hurling invective dot com

I feel compelled to make a small follow up to my deliriously inspiring post immediately previous this one. While you, I am certain, felt as though you were soaring above the clouds while getting orally serviced and eating cheesecake, others found my allegory of Tetris-as-Life to be, well, very me. Which scares them.

It occurred to me today, however, that I didst indeed prevaricate while describing the “accidental line in crisis mode” scenario. To quote:

All you cling to is the vain hope that something will go right. That you will accidentally complete some line and watch it disappear, get your bearings and get things under control.

But you never will.

I do often feel like things will never be quite right in my life, but that’s just because the chemicals in my brain are mostly the kind used to preserve Twinkies rather than dopamine, serotonin, alcohol – you know, the good stuff. But in spite of that, I have an occasional moment of clarity where I realize that it’s quite possible I’m wrong about all that.

When the Tetris pieces are falling faster than you can process and orient them, and you’re nearing the top, and you’re about to stare down the striped screen of death, somehow – against all odds and all possibility of comprehension – you nail a line and watch it disappear. It’s a small victory that you hurtle past on your way down the otherwise unswerving path to sweet oblivion, heaping failure upon failure to reach your climb to the top of the bottom. The distraction is as brief as it is sweet.

In a dim haze wrought of anti-depressants and depressants fighting for control of my shattered psyche, it occurred to me that I once used to focus on the small victories rather than the oblivion. Somehow I had lost that focus.

My son just turned four months old. He doesn’t know it yet, but he led me back to this way of living. It’s easy to spot those small victories in life when they take the form of a smile on his face, or a look of awe at a new discovery in his world. Thanks, kid.