Little deaths

I do a lot of walking. Tons. Mostly at night.  It ain't anything except just a statement of what is.  It's what I do, so here I am saying it because there ain't much else to say about myself, and I like talking about myself.

Walking.  THOUSANDS of MILES a YEAR.  I do it because my only alternative is to sleep, and there's a limit to how much of that you can do, unfortunately.  You can't sleep sixteen hours a day and work the other eight, every day, for the rest of your life. You Just cant.  I know because I've tried.  No, not even with drugs.  It just flat out ain't a tenable situation, ever, unless you put yourself in a coma.  Then you can't work, and it becomes a completely different situation which is moot anyway. 

Here, see.  I'm talking about actually recognizing and accepting your inevitable choice to participate in this tragically unsatisfying, hellishly depressing, agonizingly unavoidable role in this... thing... this, this slow sludge that comprises the other half of awareness, as a functioning, living zombie. Aware and horrified.  Relief from it isn't even a concept that exists, so forget that you ever even heard that there was such a thing that never was.  Don't argue with me. 

Eventually, almost every day, I'll realize that each horrifying slice of the experience is pretty much just mine alone.  Unique to me, you know.  And I'll wonder how I ever agreed to take ownership of all this... shit.  So there's this thing I do, that I didn't know that I did... which is going out, out, out, dumb and unaware, and then going back in like a baby and grabbing on to whatever happens to be around that feels untainted, or different, or even just a brand new kind of bad.  I heard about the doing of that kind of thing somewhere, so I know about it.  I relate to it in a big way. Whatever that means... that is, the meaning of what I just laid out there describes in a vague, parallel way the sum feeling of my ignorant hopes, if they were added up over all of these years of wandering around, and then averaged out to the essence of some kind of total. 

Once you begin to notice the absence of all the unnoticed miles, then I think you'll understand what 'going in like a baby' means to me.  If you've taken hundreds of thousands of aimless footsteps in the dark, then you'll understand that eventually you want it to become less of something to do with just empty, heavy, unsupported swaths of time... that's what I want, anyway.  I dunno why I'm talking like I think I know what you want.  I guess I'm just lonely.

God, it's such a hopeless and diminishing thing to feel, the relentless press of every day on top of the other one.  It's so much and it hurts so longly and I feel so old.  I just wish that there could be such a thing as pain, again, but for the first time. Isn't that strange.

I really don't remember when I started to hope and wish that all of these everyday beginnings, of all of these waking ups and these long walks and little deaths would somehow add up to a beginning that I'd never met before, to a middle I'd never known, and a real ending that was more than just a last page that moved out of the way when it was turned, to reveal a brand new beginning to the same, endless exhaustion.