Flailing

Something very large and indistinct is moving slowly into alignment with me, so I'm sighting down its length. Or into its barrel. I'm not sure this thing will not blow up. I don't know what it is.

Still sick, perpetually sick, these days. My old ways of recovery won't do: I need to get rid of this visceral fat without doing a whole lot of exercise, and that means letting a lot of muscle go. Maybe I'll get to build the muscle back, and maybe I won't; but nothing good is going to happen until this systemic inflammation drops. If the muscle has to go it has to go. I need to get rid of this fat, as quick as I can.

It is an achingly beautiful Fall, this year, and I have barely seen it.

Why have I been so fretful and self-absorbed? Being sick does that to you, I guess. For one thing. But also I am more cut off from the world than I have ever been. Flailing in space like an untethered astronaut; every action its own equal and opposite reaction, summing to zero.

I fumble towards an idea of how I am in the world that includes the notion that understanding things may do some good even though it remains implicit and uncommunicated, but my materialism is so ingrained that there's not much traction there. What good does it do? I mean, there are side-glimmers, mistakes I don't make, injuries I don't inflict. Maybe. But the steamroller of Dickensian liberalism keeps bearing down on me: what good does it do? Where are the children saved from poverty, the tigers from extinction, the libraries from demolition? I'm just a black-robed priest muttering to himself in a dark place, grudging the virgins their sunlight.

Thus Dickens. Blake has another point of view: but then Blake was visited by the Christ in the morning, and drank God with his morning tea. I am a spirit of another sort.