Degringolade

The seasons have shifted and with it, my entire fucking vibe.

For the southern coast of America, what this means is, over the course of one day, the sun has banished the clouds, the air has gone from chilly to muggy, bloodthirsty gnats have come out of their fetid pools to feed upon the young, and the deciduous trees have shed most of their leaves as if it’s Autumn when it is clearly the cusp of Spring. 

To be honest, I don’t know why the tree thing happens. The remaining leaves on the trees themselves are bright green. It’s clearly not Autumn. It's like an old reheated cup of coffee out here. Maybe dead leaves on the dirty ground are normal for this time of year. Maybe they get stuck up there in Winter and are now just tumbling down. Maybe this is tea weather. I don’t know. I am not a dendrologist. It has been said that premature abscission can be caused by drought, fungal disease, and lack of nutrition. This is not so different from humans. Perhaps the trees are depressed. I like to believe that everything has a soul, even rocks. This belief is likely bullshit, as the jury is still out on whether humans even have souls, but this belief fosters a sort of compassion for all things that’s otherwise absent. Sometimes it’s worth believing in bullshit if the bullshit produces good outcomes. Truth is highly overrated. But what do I know?

What I do know is, yesterday, it felt like Twilight Princess weather, today it feels like Chrono Cross weather. For the record, I’m OK with both types of weather, but I’d prefer to slip into them, not be forced into them over the course of one day. The Chrono Cross weather came too quickly, I had gotten used to the Twilight Princess weather. Now I can't wear sweaters, and I like sweaters. I also can't wear my camo pants, which I wear because one, it’s ironic, two, I think they kinda look cool, and three, they help me blend in to both the hickass people around these parts and, of course, the local flora. I'm like Solid Snake in this here bigoted Southern town. “I'm invisible. Yeah, that's me. If you look then you'll see right through me.” That's a song by The Dismemberment Plan. It's a great song, you should listen to it right now. Also, I can’t wear my beanie, so of course my brains are spilling out all over the place.

Weather conjures all sorts of different images in my mind, all sorts of different memories and their associated moods, like Twilight Princess and Chrono Cross. Those are moods for me. I'm big on moods. For a brief stint in my teens, my mom sent me to a psychiatrist. She was a blonde woman with an angular face and an athletic figure. I got the impression she did a 5-mile run every morning and drank lots of vitamin water and ate avocado toast. She had an upper-middle-class soccer mom vibe, if you know what I mean. These are not the sort of women I'm normally attracted to, so it was easy to talk to her. I remember I told her that I could sense auras, and that these auras fucked with my mood. I told her about intrusive auras and how I did not appreciate them. I told her that I would adjust the lighting in my room very carefully so as to cultivate certain auras. The psychiatrist told me this was normal, that many people do this, and this was not something I wanted to hear. I wanted to feel special. I still want to feel special. I bring this up because, when outside, I cannot cultivate auras. There is no dimmer switch on the Sun. The clouds are amorphous and beyond my reach. This is fine, but again, I need slip time.

Speaking of, or typing of, clouds, the other day I went to the beach and the clouds were so low that I couldn’t see even a few feet in front of me, but I could cut through them with my bare hands, which felt empowering. A foggy beach is a very powerful image, mysterious and spooky. The shoreline was like a graveyard, blue blobs every few feet. They say the southern coast is where old people go to die, I guess this is also true for jellyfish. My son, who was with me, kept trying to touch them. I told him that you don’t want their death on your hands, plus they’ll shock you. Of course, he didn’t listen, and he touched them anyway, but they didn’t seem to shock him, so I guess the electricity had left their bodies, perhaps at the same moment their souls mixed with the mist. I am feeling somewhat poetic today, if you couldn’t tell.

