Getting Loose of the Season's Hold On You

Getting loose of the season's hold on you is not simple. sometimes it becomes hard to wash the dishes or get out of bed. sometimes the myriad moral principles you genuinely try to follow morph into something you no longer understand or recognize, and you end up taking shortcuts and doing bad thing after bad thing without being able to stop yourself. You can blame it on the season as an excuse but then you're trying to make a rational one-to-one causal relationship, and that's not where the answer lies.

The miasma that comes with the season - closed-in mustiness opposite the crisp winter cold - takes an infectious turn and here's maybe where you lose perspective and give in to an afflictive self-aborption, the kind that wraps you up in itself and pushes every possible tool available to the hopeful mendicant away. now the mice are scurrying around and maybe you even have it in you to set a trap or two at first. after one or two are killed and disposed of, you begin to think it's more a chore to address the problem than to let indifference diminish its scope. you could buy a cat, but fuck that - cats are one step too far in the direction of total abandonment of principles and you need to keep a smidgeon of self-respect to keep the metabolism at operative levels.

Also there are no mice - you're just remembering that time when you lived in the little house by the mountain stream when the mice would dart into your room as you sat under a lamp reading Vollman's treatise on violence. eventually they didn't faze you, though if you had enough energy left over for pondering you'd sit and wonder if it was always the same adventurous mouse that made strafing runs or if there was a team of them that came in alternating shifts. it's this kind of thought process that signals a further descent into the season's shiftless, could-give-a-shit-less orientation, but at least this time around there are no mice and you can be grateful that you don't have to assimilate them into your reality and actively engage the ideational nexus of possible meanings and responses they engendered a few winters back.

Late in the season you quit buying perishables and subsist on pasta stored in an airtight bin and things kept in the refrigerator. the stray rez dogs in the neighborhood, mangy three-legged mongrels standing in synecdochically for your inner self, start looking forward to your trips to the garbage cans in back where you dump whatever garbage's accumulated unbagged into whichever one offers them the easiest access. if the wind's not blowing, you smoke outside and make a little path to the cans that hardens over time and once or twice causes you to slip and sprawl. this inevitably causes laughter, strange compulsive laughter that makes you think of scenes in movies when a character who's lost someone or something dearly loved shakes his fist at the sky or God or whatever's up there, supplanting a denial of grief with an acceptance of absurdity. Bless your random moments of meekness, having an ego is so hard most times.

Still, you try to write. it becomes too hard not to. if you didn't write, you're turning your back on one of the reasons you're here, so you do it and do it and do it again. you can't leave this place yet and you don't want to revert to the tired old self-motivating truisms (Cf. the going getting tough and the tough getting going, you made your bed now lie in it), so you click the pen's tip out and open to a new page as a kind of preemptive strike against acknowledgment that the season isn't lifting anytime soon and its constriction of your life isn't either. you write to take up time and you write against time, to counteract the fear that comes with thinking too much about when will this be over and when will something new open itself up but also to sustain that fear. And then a few moments a week that new thing is right there for the taking and you lose it and chase it and listen to Bob Marley and Aaron Copland back-to-back until something finished clicks and you laugh a demoniac laugh that turns back on itself and makes you laugh again, but natural this time. Suss it all out and see if it grows on trees, why don't you?