Ok. Pardon my saying so, but. I don't have a good feeling about tomorrow. The day goes like this. Rise around 5 and do a little sitting practice and a kriya or two and, um, financial history blogs/Stephen Colbert practice. Middle path, yo. Asana practice 6:30-8:15, including some new findings in the backbending that are throwing me pretty literally for a loop and doing kapotasana-reminisent energy things and making me all vulnerable and lovey and shit. Birdbath in the shala, teach a couple of privates in Venice, quick-change at a client's home studio, pick up the kale salad I'm already thinking of, catch the freeway to campus and work in the office 12-4. Reception down in Westwood 4-5ish. Drive home with the Editor, thank god, for debate and aftermath, writing in the evening.
None of which matters at all. An ant dragging a stick a few feet in the sand. A day's work. What'll be going on in the interwoven world? No caves for these times, little yogis. Living as-if ahistorically would be too un-brave right now, and un-curious. Here's something I wrote in my little diary files last Saturday. I feel like publishing it. Because sadness like the below has a rueful lightness for me. Dread is something darker. Yes it is.
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Had this somewhat dark time, the last couple days. I don’t know why this emotional cloud blows in sometimes. It’s all dark and textured and makes space for sad thoughts. There wasn’t a lot to do about it—put on a natty soft sweater, listen to Moondog, sip chamomile tea and sigh a little. I watched a little Name of the Rose, about the medieval obscuring of reason by blind faith. Maybe not the best idea there.
It would be inaccurate to say that thoughts create darkness. If anything, it’s the other way around: there’s some emotional hollowness emptying out a little cradle and I fill it up with forlorn little orphan sad thoughts.
Days like these probably make me more understanding of people. There’s this tendency to see life as easy and beautiful, and pain as not a serious or problematic sensation. I look at my dad, who is ridiculously compassionate—who comes off the night shift as a hospital chaplain with sad eyes but also joy—and realize the cheesy resilience is not my invention… this impatience with pathos is just half of his. But the fact that there are cute people everywhere doesn’t help—why do cute people have to distract me from the reality of humankind’s depravity? You make it hard to feel authentically pessimistic, you know.
Clearly, I realize days like these, I am living a lie. Humanity is a heartless cruel species. Just look at us. When I’m sad, it hits me how many people do not care about others. People are cold, even toward supposed intimates.
The ability to fuck someone over, walk away in callousnss, disregard their welfare. People will use each other for attention and for money, but that’s often as deep as it gets. We’ll even fake caring to get things—so unbelievably disturbing, and something I’m not always able to admit is going on around me.
Society is too much for us—maybe we can manage to care about the welfare of one or two parents or children, but otherwise the diverse society around us is just a natural resource to be exploited for things or attention. It's too much to ask humans to care for their neighbors let alone distant people or species.
People's capacity to go cold on others just kind of destroys me. Emotional life seems like such a joke with that in the background. People talk about "ethics" but don't really give a damn about looking after the humans in their immediate lives.
I know depression very often signals repressed anger. It’s just so obvious in people. But I’m not sure about myself. The bit of sadness that is here doesn’t seem to be masking deeper anger. When I’m pissed off, I can rant quite nicely. Anger seems to contain a seed of optimism, a sense that the world could be different, and energy to create movement and even change. Anger is something productive in humans. What’s weird is when there’s sadness that doesn’t have an angry undercurrent. But I wonder if actually underneath it in me is a certain sad hopelessness that’s getting tapped in small ways. There are so many indications that people don’t give a shit about others. They are, at best, just sitting around selfishly expecting to be loved, gratified, paid attention.
Makes me want to be a member of some other less atomized species.
If the few people really close to me weren’t so caring (not of me—of everyone), despite their efforts to look like your average self-interested egoists, I wonder if I’d be some dejected third rate novelist cranking out soppy nonsense about the wickedness of humanity.
Or not. Maybe my disposition would still keep me disconnected from this sensibility most of the time. If I took depressant medication, would I have these thoughts more often? Would I be more realistic? Shit. Now I'm cracking myself up again with this pathos. Oh well.
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