i know there are people dealing with grief out there. compounded with financial woes. i feel you. i feel your pain. or, at least, my (small) version of it.

i can't seem to untangle myself from the chain tying me to this boulder. i keep trying, but there doesn't seem to be anything that works. i think a lot of my "activity" (creative, and otherwise) are all just ploys to distract me, or to even fake or prop up a semblance of normalcy, productivity. but everything i do rings hollow. and the nights are terrible: feeling so very tired, but anxious because of all the impossible demands that are placed on me daily.

it's so easy for me to get bitter, but i won't. no one can help me. no one can save me. i think some people can ask for help and get it, but it doesn't seem to work for me. either my "pain" isn't sincere or deep enough (after all, pain is subjective, eh?), or it's so deep that people can't reach me, stretching an arm into my tartarus...

i'm so grateful for my wife and children, who seem to be bearing along cheerfully, and supporting my downward spiral. without them, i don't know where i'd be. stuck in a hopeless gravity well.

i wish sometimes that i could just sleep forever...

... odd. i just heard the wind-up bird just now. there is this bird that lives in the gully behind my house. for the past few nights, i would spontaneously wake up at around 2 in the morning, and i would hear this bird sing its strange cry. it always seems to end its musical phrase with a question: "are [middle] you [low] up [high]?" over and over it sings this. it is a cheerful sound, and sometimes (superstitious fool that i am) i imagine that it was sent by my grandmother to urge me on, or something.

but i can't. i can't seem to move this lump of flesh that i've become...

for those of you who know what it's like to be depressed... how it feels to just be so terribly weary of the world and its endless responsibilities... the effort to simply survive through, barely adequate answers to endless questions...

there are no easy answers. i believe we struggle with it, finding apparent but ultimately temporary solutions, following will-o-the-wisps... and i think that we have to. if we seek to affirm life, and our path through it, we have to... if i am defeated, so be it; sometimes, i imagine there would be a relief in that, in the complete surrender... but i try. and i try. and i try.

as my grandmother would say: sometimes, we just gotta live through it. that's our innen.

how i wish she were here today...

the bird i imagine she sends, i will listen to it, when it sings to me in the dead of night. i will try to hear what it is trying to tell me.

the wind-up bird...