On the wine-dark sea

I would like to take this opportunity to announce a cast change. The character formerly known in another venue as "Mrs. Pops" will be played by No One in Particular.

You, my loyal and devoted readers, may have noticed some traces of unwelcome darkness and more unwelcome (if not blasphemous) seriousness in some recent posts. While I enjoy very much maintaining control of information as to the shape and form of the man behind the curtain here, it isn't always easy to keep the chalky flavor of the incidents and accidents of Actual Life out of the otherwise savory blog stew.

The inky pap coating the back of your tongues, making you gag just a little? Yes, that was the flavor of separation and impending divorce infecting the palate balance in subtle ways like too much saffron or flakes of polonium-210.

There are dark days, yes, when I consider the state of my mortgage and my children (in revolving order, depending on what I'm looking at) and all the standard, unwise relationship forensics wherein I ponder such pointless imponderables as "Where did it all go wrong?" or "Why me, Lord, why?" They are imponderables not because they have no answer but because the answers are all too obvious, shining back from mirrored surfaces under the Klieg lights of hindsight. In retrospect, multiple years of suffocating indifference strung together all in a row seem a much bigger deal than when they were happening. They beg no pondering of any kind.

Still, clarity is not much of a salve. Usually it serves just to make you feel stupid, which ideally, is not what you want from your standard salve. If I'm applying a judgmental salve, it had better cover the hell out of existing wounds, leeching out the chronic sting and lingering heat and, best case scenario, smell like eucalyptus and mint.

Finding oneself set adrift can be disorienting, spirit-breaking and harsh. The endless, churning horizon of swells and whitecaps cut by the occasional curious dorsal fin is an invitation to recoil inward from the existential dread incumbent in portlessness and in the face of approaching storms. But this, as everything else, is simply a question of context and perspective. If one would merely stand, raise the eye level, drag the gaze along the horizon's circle, it is possible to see that instead of lost at sea, one is instead the captain and crew of a seaworthy vessel unbounded by itinerary or direction. This is the line between lost and escaped. Between abandoned and free. Between pushed and jumped.

The purest expression of liberation is when there is no more failure to be had. It's what keeps the Maoists in the jungles of South America. It is what compels the brutally decoupled to try coupling again.

There are more metaphors to be made about sunrises and springtime and birth and the state of the American daily newspaper, the point of all of which is this: Memento mori. Remember, you must die. This is a slogan, not a motto. It is ballast. A counterweight. A check against hubris and the calamity of despair. Better, I think, to hold our noses and proclaim, despite all evidence to the contrary: OMNIA VINCIT AMOR.

Taken together, they dialogue to say that before the end, with our perspective intact, something wonderful may happen. But it only counts if we have our heads up to recognize it.