Healing

It's with me now, the depression. Not black, but it feels dangerous. Something like despair. It's kept its distance for half a year now. But I suppose like any addiction or infection it has to flare up according to some arcane calender. There's a liar screaming in my ear. Should I listen? Because this liar tells the truth. But only part of it.

Banged my shin Tuesday with a cut and it was a lump yesterday and now it's an angry five inch bruise with some squishiness and heat. I'd expect it to be gone tomorrow, but the fluid may confound the matter. Makes me think about healing, though, the process. How can it be made faster? That's what it's all about, with exercise -- recovery. With age, recovery just takes longer -- a genetic thing. But how to optimize, within the necessary limits of reality?

It's such a slow process. Consistent effective efforts that lead to almost imperceptible gains. We see them only by recording results across a meaningful span of time. Like aging. The mirror and the calender mark our decay. It's not reversible, but it's controllable. Sensible diet, sensible exercise. What else is there? We're made out of what we eat, and we use what we're made of, to do things. Diet and exercise. We can get by pretty well, with just okay diet, and okay exercise. But what if they were extraordinary?

I ate a pizza yesterday. A special healthfood no-cheese pizza, with some sort of soy substitute. It was okay. It had milk protein though. Big deal? Right, but it was a compromise. I didn't notice the animal when I bought it, and when I did notice, I was too cheap and selfish and greedy to not eat it. And now, today, that bump became a big nasty squishy purple bruise. Is there a connection? Dough and soy omega-six and raised insulin levels and a hot lumpy bruise? I don't know. We have to have pleasure. Does all pleasure make us weaker?

I was thinking of how we comfort ourselves with pleasure. I thought, there are just two physical pleasures, taste and skin. Music and art and poetry and good conversation and convivial companionship -- these are pleasures, but I mean physical. Food and sex, basically. What is it they soothe?

Do you think I've been honest? I feel like something found clutched in the fist of a murder victim. A clue. Not all crimes are solved, though. And justice is even more rare. I want to say there is no hope. But there must be. Sometimes, not always but sometimes, I know that I'd be dead if I didn't have a family that would be hurt by it. That's just depression talking, and depression is a liar, with its partial truths. But it's true.

Excellence has to be good enough. There is no perfection, after all. I'm just so sick of it all. Good thing I pretend to have some integrity.

There are no unguarded moments, and everything is for effect.


J