I've dropped off the face of the earth for a while. Didn't see it coming, but then again, who does? If you saw the end of the earth, you'd probably stay the fuck away. Maybe you'd post a huge sign saying "END OF THE EARTH. TURN BACK NOW, YOU SILLY MOTHERFUCKERS" so that others could hope to avoid it.
A professor (and I like to think a friend) of mine died last Thursday. They say it was cancer. I say it was his body's jealousy of his mind. The man was chock full of wit, energy, and insight. He was 70, so his body must have been looking at that mind and thinking to itself, jealously. It must have been thinking, like an old man whose beautiful wife ages much more gracefully than him, "this is unfair. Just a few years ago I was the coveted one, I was what people were attracted to when they sought me out." And like that jealous husband who eventually goes insane from the jealousy and the paranoia that his disproportionately beautiful wife sleeping around behind his back, his body may have reasoned that simultaneously ending its and his mind's lives was the only way they could be equal and together again.
Yeah, that was fucked up.
I miss him. I keep thinking of his laugh, his tangents during class, his mocking and provoking emails, his passion for his work, his ability to fuck with you. He understood wit in a way that I've never seen before.
So I fell off the edge of the world. Didn't see it coming. And now I'm scrabbling back up. I met with my therapist earlier in the week. She remarked that she hadn't seen me this bad before. Which got me to thinking about times that I was much further down than this.
Quite a few people I know have died in the past year or so. Steven was the most recent, but my uncle died last term and my great-grandfather died over the summer. My step-father's grandfather died over the winter. My girlfriend's grandfather died in the winter as well.
Losing my uncle was probably the hardest for me. To some degree all of the rest (except for Steven) were very old and not completely present. My uncle was in his thirties and he was gunned down by a friend of his. It's fucked up to think about it, but I think I may be more upset about Steven's death than my uncles. I was closer to Steven. My uncle I hadn't seen in years and when he was around he was pretty peripheral to my awareness. Steven was front and center of the classroom, he was in my inbox, his comments were on my papers, we met in his office to discuss politics and the state of the news-media.
I feel like this is some kind of grief-quantum. Attempting to measure how much grief I have experienced over certain people's deaths. Yes, I get that it is disrespectful and a bit disgusting. Hey, the US did it with blood back in the day. Blood quantum anyone? If your father was full-blooded Cherokee and your mother was full-blooded European you were less than 1/2 white (or something) because the man has more power or something. I don't really remember. I do remember that it was racist and arbitrary.
To be perfectly honest though, the worst depression I've ever had was after a girl broke up with me. I feel like I'm saying this a lot in this post but, how fucked up is that? Great men die and I am sad for a time. A girl I dated for a year and a half breaks up with me and I descend to the greatest depths of depression and don't even attempt to crawl back up for months. I remember laying on the floor of a shower in a hotel in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, crying because I was so feverish and delirious that I thought that girl was in there with me, still breaking up with me. Or something.
So I've been worse, even if worse was less justified.
The trouble with this depression now though is that I need to write. I can't focus when I feel like this. Or maybe I can't focus and I feel like this? I can't focus and so I feel like this? I'm not sure. The bottom line is that I am still struggling on a chapter for my thesis that should have been done on Wednesday. At least I can put pen to paper now. That's an improvement. I just need to be able to write more than a page a day. Unless I get an 80 day extension.
I'm beginning to look at graduation with the hungry eyes of someone who has been inside a really comfortable and engaging jail for the past 17 years. Academia is really all I know with any experience or certainty. My academic career has advanced in fits and starts like a kid learning to run. I'll get up and start running, fast enough to escape my protective mother, and then promptly fall on my face. I'm ready to get out of here and fall on my face somewhere else for a while. Then I'll probably come back. I've heard that prisoners who have been in jail for a substantial amount of time crave the bars and the routine when they are finally released.
Anyway, every day is a little easier than the last. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut;
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
I miss him too.
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