Blue Saturday

Good Cher single

Such a deep luxurious blue today, my thick quilty armor stitched from equal parts loneliness and freedom, such a gorgeous sadness I just wanna roll in it. Wish the sun would join me but as long as the rain doesn't fall I am going out to revel in being alone amongst friends and strangers. The syrup of melancholy, the maraschino of the blues.

The syrup of melancholy, the maraschino of the blues

I keep hearing this in the gravelly Leonard Cohen voice but really it is quite the line.

no poetry like sentimentalizing fuckery :D

Later, when I'm hungover and my mouth tastes like a burnt out cigar, this is to remind me that today has been really good and coloured with love and friendship

*hat tip*

They’re selling Christmas cards at the scope shop

That was a purely unintentional desolation row homage lol

how can it ever be Christmas when 2020 has lasted a hundred years?

Of ffs soz

l'imaginaire is my worst frenemy

feel so at odds with the universe

(that's all, just putting it here to stop this feeling going round my head on loop and maybe I can get on with having other thoughts instead. sorry to interrupt your day)

I feel that. Have felt depressed this week, which I blame on going out for dinner last week and it hitting me like a tonne how much i miss people. I have been someone who is a loner since I was old enough to walk, this is really strange for me.

maybe a breakthru i had in counselling this year was realising i'm always gonna be at least a bit at odds with this society and that's ok, it's a bad society, i don't wanna belong to it

the rona has brought in whole new layers of boring dystopia, even the escape routes that used to be normally available have been closed or curtailed. the words "new normal" are on my death list like "these times" but if this is going to be our world for the foreseeable then i'm trying not to think too hard about it, the extra sheets of glassy isolation between us, the pseudo-curfews, the closing down of what world there is

there were some good things and some pleasures to be found in the lockdown, but now all we've got is shitty England consumerworld, now with fewer bonus features. sooner i can afford to drink more the better.

ach, the feelings come and go

and fuck me i really miss karaoke

Lads I'm finding it really hard to get out of bed lately

I’m sorry, tell us about it at least. It’s the length of this thing isn’t it?

It's a bunch of stuff, just being bothered to push back against gentle despair, too much regret for things I've done, too lazy and anxious to get back into work. I keep worrying I'm going to hit depression again and I don't think I'm there yet but I'm emulating the outer forms. I think (badly) managing no money is kind of exhausting too, makes me wanna stay in and do nothing.

I still feel at a point where I could just jump up and start to do something about it but then every morning - lol this is morning - the weight of apathy settles down

Me being overly dramatic in yr thread NV and part of it definitely the lack of sleep I had last night but fuck it all today, right? Really feels great being in a better position to the majority of my family and friends and still feeling that there’s no future worth having for most people my age and younger, only endless grubbing for coins and fluffing of fascists, and the people who should stand for you are embarrassed by you but still demand your support. Lol @ me thinking I would stop being hurt by politics after the exit poll and it still having the power to do so almost a year on.

Sorry, as you were.

It's fine

You know, of course, that I feel you

You’re a fave for a reason mate ❤️

Not sure being a key figurehead for despair is a good thing but lol me

suddenly in a very purple place right now

one big reason i can recognise - a job application ffs, who gets this fried over a fucking job application? probably lots of people tbrr

other stuff is i don't know, feel like i'm waking up to myself a bit, not unpleasant but gee there's a lot of mess and the effort of picking up the semi-metaphorical mop and bucket - sometimes the darkness of the thought of how to avoid all forms of work feels like a huge overreaction and yet there's the thought

lie down and die or start climbing even if your odds of even making foothills feels nooo way

anyway i'm ok. just a note to say i'm ok but i might be blissfully mostly shut up for a bit

I mean, job applications are shit aren’t they? So your answer is pretty otm for me too.

Purple is better than blue right? So yeah don’t apologise for using your thread for its intended purpose!

not saturday but i woke v blue today -- maybe just autumn and feeling old

autumn tends to get to me yeah

when the universe aligns to draw your attention to something

plug from his good jacket hanging on a nail and the desired object was
passed from hand to hand.

—Thank you, the sailor said.

He deposited the quid in his gob and, chewing and with some slow

— Ulysses Reader (@UlyssesReader) October 6, 2020

my sister when v small referred to slugs as plugs (she wasn't a fan) and within the family the name has stuck

Not a fan of slugs either, they're pretty hard to warm to

Idly reading this and thinking of when I had to break up with my own therapist (and break up is very true terminology, it’s a breach of trust that makes it difficult to continue). In my case, the reason why was pretty painful and I haven’t even looked for a new one since because I’m still not really over it. It’s a shame because I really did benefit from going.

