the finer line

I was thinking about magnets. The way they pull towards each other and then push away when you turn them over. The physical manifestation of positive and negative. But in a magnet, there’s no good or bad like there is in our world of consequence.

When I wake up and the magnet has turned to the negative, all effort I have inside is tied up in a duffel bag. This effort, set loose, would be used to make the day a successful attempt at honest life. Instead, all decisions have at least three or four dead solutions. Every attempt at hopeful thought is weighed down by a residue. There is simply nothing but the object. No basis behind anything. There are only the wrongs of men to account for the way the world looks on these mornings.

One of the hardest aspects of the manic-depressive state is waking from a previous day of mania to find the depressive cloud has returned. Then the quick realization that your hyper-efforts the day before were outside the realm of logic. It’s the close memory of how elated you felt the day before – getting things done – pulling the entire train back on to the track.

What I’ll do is spare a little time for meditation in the evening. To hopefully center the mind and let it remember the middle ground, the place it needs to live. But then all the critters of modern life come scratching across the mind. At times, I remain awake in bed, thinking the faucet drip is the universe being dismantled one inch at a time. And then the realization that it’s only me being dismantled by my shadow.

Mania is an internal state. Everything in the external world becomes stuck inside this covert, perceptive static. You become the noise between stations, the dissonant pulse of modernity. It’s easier to just say, “I feel like shit today,” but my paid leave has run out.