I feel that I ought to write something today, but I don’t really have any idea just what I ought to write.  It seems the only things I have to discuss nowadays are gloomy, depressing, soul-sucking things.  Then again, at least nowadays, gloominess and soul-suckery seem to be the most prominent aspects of who I am.  If I were a character from the Harry Potter books, I would be a dementor.

I know, dementors aren’t really characters, per se.  They’re really just creatures.  We don’t really get the notion of any personalities from them, though they apparently are able to negotiate and make agreements with the Ministry of Magic, or with Voldemort and the Death Eaters*.  We also know that they can reproduce.

Of course, I’ve often compared myself to the Nazgul from The Lord of the Rings, but I think in most cases I’m a bit less malevolent.  Then again, I’m not under the command of any Sauron equivalent, who has malevolent and authoritarian** intentions and is the real proximate cause of the ringwraiths’ bad deeds.

My own stories were much more positive and lighthearted‒such as Mark Red and The Chasm and the Collision‒when I was in prison, oddly enough.  I suspect that’s because, while there, I was able to think that when I got out I would be able to return to some form of life, to be part of my kids’ lives again, maybe to find some new purpose and new friends and so on.  That delusion that didn’t survive long, though; once I learned that my kids didn’t want to go back to seeing me every other week (or even less) and that my son didn’t want to interact with me at all, it became hard to be upbeat.

It sometimes pisses me off when I see people who are less reliable and safe than I am, who care far less about their families and their children, who have various destructive habits that wreak havoc in the lives of their loved ones…and yet who have friends and families, children and loved ones who stick with them, who strive to help them, who actually want their presence, even through catastrophes worse than mine and through harmful deeds that I would never even consider.

I don’t really grok it‒it seems profoundly unjust‒but intellectually I know that it’s only to be expected, and has multivariate causes.  I also know that justice is entirely a human invention, a fiction of you will, like money and the various religions, and that I have no excuse for expecting any reward for the good deeds I’ve done (such as they are) or for the positive character attributes I have tried to embody (however imperfectly).

I don’t expect anything to get better at this point, and my own fiction has trended in that direction ever since I got out of work-release.  Not that it was ever truly lighthearted, mind you‒even CatC presented a universe-destroying threat and put the onus for preventing it on three middle-school students.  But the stories were optimistic in general.

My most recent story, Extra Body, is admittedly rather optimistic and even has a happy ending.  But that was deliberate.  I had to make a conscious effort to write so positively, and you’ll notice I haven’t published the story other than here in this blog.

Oh, well.  Whadaya gonna do?  I’m simply not having a wonderful Christmas time (with apologies to Sir Paul), nor a wonderful Hanukkah time, nor a wonderful week or month or year or decade.  No matter where I go, there I am, and I think you all can at least imagine how unpleasant it is to be around me 24 hours a day, every day, for the rest of my life.  You would want to kill yourself, too, if you had no other means of escape.

*Surely that must be the name of some indie heavy metal or goth or punk band somewhere.  If it’s not, then that’s further proof of the degeneration of the music industry.

**I say authoritarian rather than totalitarian because Sauron does not seem inclined to micromanage the thoughts of those rules.  His orcs certainly don’t seem to worship him exactly, nor be motivated by ideology as such.  They admire and fear his power, of course, and act out of hope for personal gain.  Also, of course, their nature, twisted by Morgoth originally, is such that Sauron, or someone like him, is their only workable authority figure.  You’d think it might be worth the Valar’s time to try to treat and heal the orcs, who are as they are through no fault of their own.  But no, Manwe et al would rather sit in their little paradise, high up on their mountain or in their halls of judgment, all of which isn’t even directly attached to Middle Earth anymore.  Heck, maybe if they had tried to reach out to Melkor in the first place, when he was such an awkward outsider even at the start, things would all have been much less traumatic for all.  But no, Iluvatar wants his entertainment, his ongoing struggle of “good” versus “evil”, all of which is his doing in the first place.  I wonder if he creates his own popcorn to eat while watching.