Sorry. Morning!

Extremely twilight Sunday evening melancholy but also cosy confused vibes, love to throw a bit of seasonal affect on the pile

tbh i always feel a bit of a fraud posting -- as opposed to replying -- in this thread: i'm materially and emotionally cushioned compared to many friends on the borads, my life is p uncomplicated, my health is not so bad for my age, i've lived alone for nearly 30 years and got used to it (and tbh entirely enjoy it: lockdown is not the burden for me that others justifiably find it), my last romantic adventures and misadventures were more than a decade ago and did my various friendships no lasting harm (or any harm tbh, quite the opposite), and even if i'm eating into my savings week by week i can pay my bills for a while yet, plus i like the work i do (what little of it there currently is) and i have plenty of time to write, with ilxor and internet the main distractions and ruination there lol

so whoop-de-doo me why am i here a-fussin and a-blubberin eh, leave it to ppl with genuine woes

ok then: this week i've been working at a review that links my two main intellectual projects since i left the wire fulltime a quarer-century ago: i have friendly editorial sanction to go ham and i want to, and if i get it right this is kind of a good strong first next-step piece in my [GRAND VOICE/BORAT VOICE] life's work (probably this phrase -- "if i get it right" -- is worth dwelling on of course)

but most of the week i've been just dawdling and doodling and breaking away towards nonsense bcz the sense of "what's the fucking point" has been so vastly overwhelming (and this too is easily explained away = a deadline coinciding with the very bad, very disspiriting politics of the week so far and -- i hope not! -- the week to come. just tinkering with little bits and feeling im getting nowhere (laptop cutting in by being weird again post-repair for the first time in months, not NOW laptop ffs) or more precisely that the somewhere i have very much had in mind to get, just gets more meaningless by the hour

like i say, i feel a fraud: like my job (which i'm god at, or used to be) is more is to be on the other end of this conversation talking friends out of this nonsense

"i'm god at" thx freud

based

I believe in you mark s!

if ilx has taught me anything* it's that all woes are real, and blueness is a shifty concept that never fully matches up to a set of tangible causes. also maybe nonsense is some kind of fertile mulch idk it comes and it goes, hope yours goes soon

*it has not**

**ok it really really has but there's nothing funny about sincerity

listening to youtubes of the Heart Sutra with a grand miserable empty feeling of empty lostness, nowhere to go, nothing to do, absolutely out of touch

might get dressed and take this outside, can't shake it lately, actual problems should be gently receding but as they do the aloneness swooshes up the beach to fill their place

something something attachment something something the web of following on Twitter

I was thinking of you yesterday! Sorry to hear you’re feeling down, but I hope the 🤞🏻 we have been talking about helps somewhat?

it will help? this emptiness is happening in the waiting, i guess. but also when you're in limbo that's when the real things - which are lol irreal - have the time to come out and play maybe

and of course lockdown brings down the psychic shutters a bit, again.

but this is the real emptiness, this is what's always here even when you're not looking

Is it rude to ask you to put your clever brain to work to think of a new dn for me in the hopes of distracting you from the abyss

lol let's see if a walk kickstarts some kind of brain function

i came up with one the other week and didn't want to change this one because i was still running it in and now i've forgotten what the other one was

It’s really unfair because yours are by far the best

oh stop

throw enough scamp at the wall

Probably because I’ve been thinking about both Rome (2005) and Hadrian I’m like trying to think of a Latin type one

Like, x, y, scampus

have we had scampus fugit?

We have not!

Imo the struggle of, and with, sunyata is real... Being awfully far from enlightenment (=acceptance somewhat of the void, or: accepting the void, but... then what remains? where does that leave me, if not dead?) myself lol, I always took the conclusion of the sutra ("Gate, Gate, Paragate, Para Sam gate Bodhisvaha", something like "Gone, gone, gone to the other shore, awakening, svava") as a transcendental journey of the spirit, or the all, that crossed over from outside our emptiness, from out of all emptiness, to what comes after emptiness (enlightening). But it's very hard to even see the other shore, let alone... etc.

That's on me because I'm a terrible Buddhist lol, but if what you mean is the strong desire to even catch a glimpse of the other shore, of leaving emptiness (and any desire, for that matter) behind to the state of just (non-)being, then boy I hear you.

<3

It turns out that long dark nights, lockdowns, deadly pandemics, shitty politics, minimal interaction outside your immediate family, and an ever-growing list of serious/chronic physical health issues is not good for one's mental resilience.

Feeling blue.

<3 sorry to hear that bud. everything on top of everything else is a lot right now

don't know if a long walk upped my serotonin but at least i'm knackered and sweaty and can lie back on the settee with a clear conscience