BE EXTRAODINARY

TACTICAL

I don’t know if I have been through a tougher patch since the confirmation of my disabling condition. I use the official finding of the Social Security Administration as a marker because I likely would have felt differently about the onset of, and the subsequent episodes that led to my suspicions of what was happening to me.

My current depression has been one of hopeful peaks and near-untenable valleys.  I can have lows that make me a totally different person, as Nebraska unfortunately discovered.  She is going through a MAJOR change in her life, so please, I am asking that thoughts and prayers (yes, I SAID prayers..!) be sent her way.  She happened to catch me at the low of a swell, and I was very unfriendly when she (and myself as well) prolly needed a friend.  My highs, the best of my moments since Thanksgiving often reach the mean of whatever “my happiness” is, and no more.  Consequently, I am constantly anxious, further fueling the emotions that add weight to the oppressive cloud of darkening emotions around me.

School is school… I am going to have to retake my Spanish class, which I am not that pressed about. For Sociology, we watched a documentary, “Streetwise”, which while well-done, was quite sad.  It was about teenagers who were living on the street, using drugs, hooking, and their broken families.  Ugh.  I had to reflect on my daughter’s and how fortunate I am to have them and for the fortitude of their Mother’s.  They have done a wonderful job, no matter what anyone says, and in spite of the jam that I left them in.  Speaking of my girls...

I made a phone call to Lexxie’s Grandmother recently one afternoon and of course, I got the voice mail.  But as I dutifully left my message, reminding the machine that I was Lexxie’s father, the phone was picked up by Lexxie herself!!  So I do feel somewhat validated in thinking that her Grandmother has deliberately worked to harm our relationship.  Que sera… now, I have to work to get her a round-trip ticket this for a visit this August!!   

STARS… IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND

When I saw the story by Samuel Delany in the anthology “Breaking Ice”, I fell in love with the story, which was about a misfit in a stratified society (which is a brief and unjust synopsis), and thought of it as a metaphor for my own experience.  I took the title and with a slight adjustment, adopted the title as device for my own personal look on life (and for the name of this journal).  Just like unpacking from a day at the beach, the possibilities in my life are much like grains of sand, found everywhere and in the most unexpected places.  I was in a small town in North Carolina at the time I discovered the story, and by any measure was on the path that I had, at the time, most desired.  Now to be sure there was “this and that” to contend with, and in dealing with such, the result was that my road has continued to wind its way along and why I am here, in Omaha.

Before I began to fade out of 2014 into the fugue state that brought me into 2015, I had thought of what my year was going to be like.  Coming off such a good stretch that included meeting new friends, cementing relationships and feeling as though I also was very dutiful in the process, I have (not the tense) high hopes for this year.  When I started to drag at the end of November, I first attributed it to minor fatigue, because I had pretty much lived last year as if I had no encumberances of any kind at all.  In the middle of December the feeling began to gather form and shape, then the week of Christmas, it fully metastasized into a full-blown depression.  I had started to hurt, to feel a constant dull ache throughout my body.

When you feel depressed, your immune system often becomes compromised.  Even with the medications and supplements that I take regularly, I felt like I was feeling sick in spite of my efforts at running and working out.  And again referencing Anthony Griffith’s Moth performance, trying to be African-American and have psychological issues only conflates the problems.  There is so little understanding between African-Americans and the seriousness of treatment and letting it go without action, mainly because it isn’t anything that can be seen or fully comprehended.  Telling a AA that you are depressed is tantamount to offering yourself up for derision and ridicule.  And with my having an “invisible disability”, I feel it only becomes more complicated, because noticing subtleties are one of the AA’s communities great weaknesses, IMO.

SOMETIMES, CHOOSING TO GO ON IS THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY THING THAT ONE CAN DO

I am STILL going to have a big year.  I have no doubt that I will reach my level and go from there.

One of the thoughts that has been with me is one about my relationships here in Omaha is that I have enough information to make a more informed statement about what I have observed.  First, the brothers here are just pathetic.  And trust me, I am not talking only of the “inmates in the asylum”.  Over the spectrum of socio-economic spectrum, the cats here are just  … sorry. I think that this contributes to what I have experienced with women here locally.  Out of responding to their environment, I think that the women here suffer from a form of relationship PTSD.  I think that the women here are delusional.  They see things that don’t exist, and make the innocuous seem formidable.  

In trying to be understanding, I still don’t really feel moved to be empathetic towards women here.  There is no reasoning with anyone who can only see through the clouded lenses that the local women seem to be looking through here in Omaha.  My reasoning is that I am certainly a different kind of cat… and as such, should be something favored, right?  Mind you, I understand that I have my share of shortcomings and personality quirks.  But I feel that if you are a woman and find yourself constantly enmeshed in relationships that feel like that they mirror each other, then there you go!  But as I mentioned, I think that there is a delusion borne of an environmental-induced hysteria.  But I digress… and I have ran on long enough.