Machinery

Saturday, August 02, 2008

Machinery Current mood:  indescribable I find that if I focus on the mechanics of the thing rather than the thing itself, I can handle the days.  I think I’m doing rather well, actually.  If I think about the hassle and the fallout and the lists of nitty gritty annoying issues like the legal aspects that must be covered, my mind will continue to click through the day from thought to thought, plan to plan without a glitch.  Exercizing control for a well-maintained machine. If however, my mind wanders, as it willfully does in a most un-mechanical fashion, into the memories themselves – I begin to have problems.  Images of the man himself, snatches of made up songs he sang, half-recollected remembrances of things I didn’t think mattered at the time flood my consciousness and then gears miss their cogs and the machine springs loose and goes all to Hell. My dad died.  All right, then.  I have accepted the fact itself, but what does it MEAN?  I am only beginning to come to terms with the depths of the loss that I’ve incurred.  It’s like standing on a plain with the wind sweeping around you, looking out over a blank horizon – only to look down at your feet and realize with mounting dread that the ground you were on has dropped away in front of your toes.  A yawning chasm – in my mind it’s a red-earth canyon, beautiful and deadly – is ready to claim you, mind, body and soul.  The wind which was blowing around you now whips you like dry leaves, vertigo sets in, and you are rapidly swept off the precipice to certain and beautiful doom. It’s not depression I feel – it’s incomprehension.  I’m not sure which I dislike more – not comprehending or the slowly dawning fact that I am beginning to indeed, and all the terrifying things that the coming awareness will bring. I think that if I write the thoughts I have, I can control their dispersal.  Like letting water from a dam so the pressure doesn’t build and the dam burst.  But when I try to type the facts, all I can think of are lines of a song by Vienna Teng, a song named, “Say Uncle.” It is the most accurate, heartfelt and completely un-depressing song about loss.  Never have I had someone else’s words so precisely capture the facts and the ache – every line resonates in my mind long after the song has ended, like a still-vibrating string plucked on a guitar.  Most specifically, the following: “These days everyone cries, “say uncle” I retrieve the memories quickly as I can Add them to the portrait we all draw in our minds Your body gone, we shall keep the Man.”