As I’ve said often enough, I’m fairly cheerful by default. I’ve had a lingering melancholy tinge since Natan died, but for the most part I’ve integrated his birth and death into my personality. It’s just there. My body messed up; it misunderstood what it was supposed to do. I’m humbled. I’m not angry at the universe anymore, and I’m trying to figure out how to make up for professional time lost that was no one’s fault.
I have very different feelings about the bad things we do to one another. For the past ten months, members of my extended family have been experiencing a different kind of misery, a man-made torment. A world upside-down, deep anger and frustration sparking hell. My sense of goodness and my faith in my ability to understand the world is confused. Things I thought I understood, I don’t. People I thought were good, aren’t. Opinions I thought I could trust, I can’t. It’s different because people are doing it to one another. People who know better, know the truth, and don’t care.
Against that, I rebel. But not in an organized fashion. I do know at least that we can blame the overdone personal ambition of a few men, and probably throw in some incompetent, superficial, sensationalist and self-righteous scribblers. (I’m being deliberately abstract.) And that’s my generous assessment of their characters and talents.
The events find me allied among figures with whom I mostly don’t agree. I’m thinking and asking new questions about the world around me, and how it came to look and move the way it does. It shouldn’t surprise me really, given the source. I’ve long know these people, that place, and that source to get it all wrong, to be opportunist, occlusive and banal. When I first got away, I had a physical response when I was forced to contend with it all again. The closer I got, the more familiar the sounds, sights and smells, the more I could feel a sucking in my chest, my soul departing I would joke, and I could hardly breathe or see. I grew up and out of it, realizing that I could decide, that I could go back and forth, that I could push away the bad and appreciate the good.
That’s just not so anymore, and in fact the mechanisms I developed to help me understand those people and that place, are crashing in on one another. They’re having a bit of a Carnival, taking values, people and principles I hold dear and giving them a skimmington ride. But it’s all based on lies and obfuscation.
And that’s about as specific as I can get right now.
further records 
“The closer I got, the more familiar the sounds, sights and smells, the more I could feel a sucking in my chest, my soul departing I would joke, and I could hardly breathe or see. I grew up and out of it, realizing that I could decide, that I could go back and forth, that I could push away the bad and appreciate the good.”- This passage moves me and I understand the feeling. I struggle with “realizing that I could decide” even now.