Space

Nothing comes to mind. Nothing compels me to write. I cannot grab hold of a topic to trigger this morning’s blog post. I tried the news, but it was either dull or disturbing; not a single topic lit an ember in me that might grow into at least of few flames. So here I sit, feeling ill-at-ease with myself. I do not know this man who sits before the computer screen, looking blankly at the white glow of an empty computer screen. He is not someone I’ve met before. No, he is a stranger, an intruder who mistakenly entered my context.

Apparently, I do not care that an intruder is in my space. I feel surly and annoyed, but not sufficiently angry to strike out at the stranger in my place. But I will say unpleasant things to him. And I will invite him to get out of my house, out of my space, out of my life. I have no room in my life for an empty-headed clone. Even when I tell him, he looks back at me with a vacant stare, as if he does not hear a word I say. By the way, I say the words silently, lest mi novia hears me, confirming for her that I have lost my mind.

Something is finally creeping into my consciousness. But it, too, surprises me with its oddity. I feel my own consciousness, but I feel it as if I were experiencing it from considerable vertical distance. Looking down at my emotional state, as it were. And I see the stringy remnants of emotions, the bulk of their constituent parts dry and shriveled and looking for all the world like shards of over-dry beef jerky. Judging from the volume of remains I see below me, there was a massive amount of emotion down there, but it has withered into callous disregard. Uncaring. As if nothing matters. Perhaps nothing matters. And that is the hideous message arising from my empty page and empty mind this morning.

That can’t be right, can it? Life is just behaving like a tease, right? Or is it Eternity that is behaving so badly? It is impossible to tell, because neither can be fully understood; they represent complexity far beyond the scope of physics or psychology. As expansive and powerful as our minds might be, they are simply incapable of understanding the complexity of Everything. And Everything truly is complex; I would equate it to trillions and trillions and trillions of layers of parallel cells interspersed with trillions and trillions and trillions of layers of perpendicular cells interspersed with equal numbers of cells at 1 degree increments of offset. And multiple that by an exponent a billion times larger than the largest known number, multiplied a hundred-billion-fold. And that’s just a start.

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I loathe being at a loss—not for words, but for ideas! Something to think about, whether deeply or in passing. When the ideas simply are not there, I feel blank. I sense my value is considerably less than a torn piece of wet cardboard. That is unpleasant. Being at a loss for words is troubling, too, of course. Words probably constitute 99 percent of whatever value I might have as a human being. Touch might represent another half a percent. And fractional slivers, barely measurable, could be constituted by unknown “other” stuff. I am not alone in where my value is stored. Almost everyone else is in a similar situation. What we say matters enormously. Even when we say virtually nothing. When our silence suggests we do not acknowledge jour own emotions. Ach, it’s a long, convoluted thought process that got me here, which is essentially nowhere.

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I strung beads yesterday. The physical result of my bead-stringing is nothing to celebrate; even with all the colors, it is rather bland. But the mental result is…curious. I expected stringing beads to be like an injection of morphine—that it would eliminate or mask the pain and leave me mellow in the extreme. It did neither. I finished stringing beads and was disappointed in myself for thinking the end product was not sufficiently attractive. And for feeling tense, as if I were ready to spring. But that pent-up energy fizzled, too. My mind never “cleared,” either. Every bead I added to the string seemed to represent another nagging thought that had been buried beneath the surface of my brain…but that now was exposed and becoming more energetic.

I may try it again today. Perhaps I should begin the process is a somewhat different frame of mind.

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We’ve been watching a series, Blood, on Acorn TV. The series has grown on me. Initially, I was not impressed, but by the second or third episode of the first season, it has me. It is set in a semi-rural village in Ireland, with a family whose patriarch has his demons (and, it turns out, so do most of the rest). Like so many other stories, there is a significant amount of “stuff” that’s truly improbable. But I can forgive that. Fantasy, after all, is imagination. This series is not fantasy, by the way. It is drama, with more than a little intrigue and action thrown in.

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There’s something under my skin that just won’t let me keep writing this morning. I hope whatever it is disappears during the course of the rest of the day.