tracphone, the cops breaking up houseless communities in parks, under bridges and in discount city parking lots, incompetent lawyers and searching for a place where a woman can squat & piss in the night. She's out there amid the casting southwest sun and mounds of snow. She faithfully reads this blog, circumventing the time and distance between us.
I don't know, I feel sometimes like I've been walking 40 years in a fucking wilderness, but it's all right. I may never get out of it, but can I find joy or happiness within that reality? Well I sure gotta keep trying. I have my kids. Where would they be if I gave up? I pray for them. I pray for the gal in the Southwest U.S. I know what some of you are thinking. Believing in God? Why don't you believe in Santa Claus & the Easter bunny? But I think that's a fallacious analogy. How do you put children's characters on the same plane with a higher moral power in the universe?
Where the hell is anybody in this whole thing, really? I don't know. But happy or sad, minuscule in the universe, I'm gonna keep writing junk. Some representation of myself in the clusterfuck, this digital wilderness.
"I Say a Little Prayer" -- Aretha Franklin