The Material and The Spiritual

My friends Jack, Melissa and I have been gathering for lunches on Fridays at the coffeeshop. Jack and I are sometime writing partners. However, we were both pretty lame last year about actually writing anything, so we sort of stopped. Now, we have started again with short assignments. Two pages. This week's theme was The Material and The Spiritual. Here is what I wrote in my little notebook.

(I showed it to my friend Chris later and he said, "I don't know whether you wrote this because you're depressed or whether you're depressed because you wrote this."

Probably both.)

Let's say that humans have a soul, or some tangible, spiritual, ethereal self. Let's say this is a conscious self also that is reincarted many times, without memory, into may different bodies and lives.

We know that from our observations, the universe tends toward chaos, toward entropy. This is true of the universe and its expansion, of decay and erosion on earth, and also of our bodies. Our bodies slowly break down and erode until they fail and die, so the soul moves on.

If entropy is true of the entirety of the universe, then wouldn't it stand to reason that it also holds true for the soul?

Entropy manifests itself in the body in a slow breakdown of organ function, a drying up of skin elasticity. It take years or even a lifetime.

How does entropy occur in the soul? I have heard that there are "old" souls, and this makes sense. But it also makes sense that old souls are identifiable by a maturity, a melancholy, a sadness that has no tangential relationship to that particular body, lifetime, or experience.

Perhaps depression is an indication of a soul's aging and entropy. The soul breaks down in the body and decays. This causes the body to need more sleep and causes depression symptoms like not looking forward to anything, inability to enjoy life.

What if depressed people have souls nearing the end of their cycle? How do souls stop the endless iterations of life and bodies and experiences?

Maybe they can't. Or maybe this is one explanation for why people kill themselves [I am not suicidal]-- they somehow know that this will make things stop, not just for this turn in the cyle, but STOP.

If there is a God, then does God also tend toward entropy? A topic for another day...

What is eternity? A bird's wing can cause the most undetectable kind of erosion when it tips the edge of a mountain. Perhaps the entire universe is slowly decaying at a rate that will take eternity.

See? Already I can't update this.

I don't know what to say.

Bubble Berry Pie

Most of the blog titles I liked were already taken: blueberry pie, bumbleberry pie, blueberry bubble gum, bubbleberry pie.

The only explanation for why I like these blog titles is the "b" sounds. That's it.

I didn't want to choose anything resembling my real name this time. Not because of privacy issues-- I'm far too big-mouthed for that. I am not trying to conceal my identity here, but I'm sure it will come up. It's because I am trying to create something a little new here, even if my blog posts end up sounding exactly the same as they did on my old blog.

I have to look at a new page, a new place. I just needed something new.

It has taken me months even to be able to create just this. You have no idea how hard it was to post this, how resistant I have been even to doing it.
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Part of the reason it was hard for me to begin blogging again is that everything is hard these days. Getting out of bed is the hardest. I can sleep for twelve hours and still want to take a nap later when faced with the prospect of cooking dinner or washing dishes.

Yes, I know this means I am depressed. Last night, I was recounting to friends the fact that when my doctor initially diagnosed me with depression, I started to cry. I was crying because it seemed OBVIOUS to me that I was depressed-- but depression wasn't, I thought at the time, the problem that needed to be fixed.

Apparently, I was wrong.

I still take anti-depressants, but sometimes life whammies you anyway. I suppose I could ask for a new pill or a larger dose, but that just seems like effort to me. Here is what I think: In Anne Lamott's great book Operating Instructions, she tells the story of a friend who has a sick cat. The cat lies in a puddle, in the middle of a great rain, and doesn't move. People want to take the cat to the vet. Someone stops them and says, "The cat is doing what it needs to be doing right now. If you move it, it will die."

Sure enough, after a few days of lying in the puddle, the cat is fine.

I am doing the human equivalent of lying in that puddle. I know my head is up my ass. But that is where it seems to need to be. And whenever I try to take major steps to get myself out of the puddle or take myself to the vet, some small voice tells me that I am exactly where I need to be, doing what I need to be doing. I can pay my bills, I care for my children, I shower, the dishes get done. There is just a tremendous amount of sleeping in between.
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Isn't it funny how even though there is not a whole lot going on, I finally decided to write about it?

I just read that Julia appears to be pregnant with twins. I am holding my breath with anxiety: Twice as many things that can go wrong. Twice as many miscarriages that might happen. Twice as many babies might die.

I keep reading her because her writing is so lovely. She is like a wonderful secret that the publishing world hasn't discovered yet, my very own Lorrie Moore.

And yet, she makes me anxious. I want to drive to Minnesota and slap her. I am so glad that she is pregnant, but if she loses them and if she does this again, I will do it. I will drive up there and slap her.

I said that last time too. And the time before that.

But twins.

I just found a rather large sliver of wood on the floor right next to my foot. As I bent over to pick it up and place it on the coffee table, I was briefly tempted to jam it into my foot, hard, so I wouldn't have to go running today.

We were walking home from the Kum & Go tonight and I was smoking a cigarette. But I started to feel breathless, so even though I hadn't smoked very much of it, I tossed it into the street, and shifted our bag of chips, dingdongs, candy bar into my other hand. If he noticed that I had tossed my cigarette away, he didn't remark on it. I looked at the puddles on the street, leftover from many rains today, and wondered what would have happened if one of them had been gasoline instead when I flicked the butt away.

I can't sleep tonight. Again. Probably because I had to lie down at 5, so very tired. We had sex and I came for a very long time, and I felt like I could have cum for an hour. But I thought he probably wanted to get to sleep at some point.

I have a phone interview with a recruiter tomorrow morning. That was pretty stupid. I don't want the job. I am not planning to relocate. But I couldn't let the ego stroke pass me by. Or something.

Tonight, lying in bed, I was feeling restless, bored. I want to be noticed, I want to be famous or loved or just seen somehow. I want someone to feel some curiosity about me. I know the best way to get this is just to live my life and have it be as full as it can be: at the point that I no longer care whether or not I am seen, I will be seen.

I worried and fretted in my bed earlier that I am not fully present in my life. I am half-way into the computer world all the time, at every moment. I can't stay offline, always moving from site to site, checking, checking, seeing, seeing. I don't do anything anymore. I don't eat out of my fridge. I don't feed the cats. I don't cook dinner. I don't fold the laundry. I hire someone to clean. I am no longer fully engaged in my physical world. I have managed to eliminate the need to do anything but hold the laptop and type.

There is something seriously wrong with this. I need to unplug more. I must. I must get out to the studio and use the paints. Think about things that I can do with the children so they will learn to do more than just look at computer screens. This is a sickness. I need to fully engage, do the laundry, vacuum.

This morning, I cooked eggs for the children and made hot chocolate and last night, we all went to baseball. I ran four miles. Today, we walked to the gas station at midnight. We made love. I started a book. It isn't as bad as I'm making it out to be. But it certainly could be better.

Jen Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Now, I live here.