this certain hour of the day is here

and there’s another certain hour ahead after it.

it’s 64 degrees outside, but you’re not. terrorized by the quiet phone. afraid of any kind of relay, really. someone’s always expecting something, and you’re not ever up to it, anymore.

even christ only fell down thrice, and never permanently. is your predicament conditional, or has a new stench of normalcy attached itself to your toppling incontinence? indeed, you’re oh-so hoof over tea kettle, jostling from forever and nigh-on everywhere into something sharper, frailer, somber-er and more permeable.

need i add

that the materiality of the signifier, let alone the materiality of my being-in-my-own-skin, is running rampant over my conscious mind and libidinal etcetera? i suppose that goes without saying. constantly i feel more like a figure in a painting, or like a statuette, than i feel like an acting subject.

yeah, couple that feeling with some occult/demonic/lsd vibes by way of gnarly flashbacks and induced rewatchings of The Exorcist. i end up contemplating long-forgotten halfbacks and waiting out the afternoon impatiently.

there’s no psychopharmaceutical antidote to this, i don’t think. this is a behavioral struggle over the stakes of me and my turkey flesh. i hope that i am allowed to represent myself in this derby. i am confident that i have a fool for a client.

the tourney of autobio and memory, sonics

1. the same Grand Funk lp has been sitting unplayed for better than a week, now.
2. the afternoons last longer on this side of the eastern time zone.
3. the evenings last like afternoons.
4. a very good friend passed through town today, and i was unable to answer her call for a visit. agoraphobia is new to me, but it’s not new to me to feel attached to my home floorboards as though they were the slots for my slotcar. i would make a good ascetic-cum-animist with my nightmarish fantasies of a social-psycho geography that’s at once infectious and already infected. aren’t they as real as other, better-recognized demons?

walking to the killing

All told, I’ve lived in Michigan for about a year now.

Today, my wife asked me to walk her to work, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she wasn’t motivated by a desire to leave me alone in the house for as little time as possible. It takes a lot of mercy to endure my partnership, these days. Mercy and human kindness.

I am horrified that I radiate so much anguish and that i bear the sloppy, largely silent manner of someone who is winnowing away. Daily I observe, as even my memories winnow away from me.

After the walk, I took solace in my most beloved of contempo television, AMC’s The Killing.

Now I’m blogging at you, because blogging is back. On my walk I twice passed a dude who played jazz guitar atop a unicycle. It didn’t even evoke my usual, guttural contempt so much as remind me that I live every day like a statuette of a diver in somebody’s aquarium. I don’t blame God or drugs. I always blame myself, but I do it from enough diverse perspectives that the whole business still holds my interest.

Being depressed is not like listening exclusively to Grateful Dead bootlegs, despite a certain comparable monotony. It’s more like just winnowing-the-hell away. These days, just smelling something distinctive seems like sensory overload. Everything but crime genre and my merciful wife scares the shit out of me. I’ve fallen out of contact with many, many friends — even as they bend over backwards in attempts to reach out to me. Others have already written me off, be it angrily or despondently.

Moons and people wane. When does the waxing begin again? Will it be before or after the cold sesame noodles that I so stupidly over-salted?

If You Wanna Scream, Scream With Me

This is an odd time to try to resurrect le Prisonship. It’s odd to opt for generalist blogging in the microblog-o era, and it’s odd for me to wanna churn out chunks of worthy reportage during a time in which my will to evoke and/or characterize anything is at an all-time low.

But I continue to conflate penance with progress, shame with being and writing with “self”-realization (sic.) Also, I’ve done a lot of things wrong in my life. I want to write in honor of everybody, which is to say in honor of all the people I feel I’ve wronged. Like any other catholic corpse, I am personally responsible for the agony of Christ.

There’d be nothing wrong or unnatural about the people I’ve wronged the most presuming that they know me best. Those self-same people probably’d be happy to hear of my depression and subsequent careening off the well-trod tracks of academic and activist making-do, and my having tumbled so slapstick-uh-ly, mouth-first into a Pyrrhic regimen of psychotherapeutics, zennish meditation efforts and strength conditioning. They would be rigidly self-satisfied to hear of my career-best lethargy.

It’s a good time for anybody who wished some karmic vengeance on me, or those who were content to watch me string the rosary beads with which to hang myself. But I also think it’s a good time to start blathering on le Prisonship again.

I am horrified of telephones and emails. I run away from easy opportunities to be with people whom I love and miss. I am withdrawn, in a city where I’ve failed to really make friends or even look for ’em.  It’s a recipe for shit, I tell ya. I have a list of unpaid debts and overdue regrets that could choke a great white shark. They haunt me and exact revenge by running my life through generalized guilt and intermittent panic spikes. Other times they beat me into psychic submission, the closest I’ve ever come to succumbing to a real, live sleeper hold. I used to think it’d be sexy, submission. But now it feels more like abuse.

I can barely keep a journal or keep up with my cognitive-behavioral assignments. It’s a victory when I don’t indefinitely postpone exercise, let alone when I drag myself into the New Age gates in search of meditation tactics worth plundering. Sometimes when I play records, I get scared. There is a sweeping winnowing, happening now. I hope my antagonists, old friends, enjoy it all.

I work hard to eat three meals a day, and to step out of the house and into the day. I cower behind crime novels, even kinda shunning politics at the moment. I am withdrawn and I am winnowing, despite everybody’s best motherfucking intention-fuckings. Tra-la-la. The Prisonship has resumed.