Living in the Past?

Image by melolou via Flickr

Am I? Living in the past I mean. An old friend sent an email telling me not to - don't know if it was in response to one I had sent him or to this. Either way it was another of those cold water moments. Was that, is that what I have been doing in an effort to distance myself from the. frankly, very unpleasant now.

I suspect he may be right but anyone who quotes Dickens does not get my vote at the moment.  And 'Don't Look Back in Anger' doesn't count either. Poor imitations of the Beatles do cut the mustard. Poetry or die that's what I say. Find me a poem where Donne tells me not to look back and I'll become a woman of the moment - until then Dickens and Oasis can go and boil their heads.

Hmmm - seems to be developing into a rant. I think I had better start thinking happy thoughts quickly.

Not easy when you are terminally depressed although if asked today I would have to describe the mood as irritable. I am cross with myself for being such a crybaby, cross with the world for being at all and cross with the past because it seems so much better than the future. I have no real issue with the future - let it bring what it may.

Not sleeping doesn't help. Insomnia is a curse - all day I am sleepy and tired - turn off the light and my brain races, my legs twitch and the night seems endless and tortuous. When I am like this nothing works - not even the beloved Farmville. It takes ages to load - seems pointless, petty and mundane. Rather like me at the moment. TV is puerile, I have read all the books and I can't think of anything to write in the blog.

So here I am - ranting. I wonder if this gets any better - I look at the old and the infirm on the bus and query their smiles and seeming passivity. Don't they ever feel like the guy in 'Broadcast News'? "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore". Why is it that more of us don't stand and shout that from street corners through megaphones?

Forgive me - it seems that what I needed was exactly this - to vent, to let off steam. Maybe it is a move forward to feel angry: up until now I have only felt despair and misery. But why oh why couldn't it have been some more uplifting emotion - hope, joy or even the old standby - happy.

Jefferson really put his finger on it with the pursuit of happiness - what a truth to enshrine in a constitution for a new country. You know, I think it created much of our modern angst. We now feel that we are in some way cheated if we are not happy and I think the reality of the human condition is not to be happy but to strive for happiness.  Which is after all precisely what Jefferson was enshrining - the pursuit not the finding.

So to pursue happiness in my own way is to roam around in the rooms of the past, to remember, and in remembering, find some comfort. And, hopefully, reason to go forward.

Sorry if this has been a something and nothing but in the words of the book - that's all there is, there is no more.