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TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


10.10.22

I am in a deep funk. It's been percolating for weeks now. Business in the pub and office has slowed, and all my projects remain unfinished or neglected due to enervation. I feel far away from all my friends, although, if I looked at my life objectively, I'm not without company. In the background, leaching into conversation and the back of the mind, various national tragedies and of course the looming spectre of a global recession. Plus, I am living with a mother-in-law, whose list of prohibitions grow longer every day.

I'm not sure of how to get out of this funk. The only thing that gives me any measure of peace is yoga, and you can't do yoga all day long, can you? I could write, but writing isn't salvation; it's a compulsion, with little reward. I could drink, but I lack inclination.

I could try to read my way out of it. I've done it before, in the years when I was broke and down and out, in Oakland and Ballyvaughan and Galway, biking to multiple dead-end jobs and eating lentil soup for dinner every night and scraping change out of the crevices of sofas. The years my parents wouldn't talk to me for marrying the wrong man. The years of living with a bipolar alcoholic, witty and charming in public, dreadful and unappeased at home. The years, so many of them, I didn't know what I wanted to do with myself; in that regard, I was among what Karim in Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia calls "the unhappiest sort". Those years, I'd sit in the library or lie in bed all day, just reading and drinking coffee, finishing one novel and picking up another, stewing in other people's misery and bad choices. Time would pass pleasantly, if intensely at times, and word by word, sentence by sentence, page by page, I'd find that my state of self-pity and paralysis had cleared, and I could make some kind of decision about the present, as much as I dreaded the consequences of that decision. I could do that now, but what would the mother-in-law think?




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