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No podcast this week; a few idle musings about future guests, rich man’s fantasies, True Detective, depression, lucid boredom, UFOs, and God, to tide listeners over until next week.
Songs: “El Mariachi” and “Monkey Said” by The Freak Fandango Orchestra; “Six Sticks,” by Halloween; “Invisible Rock,” by Kevin Blechdom; “The Spase Dogs,” by the Vivisectors.
love you love the show.
🙂
Please don’t even think about stopping the podcasts. I lost your lucid voice for a few years and everything turned upside down! Seriously though, yours is one of the rare, honest, insightful voices out there in internet-land, and your presence is reassuring.
Depression has become such a dirty word. It’s become such a shameful thing to say, ”i’m feeling depressed.” There was a time when it was considered normal to feel down once in awhile, now no one wants to admit it, for fear of being labelled as ‘depressed’ and advised to take anti-depressants. We’re supposed to act as if everything’s great and we’re on top of the world at every moment. Those moments of feeling down have always been the catalyst to push me further & further along my path. For sure, they can be maddening, though.
I haven’t seen much of the 2nd season of True Detective, but I’m not impressed with it so far. I was much more impressed with the 1st season, which is one of the rare, recent t.v. series I’ve watched. I grew up on 60s & 70s t.v. and have been thoroughly marked by it, so I tend to avoid anything to do with t.v. (have never owned one).
Glad your heatwave has passed — ours is never-ending (south of france).
Warm regards.
thanks; that was at least partly why i wanted to talk about it (depression)
also, to not withdraw but without hiding that, and why, I wanted to.
Hey Jasun, I suffer from depression.
Just emerging from a truly crippling bout myself, so it was interesting and apposite
to hear you talk about it. Had it all my life. It’s torture when it hits.
Often depression is equated with feeling a bit down, but in truth the two states are incomparable. Feeling up and down is normal. Depression can be a killer. I don’t know how bad you get it . . but . . .
http://www.buzzfeed.com/annaborges/depression-101-yo#.vw485XQ6V3
In any event, when it sets in, I have this almost uncontrollable urge to take down everything I have ever done, everything I am working on, everything i have planned, and everything seems like a contemptible cruel universal joke. Sometimes I cannot resist this destructive impulse. An attempt to erase all trace of my external self. So, if I were putting myself out there as you are, it’s quite possible I would have deleted everything in a fit of excruciating hopelessness and existential rage. So, I think you did a clever/brave thing to talk about it in order to work through it and to turn it into a podcast. That is creative. The work I produce when I’m on that edge of the abyss [if I can manage to force myself to work] is always curiously lucid as it feels as though I am fighting for my life. Because, in truth, at those moments, in those days, I am fighting for my life. For my right to exist. For my self.
I hope you are feeling better. Perhaps we passed through a wavecloud of bad energy. I seriously sometimes hope this might be the case. It would at least be an external explanation of the appalling dread alien possession that is the depressive mindset. Would be nice to externalize it like that. And it would make me feel sensitive and special as opposed to defective and broken 🙂
In any event, I look forward to more audios.
I am working my way through the crucial fictions audios – a really great series. All the best.
Thanks; I’m glad that communicated, a podcast about why I am too depressed to do a better podcast ~ what could be better?! 😀
i realized when I listened back (not knowing if it was broadcastable) that it was my way of “showing up” even just to say, i really don’t feel like showing up this week. To keep the connection open, signal on, even when I wanted to shut everything down, as you say.
and yeah I’ve dismantled websites and IDs so i could disappear before, tho I mostly left the traces up. the fear of being seen the terror of not being seen; the desperate need for connection combined with the vulnerability and danger of connecting. that is what the podcast IS, for me, a weekly reenactment of that need, dread, passion. To emerge from the deadness of an abandoned psyche shutting down in order not to die of anguish, and risk re-experiencing the abandonment all over again, because connecting is the only way to come back to life.
In many ways I am feeling worse, thanks for asking; but also better. the movement forward/upward is also a movement downward & inward.
I hear you 100%
The heart will be broken over and over again . . by the paradoxical practice and relentlessly impossible balancing act of self expression, humility and narcissism, constant exhausting triumph / defeat & tragedy / hope / ignominy, that is being an artist and staying true to the ‘real’ . . which i suppose is really just a macro of the crashing waves of successive heartbreaks of ego on the shore of the precocious and indefatigable paradox of the blessing and curse that is the human experience/condition.
And there is also a negative side [ha ha!]
After your interview with Bo, I am thinking I possibly have this same Asp condition.
Keep going, it’s really special material that you do. Unique.
Have you ever seen The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet documentary? If not, I think you’d enjoy it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLqrVCi3l6E
Nope, but it’s the 3rd time Ted K has hit my radar this week….
‘Showing up to say I don’t feel like showing up’ – bravo.
Bored in your dream – boredom = distancing mechanism, disengagement, dissociation – you’re protecting yourself from getting too close to something too painful? (Lucidity can mean heightened defended ego?) So choosing violence over suffering – ‘The false God changes suffering into violence. The True God changes violence into suffering’ – remember that quote? (Simone Weil)
Some thoughts, might be helpful.
Loved your description of yourself as a ‘quivering blob of psychic jelly’, think I’ll adopt it.
x
I think there was something of that, yes. I like the quote. Maybe I should use “QBoPJ” on a new run of business cards?