Spring

Done with the Opens. 81st place! Yeeah! Top, maybe, 12%. Oh. That's not so good. Well, my legs are not as strong as they need to be. A lot. Still, I haven't been entirely serious. Top twenty go right to the Games. That group, I see, clusters together, then a big gap, then everyone else. So, the serious guys, the also rans, and the drop ins.

I have a motivation issue. The depression is back, and a few nights ago it was so bad I considered pharmaceutical medication. Not actively, it just occurred to me that that's how bad it was ... medicatable. This can't be, cannot be the way we were meant to be. Depression. Self-destruction, of the proactive sort, seems not to be in my makeup. But if it were, I'd be done by now.

Spiritual, emotional, chemical. I don't know which, as a root cause. My alienation from God, and the concomitant assault, as needed, by demonic forces. They probably don't bother with me much anymore. I know they used to. My prayers, when I pray, consist of me seeing myself on a storm-blown peak, at the edge of a vast cliff, calling into the wind, "GOD! GOD?" He has never replied. God nowadays appears only to communicate via writing. Well, I'm a reader. Or used to be.

The baggage from my childhood? -- with its abuse and neglect, bitterness and unforgiveness. Something organic? -- some molecule, hormone, peptide, amino acid, that's just present in the wrong ratio? I don't know.

Staying alive is a duty, not a pleasure. Habit and stubbornness sustain me. I know this can't be the way it should be. It's interfering with my training. Utterly unmotivated. It's kept me from doing things I was born to do, from doing even the conventional things that normal people do, like living in a home, or having a mate. Recently it's been subterranean, a reprieve, but here it is again. It's not even about hope, or hopelessness. Pointlessness. Sometimes I can hardly stand it.

Do not argue with me when I say mine is the God of Unanswered Prayer. Yes, silence is an answer, of sorts, as is punishment. But I'm one of those characters who needs to be rescued more than once. I need mercy to be renewed every morning. Mercy, a word that has meaning.

But all that was a few nights ago, and I'm better now.

Trayvon, the boy in Florida who got shot down. Well, he was visiting relatives because he'd been suspended for possessing a bag with marijuana debris ... so he was a fresh-faced kid with an Obama-bright smile, but he wasn't a saint. And along comes Zimmerman, who sees the boy on the way to buy Skittles -- the munchies? -- and Z wants to be a hero. The boy was on the phone with his girlfriend ... some guy is following me! Maybe he turned on Z, but that would be maybe the "stand your ground" situation that Z is claiming for himself. Still, no rush to judgment. We can't punish wannabe heroes just for wanting to be heroes. Guys who blow away people who are confronting a threat, though ... a little tougher situation.

The Old Testament has the idea of the City of Refuge, where someone who causes an accidental death, as an ax head flying off and killing someone, can flee and be safe from the life for a life justice the victim's family. Sort of a punishment. Sort of a mercy. Z appears to have had grass stains on the back of his head. So there was a confrontation, not just a cold murder. It's complicated. If it's complicated, justice will not be clear. Either we're not allowed to be wannabe heroes, in which case we are no longer men or Americans, or if we are innocent and stalked while Skittle-buying and if we confront our stalker who perhaps pulls a gun and if we rush him ... we can be killed without it being a crime -- in which case, well, it's confusing.

Here's an example of what's not acceptable. No City of Refuge for unrighteous prosecutors. Where is God's swift justice when we need it?


J