The Lingering Lemon of Death

in which i am surprised that life is not like the movies

Heard this on the radio, and followed it up today on the web. A woman in Dubuque Iowa is awakened one morning when a 50 pound chunk of ice smashes through her roof into her living room. There is absolutely no explanation for this.  While there are aviation and weather sources which might cause such an object, neither of those sources are possible for this one. And in the movies, scientists would be crawling over this woman's house, trying to get to the bottom of it.  Top men would be measuring and taking notes, computing the trajectory and possible velocity of the object from the impact area,in an attempt to determine it's origin.  Samples of the ice sent off the be analyzed 17 different ways, the mystery must be solved. In real life, she stuck the piece of ice in her freezer, so that when the claims adjuster came over she would have something to show him. Apparently she was worried that he might think she had, like so many people before her, faked a meteor strike in an attempt to defraud the insurance company. Shouldn't there be a federal department of investigating large things which fall from the sky and into my living room?  I feel strangely unsafe.  I was expecting that, should a 50 lb. object, probably ejected from a cloaked UFO skimming through the atmosphere and filled with deadly bacteria never before seen on earth, fall into my house, at the very least I and my entire family would mysteriously vanish, spirited away in unmarked white vans, as an arsonist torches our house to cover up the incident. I pay taxes, I demand an efficient hyper paranoid super secret government agency. I'm writing to my representatives in Washington.

more on depression

though almost every measurable aspect of my life is perfect, i walk through days feeling like i am in a prison camp condemned to death. it's quite bad right now, even though i am on medication.

i refuse to be defeated by this feeling which is so dis-connected from reality. but today, i am so tired of struggling with all my might just to reach "normal" and and so angry at the zillions of people who, when they see a CD out of the case, simply find the case and put it away, instead of spiraling down the "just another sign of the 10,000 ways my life is falling apart" maelstrom.

i think i need to stop wishing i were like other people, it seems like i am never going get there, and figure out how to live a life filled with hope, while still having these surreal emotions. i'm thinking of "a beautiful mind" at the end, where instead of trying to rid himself of his psychosis, he figures out how to navigate the real world while still seeing the unreal every day.

rooting around in my photo collection to find something to accompany this post, i discover that in my photography, i almost never photograph the dark emotions. i'm always looking for hope. as i think about it, i find myself actually a little bit afraid to think of what it would be like to take pictures which show this other part of me. maybe it would be a good and integrating move to walk around with my camera and take pictures which feel like depression.