Vox Nihilim

A lot of time has passed.

I'm talking specifically since the last time I chose to write anything online. But in a more nebulous sense, a lot of time has passed since I was a person who WOULD write anything online. I'm older now. The hot,flaky, insanity of writing private thoughts online is a phenomenon of the past.  I miss it.

I'm sitting here in my motel room, listening to the army of feral cats outside wail in asynchronous time with the hushed flumes of the cars hurtling down the nearby interstate. An outpost for the homeless has been built under the tree that rests on the precipice of a dried out gully. Their tarpaulins, and rags flap in the wind like banners on the walls of nothing. The cats swirl and spiral in eddies around the garbage cans. This is the Garlic capital of the world, and tonight I am its king.

When I first started blogging in 2007, I was very depressed. Untreated and clinical...not the fun kind. I came here alone and lonely, and wrote to draw the bile that had built up within from my nasty separation with my wife, and excise it into the dust like so much ill-advised rattlesnake venom in old Westerns. I eventually made friends online, and we built a little community, first on Myspace and then here.  It was very nice and it was precisely what I needed at the time. I was very silly. I wrote a lot of silly things. I behaved even sillier. I fell in love a few times. I hurt people. Others hurt me. It was a new life bloomed in the crater of the old one. It was like garlic. Strong and powerful and stinking and flavorful.

There is a small engine repair shop next door, The boards of the shop walls are dried and their paint is flaky and grey, like the peelings of sunburn to be rasped off. A hazard of lawnmowers congeal in clots throughout the alkali dust of the shoddily-fenced backyard. Rust and rust and rust peppering the ground in tumors beneath the untrimmed palms.  The cats roil through fence holes. In and out along their byways, always searching for food. The thin blue oil of a worklight spills across the dirt in a narrow cone, while the warm wind cradles the light twang of country music. On the breeze it is only a whisper, a secret, a melancholy wish for another place, or time, or girl, or chance... it's too subtle to tell which. It doesn't matter. The point is made.

I don't think I'm depressed anymore. My life has righted itself from the near disastrous toppling of a decade ago. There have been times when I felt lost since. When my father died. When I sat in the hotel in Chicago and wept for hours at the things I knew I had ruined. A few other times between the general positive uptick life has taken. I can't complain. I've figured myself out and come to terms with my mistakes and shortcomings. But I've never felt the urge to write until tonight. I don't even know why...I just CAN again.

Garlic capital of the world. Fucking weird, yo.