Insights lacking, my mind is tasked with scrounging inspiration on the opposite end of the spectrum from pessimism, while attempting to avoid redundancies and the overindulgence of self that might not even be interesting enough for an advice column in some newspaper thirty years ago.

Do such things even exist anymore?

Or has that too been integrated and condensed down to video fragments for superficial mass consumption, along with vainly motivational bros, armchair political experts preying on conspiratorial minds never minding the truth over exploitation, and the visually appealing, often times buxom lasses garnering attention in ways that have more or less been done for millennia.

Wanna guess which media trap I find myself falling into most often? I suppose, at times, I am not as complex as I like think to think myself to be.

There is a numbing oversaturation, though, these days. And I wonder what limits are being pressed upon the collective human mind as the technological oligarchs continue to harvest attention and expression for cheap and addictive participation. People as products for their data, with no sign of any of the collection points aiming to be anything aside from malignant. Yet, I still feed into it, smart as I think myself. Smart ass, really.  

Even this, is all part of that system. And the antiquated methods and unambitious distribution leave it so often times feeling fruitless, or worse. An exercise in futility of ever diminishing returns. Words, always dancing around any worthwhile points, it seems.

But, anyway.

Been trying to force or coerce some ideological shifts, when possible. If possible. I suppose much of it is all perspective over substance. After all, there is only so much that can change in brief moments, if ever. But spending this inescapable time in the woods, all by my lonesome, gets the wheels turning, whether I would like them to or not. And turn and turn, and turn, they shall. And the efforts to take better care of myself, mind and body and such, also means that the reduction of former activities of anesthetic has left the mental chaos I call home more untethered, reins dragging along the floor, seeming always just enough out of reach.

There are lately efforts to think of these long bouts of alone, aside from the ever-occurring inner dialogue performed outward, as solitude as opposed to isolation. Seems a small semantic difference, but I believe it matters at least in the slightest, if not more.

See, solitude sounds like something monks and eccentric writers engage in. Isolation sounds like a punishment. A sentence for prisoners, and not well-behaved ones at that.

A strange enough condition for such an interconnected world as this one. But it is felt, and I’m sure not just by I. Perhaps you too, dear reader, it might be that you know a bit of that contrarian idea I’m toying with like some bored animal. Even when overstimulated by sights and sounds and other beings and so on, there you are trapped in a mind that you can never escape. Not in this life. Or not without an ice pick, at least.

Or perhaps I’m being theatrical again.

I know, right? Me? Never.

Though there is something to that idea of being lonely in a crowded room. Or with today’s advances in technology- lonely while most of the rest of the planet is technically only a few moves away from instant communication is something new to the human experience. And it seems like everything is set to pull us further apart as we drown in our own echo chambers, cutting ourselves off from ideas and feelings that would certainly serve us better in the personal and social aspects overall.

Forgive me, if you will. Today was a bit of a nostalgia trip that I suppose I am still reeling from.

See, I took my daughter to Manhattan today.

And as we went about, I would tell her tales of locations we passed through and what her father remembers from each place, while also leaving out a great bit to remain trapped in the cycles of my own mind and heart. That famous building where once I was a young intern. The iconic train station where I used to run like mad to catch the last train after midnight, drunkenly on my way back to school. While keeping to myself that in that corner over there, I was told a promise that was never to be kept. Or across the street, I had to throw out a shirt because the regurgitated fun of the evening wound up all over myself. Or that park where a young man, only a few years older than she is now, fell hopelessly in love. Emphasis on the hopeless, though I suppose I couldn’t know all that then.

Perhaps this is all the cost of overzealous hope, which I had in abundance in those days. High on my own fumes and dizzy with all the prospective futures, might be I squandered so much being drowned in opportunity.

Yet, as the circles under my eyes grow another shade darker in permanence- that hope somehow still lingers. Vague and often times malnourished, I still dream of the future, while fighting off the specters of the past. Could be the unrelenting optimism somehow, still, even after all these years and tragedies, remaining intact in essence. Or it is all the pursuit of vanity disguised as some grab at greatness, whatever in the hell that even means?

Is greatness sought for some large benevolence, or to feed only this vicious ego of mine?

Or is it all some further step into madness? The perpetual denial of what is, stuck in some phase long gone? Thinking of what is yet to be from this throne of thrown away yesterdays?

And within these moments of overthinking, I thought some more. I thought about this child made up of half my DNA, and what it is when she thinks and sees all of this? Does my appearance and behavior seem different in such a locale? It must. And in ways, it must seem more natural at times than how often I feel out here, waiting in line with other parents in suburban and rural New England. What must that make her feel? Or is my own self-importance overriding these thoughts? She must think of herself, within all this. And where it is she will go and what it is that she will see and be, or at least hopes for. Does she see herself in such a place? Does her heart ache in the same ways, or at least similarly to how mine did at the time?

There is this other story, a nostalgia bit, I told her a few days ago. Turns out we ended up in that location today, though not originally planned. An art museum, right in the middle of town. I was there on a date with her mother, just to show you how long ago now that was.

There was an exhibit, the only one I remember from that particular day. A large, white walled room, consisting of two projector screens in two corners, and two old television sets a few feet more towards the center of that same room. On each screen was the same video, shown in staggered timing, of an elephant walking around a larger, white room similar to the one we were in. Just walking around, nowhere else to go, nowhere else to be but this room. People were thoughtfully looking at each aspect of the exhibit, commenting quietly to each other.

And then I, as the boisterous and bullheaded young man I was, started laughing belligerent and loud. If I’m remembering correctly, the soon to be mother of my child gave me a look of embarrassed inquisition.

‘Don’t you get it?’ says I.

Silence, more or less, as a reply.

‘Everyone is talking about the elephant in the room.’

To this day, I swear, if that was the artist’s intention, that was one of the most brilliant pieces of modern art I’ve ever seen.

I still can’t remember the rest of the date.

But I can tell you this, over a decade later, I still think of that, as I drop our child off at her now nuclear home, and see her through the kitchen window, with her husband and son. As I walked back to my car, I wondered today, if she remembered that at all. I never asked, and I suppose I might not ever. We talk plenty, about the what we need to, being good co-parents. But we don’t talk about such things. Ancient history and such.

But that’s just it, isn’t it. As soon as something happens, it becomes history. And some of those experiences and people keep reoccurring. And some of them don’t. Some are gone, for good and forever. But the reveries remain, as long as our wits will them to be held.

So, I go back to this empty castle, in this foreign land, and talk to ghosts.

Might be that I talk to my dead friend too much, but I’m not going to stop. Wrote a song on an instrument that used to be his, this week, about a sadness he knew well. I think he would have liked it, but that, I never get to know.

Next week, then, dear reader. Maybe we’ll get something done next time. Or maybe not.