Groan

Twice. That's how many times today I've sat down in front of my computer to write an interesting entry that might redeem this blog. After all, I abandoned it like an orphan, and hope to foster it again. It's a hard thing to break a habit - something I've folded into these last few months - and not feel a sort of strain to get back on track. That's probably why I have for the subtitle under my plain MSN name of 'Dave' as: "If I'm out of kilter, where can I get more?" - a weird, bizarre thing to explain or justify considering I have no exams, and finished writing the one essay I had to write for the entire month of December. I don't know what is wrong with me - but I can think of no other phrase than 'out of kilter' to epitomise how I feel this month. That's probably why I wish for my life to whirl like a subway, or car ride because when you're in motion, or sleeping away life like a somnambulist in automatic mode, everything is a blur, or a numb dream. You don't feel anything. But the pain you can't numb for long - the stuff of the mind and spirit like memories - eventually catches up with you. That's what I've been feeling lately, a sort of real, jarring experience of a dull, numinous nightmare as I spend my time working five days a week, and withou the excuses I need to escape the harsh reality of home. That's why I rushed to write that assignment on McLuhan and Lovecraft, because I'm living the sense of what they write this very moment - when I should channel my understanding and express it healthily in my writing I wanted to hide it, escape it, and numb it. Now I've escaped into one of my fond, recent literary discoveries - Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan, part one of the Gormenghast Trilogy - the Lucifer/Satan of the 1940s and 1950s ignored today in lieu of that self-righteous Holy Trinity of writers en vogue currently like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Oh well. People like nostalgia. Makes them feel safe, and secure. Peake, on the other hand, is deliberately sardonic and bleak in his writing - willing to confront the living, present reality of his world, both the material and ineffable spirit of his age - yet, waxing elegiac for a world (embodied by the image of Gormenghast, a castle) of images (embodied by stringent, unbroken traditions) slowly being dismembered, and liquidated from within by imploding change or fortune, that dark mistress of revolution.

That is my present world, and I love it in the end.