Later that Night

I have a headache and can't sleep. I make myself a cup of sweet brown hot water (otherwise known as instant cocoa) and write this. The long hours of the night stretch before me like a dull knife blade, tarnished and rusty, inefficient and useless without grit of joy or sorfow to give it shine. Nothing is accomplished here. Simply still more random mutterings. everything seems the same as always: me writing and smoking leaves the realm of the ritual and becomes merely repetetive, meaningless tasks to fill up time.

I think I am mad at my psychiatrist. I think I cannot tell him these thigns as I would like to do, for fear he will urge me on to still more meaningless tasks to fill up time. "Do volunteer work," he says and doesn;t seem to recognise that doing volunteer work without meaning is useless. The meaning does not come from the work like a rabbit coming from a magician's hat. The meaning must come first or the work itself is de-meaned. I imagine telling this to my psychiatrist and him telling me I have to find my own meaning and my telling him that's bullshit; I've been searching for meaning these twenty years or more and not found it. Everything is flat and grey. This is not the black pit of depression and I wish it were because at least you can feel something there. This is something in between, or maybe even lower. The grey place. The paths of the dead maybe, where the dead have no names and no identity. I feel I have no name anymore; there is no me in me. All those things that once defined me are gone like ash on the wind.

I wonder if this is how the Elves feel when they forsake Middle Earth and go to Valinor, and wonder why in the world they would want to go somewhere that grants them eternal life.