Soup Kitchen-ing

 I feel dumb.

To qualify, I feel dumb these days.

I also feel; left behind; overcome; trampled upon; overtaken; marginalized; destitute.

I don't know if I should have fed all these feelings into a generative AI program to get back a whole post about exactly what I am feeling - disseminated to the masses in an easy-to-digest, grammatically impeccable, particularly anodyne, and carefully overwrought perdre la boule.

The older I get, the more I seem to regret ever being born - all this aspiration and go-getting and transitory-mindedness and, eventually, responsible citizening in a foreign country... points to a large cosmic joke, the dust of which I increasingly sense to have been wasted on me.

It's regrettably too late now to turn back into dust, cosmic or otherwise. Too many stories of day-trippers in mid-life crises, leading on to full-life calamities for those left behind - cautionary tales that I cannot ignore any longer... Similar to how I feel when I think about powerful motorcycles and the open road these days: all well and good for back in the day, back when there was so much I didn't know about the vagaries of chance and sheer dumb luck.

I can catch the feels these days from those around me, just as I can low-key sense the extra-ness in my slow unravelling - which is a whole impermeable mood... but what is worse is that I feel like I must express myself in this way; a figurative gotcha smirk at a convivial mode of expression, shared among those with whom I could have nothing in common but to whom I still feel a need to relate.

Is this what being middle-aged is, then? The slowly tanking cred, the superflousness, the irritation at a voice being tolerated for the time-being...

I thought I was going to be consequential by now. 

I guess I just must need to feel lucky that I've survived thus far.

Somewhere over the horizon

Having been someone with a pretty loud internal monologue manifest over the course of my forty-six years of life, it has always been a source of interest to me to dispassionately observe the topics that make up the main theme of the monologue at various times - through periods of change and continuity, through personal crises and successes, through epoch-making instances, and to the extent that the dull, daily drivel of being a productive contributor to the global economy determines your abiding self-image.

The main theme that's running through my head these days is; ageing. That's not really a surprise considering that my main source of employment involves long, meaningful hours spent contemplating and managing the daily foibles of a plethora of older people availing of federal government subsidies to sustain their independence in (what they don't always describe as) their golden years.

My monologue, though, has also been considering ageing through a lens of pitiful self-awareness - I now have two chronic health conditions, diagnosed over the last couple of years, necessitating the daily intake of medication, and shaping just how my prospects appear to me over the next (possible) thirty-plus years of a now compromised life. It dwells on a sudden, unprepared-for end and what it would leave behind in its financial wake. How that would shape my wife's and daughter's remaining years - in the context of my own experience of the loss of my parents. What retirement really means. What fantastical experiences remain to me over the following years. What legacy I have left behind. What emotions I have engendered among those who have known me. What memories I will linger in, and what must be forgotten or hidden.

I am painfully becoming aware, through my internal monologue, that I have now become something that I don't recognize; that I have preoccupations now that preternaturally defeat my will to keep a sense of myself as weak away at the far recesses of consciousness. I have even started to forget spellings of words and their meanings; I used 'they' instead of 'there', and 'respectively' instead of 'respectfully' in two work emails recently - something that I sincerely could not have imagined myself doing, considering that 'proof-reading' is an existential matter to my sense of self... proving that even the hitherto rock-solid checks and balances in the sacrosanct are now at risk.

My monologue also continues to delve into the idea of violence; a fitful concept that hasn't visited me that often physically and, if I am honest, not even psychologically or emotionally in any sustainable way through my life. It seems like the occasional violent thought that runs through my internal monologue is some kind of last-ditch effort to retain a whiff of that wild, uncontrollable rebel I confronted in the mirror each day in my late teens and early twenties; reflecting the current status of the pathetic, miserable, and scared young man I was, posturing with all my might about... what could be.

Liminality or Death

I'm not sure if this is to be my last post on this blog or the first post in a new series... 

I'm not sure if the world will ever awaken from this dribs-and-drabs consciousness of our place in deep time or if we are condemned to fade away like every other apex species - a victim of our own sentient capriciousness and greed.... 

I'm not sure if the oceans will soon rise up in protest and wash off, once and for all, the stains of our dastardly presence on this good earth or if we will, once and for all, limit our impact on the natural rhythm of this unique, singular, precious sphere of nurtured life - at once full and impossibly diverse and absolutely solitary in the vastness of space...

I'm not sure if right is ever going to be clearly delineated from wrong, if universal truths are ever again going to be distinguished from cultivated falsehoods, if violence and predation is going to overwhelm balance and custodianship in our relationships with everything 'other' that is 'useless' to our lives...

I'm not sure if I live or die in this time and place - in this actual moment - in this air and temperature and motor-neuron function manifest in the typing of this dribble.

I'm sure, though, that I will miss it dearly when it is all gone.