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Bad Sad Blog, #1

November 25, 2011             Sinclair Terrace, S. Orange NJ                      5:16 am

Can’t sleep.  Wracked with grief. 

So, I thought I would talk about my idea,, which came to me as I lay in my squalid little litter in the den, waiting for the blue pill to do its work.

 

I’m wondering, since I’ve been advised to write, write, write, if I could try to get past my aversion to the term ‘blog’ (which I continue to insist sounds like a moist nasal obstruction one might remove by sneezing emphatically), and see if I can set up a blog site (tentatively titled ‘Bad Sad Blog’, to use as a kind of dumping ground/autopsy lab, for all the many lurid and unfortunate things with which my life seems, now, to be overstocked.  I feel, sometimes, as though I’m suffocating with sadness – last night, a propos of what, I’ve forgotten, I descended once again into one of those truly frightening crying jags, when I thought I would begin vomiting woe, or that I would suffocate because, heaving and groaning, I couldn’t seem to inhale.  I might as well have been giving birth, through my mouth, to some dark, wet, hairy thing that’s been patiently growing inside me for decades, like a partially ingested twin I’ve heard some people discover they’ve been carrying with them, behind their sternums, all their lives. 

Writing might be better.  I don’t really know.  I can’t seem to sleep anyway, and I’m not quite ready to take another sliver of blue pill just yet.  And, even if I do actually (against all probability) manage to arrange some sort of permanent platform for this indecent and immodest, shamefully unmasculine display of emotion, it occurs to me that, for whoever blunders into this hall of distorted memory, there really are no dependable guarantees.  I may, on the one hand, be using these ruminations like bits of hand-twisted cord, to fashion a line with which to pull myself out of this awful place in which I find myself.  On the other hand,, that line may just as well come to serve another function.  The knot always goes on the left, under the jaw.

So (imagining this to be some ad hoc welcome mat for the incautious), come right in.  Climb the winding, rickety stairs, to the high platform overlooking the local landscape (can you see your house from here?), get your damp vinyl cushion firmly under you, and take a deep breath.  We’re at the top of a wild, slick, perhaps ultimately unsafe water slide, and there’s really no telling what we’ll all see, what jolts we’ll encounter, whirring along, twisting down and around, and heading, inevitably, into the unattractive, saline accumulation at the bottom.   You’ll be safer than you think.  I’m going first.


©  2011    Walter Zimmerman