Sometimes I get into these funks.
My face is shoved into a corner, and that broad insatiable appetite for the kind of experiences that extend into infinity is still there... it is just to my back, all of it; and I am facing this corner, and it looks like the end of the line. But all I have to do is turn around, and there is everything, all of it, always- laid out before me as far as my heart and eyes and imagination can reach.
I always forget that it's just as simple as 'turning around'.
I woke up today, ready to ease myself slowly out of this 'sitting around' syndrome of mine. I made a list of things to do, and looked at it. I washed some dishes. I thought about getting out of the funk. It was like telling a marble to roll uphill, and the marble saying 'alright'. And then just sitting there. Because it's a fucking marble at the bottom of a hill.
I had been planning on going into the city in an effort to get out and about, maybe go shopping and meet up with some friends. 1pm rolls past and I am still sitting in my pajamas in my bed playing guitar and smoking cigarettes.
I think about it some and try to figure out whether or not I'm actually depressed. It's strange, because I know I have all the tell-tale 'signs' of it... but I'm pretty sure I'm not. I don't feel bummed out at all. Sometimes I feel a little bemused. Sometimes I giggle and sigh about the fact that I feel this weird lack of motivation, but I know it will pass. I suppose I'm missing one crucial symptom of depression- the notion that there is no end in sight to this 'low' thing.
Boston Nick calls and asks if I want to grab lunch, and I say 'sure'. This gives me some motivation to get up and dressed, so I throw on a maroon sweater and brown curduroy pants, my good-luck paisley bandana tying back the hair, and think to myself, 'portable bed of comfort'.
It's good to hang out with Nick, he's good peoples. We hit up the Pleasant Cafe in south Boston off W. Roxbury and the place is great, the ceilings are tinted orange like the extinguished butt of a cigarette from 60 years of smoke-filled cafe-lingering. Our waitress had on these huge thick glasses with the glasses-holder necklace thing and big, thick green plastic rims. I was envious, really because no one could pull that off but her. There's one customer in the place, an old leathery looking guy in the booth in front of us, who looks at me occasionally shooting me dagger looks, I'm not sure why but here he is poking his head this way and that around Nick's shoulders (Nick's a pretty big guy).
I had a great cup of coffee, the nostalgic kind that isn't good in the connoisseurial sense, but very good in the 'nothing like diner coffee' sense. It was the kind of cup of coffee that has the distinctive metal/water taste of being brewed in an old, old brewer and served in a mug that has served coffee for much longer than I, or my mother have been alive.
Other places to get good cups of coffee: (Los Angeles) The Pantry. Canter's. Roscoe's. (Texas) Ole' South.
Nick took me to one of the many fantastic little tiny bookstores in Boston, I think we spent a good three hours there, and it was smaller than my house- with the classic basement-piled-to-the-floor-boards with old books.
All small used bookstores are fun, with their unique atmospheres and quirky bookstore sales clerks with their own hidden agendas. But something beautiful about Boston, in all it's longevity, rich intellectual history and many many colleges- is that you can find things like 150 year old copies of Shakespeare's plays. For $2.
I found a gem of a book- called "Elbert Hubbard's Scrapbook." The book is handbound, beautiful handmade paper and tied with a linen ribbon that is characteristic of Hubbards press. The book was published in 1923, 8 years after Elbert Hubbard and his wife died on the sinking Lucitania off the port of New York City after being torpedoed by a German submarine called 'unterseeboat tventy', or something like that.
Of course I didn't know who the hell Elbert Hubbard was. It doesn't matter much either- but the guy was obsessively well-read, and the scrapbook is a collection of his favorite passages, never intended to be published, and put together for his own personal musing. It's like the 1920s literary equivalent of Elliott Smith's 'A Basement on a Hill'
When I got home, I read a few pages of it- excerpts from everything from Kipling to H.G. Wells to Mary Shelley to Nietzche to Galileo to who-knows-what. It's fantastic food for thought. I did a little research on the guy and found out he had a MYSPACE profile... who makes profiles for all these dead people anyway... point being, he is best known for an essay published in his magazine called 'Message to Garcia' (which is posted as a blog on his page)
Anyway 'Message to Garcia' is pretty good, but more profound to me were the coincidental synchronicities between the condition described in the essay, and my current 'ho-hum' state of mind. The essay is about the person who just 'does it'. Whatever the opposite of the unmotivated person is. The person who just delivers the message to Garcia, does what needs to be done, and doesn't think twice. I thought it was marvelously accidental that my day would begin by an inability to get out of bed and then end, from the most random source, with a direct commentary on that exact condition circa 1915.
On that note, I'll share one of the first things I read in the scrapbook. A quote 'quoted', so to speak. The opening passage, written by Kipling, quoted in print by Hubbard, and digitally by myself:
"There is an ancient legend which
tells us that when a man first
achieved a most notable deed
he wished to explain to his tribe
what he had done. As soon as
he began to speak, however, he was smitten
with dumbness, he lacked words, and
sat down. Then there arose- according to
the story- a masterless man, one who had
taken no part in the action of his fellow,
who had no special virtues, but afflicted-
that is the phrase- with the magic of the
necessary words. He saw, he told, he de-
scribed the merits of the notable deed in
such a fashion, we are assured, that the
words 'became alive and walked up and
down in the hearts of all his hearers.'
Thereupon, the tribe seeing that the words
were certainly alive, and fearing lest the
man with the words would hand down untrue
tales about them to their children, they took
and killed him. But later they saw that the
magic was in the words, not in the man."
-Kipling
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