A day later, I took my son to the park. He brought his toy sword with him. We ventured into a wooded area where he slayed at least three moblins. He’s getting good at moblin slaying. He likes to pretend he’s Link, from The Legend of Zelda. He’s been watching me play that game obsessively for about a month now. I think it may be infecting his crazy little brain. I wrote all about it on oncomputer.games. The essay is titled “Breath of the Now Now.” It functions as a sort of love letter to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild while also being a Beginner's Guide to Zen, of sorts. It was fun writing it. It covers a lot of the Zen stuff I've talked about in this journal, just in a more articulate, fun way. I think our world leaders should read it. I think maybe they would stop bombing schools in the Middle East if they read it. Maybe my essay could save the world. I realize that’s a very egotistical thing to say, like I'm some enlightened guru or something. I'm not. Besides, the essay is probably not rhetorically convincing enough to push someone like Trump into the meadows of enlightenment. And who am I to pretend that I know how to save the world? I just don’t like it when schools get bombed.

The cultural zeitgeist has been infused with death as of late. Note, “zeitgeist” comes from the German word “zeit,” which means “time,” and “geist,” which means either “spirit” or “ghost.” TIMEGHOST. Even the word itself has deathly implications. Right now, people are focused not only on kids dying in Iran but also this one missing-persons case regarding Nancy Guthrie, who was abducted from her home at night about a month ago. The cultural obsession and media coverage remind me of this one summer when I was a kid, when my grandma was watching the news a lot, and they were always talking about this one girl, Natalee Halloway, who was abducted in Aruba and never found. I believe drugs and alcohol were involved, as they normally are. There was a suspect in that case who I'm pretty sure admitted decades later to bludgeoning Natalee over the head with a cinder block after she refused his sexual advances on a beach one night, meaning he pretty much forfeited his Human Race Membership Card right there on that salt-crusted shore. Funny how a split-second decision, like bludgeoning someone in a fit of rage, can totally alter the course of so many lives, not only Natalee’s life, but also his own and the lives of all the people who watched cable news that summer. The ripples we make. But the difference with the Guthrie case is that, despite us now pretty much living in a CCTV state wherein basically anyone can be tracked at any time, we have very little in the way of leads here, outside of a creepy Ring Doorbell video. Perhaps this is why the case is so compelling, and it doesn’t hurt that her daughter is like a famous news anchor person or something. The point is, it’s been almost 40 days now, and Nancy’s still missing. No one seems to have a clue as to who did it. She has just completely vanished. And there are basically no leads, as far as I know. Although, there have been many ransom demands, none of which provided proof of life, many of which demanded “one bitcoin” as payment, which seems oddly specific and weird. Why, just yesterday, I saw that someone called in a tip to the authorities, claiming they sighted Nancy in Mexico, but they wouldn’t tell the authorities the exact location without payment of, you guessed it, “one bitcoin.” I’m starting to wonder if the same hoaxer is phoning in all these tips. But I try not to speculate on these things. I tell myself that I'm above all that. But I too am swept up in the TIMEGHOST, so I can’t help but come up with my own theories. And my main theory is that Nancy has been dead for some time, and that she quite possibly died the night the crime took place. I imagine the intruder intended to rob the house, botched it, thereby waking Nancy up, at which point she had a heart attack or fought back, both of which would have resulted in her death, because she’s old and on medication for heart problems. I then imagine that the intruder freaked out, took the body, and disposed of it somewhere, possibly in acid. There is some evidence to support this, such as blood found at the scene of the crime. And yes, I realize I’ve swayed off into very grim territory here.

What gets me is that many people still seem to think that Nancy will be found alive, despite her being super old, despite her needing medication, despite her being on a pacemaker, and despite it having been over a month now. Yet, despite all this, people still cling to hope. So perhaps I was wrong, perhaps the TIMEGHOST is not infused with death, but instead infused with hope.

But hope is a funny thing. It's a trick, almost. We trick ourselves into a present state of calm by looking forward to some supposed optimistic future. Most Zen teaching advocates against this, advising that we should stop clinging to future possibilities and instead live fully in the present moment, and since hope is grounded in future expectation, we should therefore abandon all hope, ye who enter here. I know, this sounds awful on paper. Insensitive, almost. But it seems intuitively true that if you have very little expectations, you have very little to be disappointed about.

In any case, I wish all the best for Nancy Guthire’s family and hope they find closure.

Yes, I used the bad word, “hope." I'm only human, after all.