[Audience Laughter|Audible Gasp]

Just had a scare. Which is appropriate, Halloween being proximate to this time of year. Trying to upgrade the platform for this website, it became unresponsive. Pages did not load. The site was unresponsive. There were issues with dependency versioning. And so on and so forth. Thankfully at the end of the hour, everything came back to life. And what better excuse to write a new article?

The Nightmare:

Terror and laughter are inextricably related. We like them both; so long as they're under control. It's a feeling of helplessness, humiliation, and the trap that gives us the real willies. We really don't want to be stuck where we can't get out, even if it doesn't actually mean us any danger. Because without that way out; to safety, security, trusted allies and somewhere we can go to sleep with confidence. That might be why we're so afraid of seaweed wrapping around our ankles; that gasping, swallowing horror that will drag us down into some underwater gulper. Eek.

When something goes sideways, we tend to panic. As a means of preserving what we hold dear. We figure that anything is better than nothing, and we'll fight for both. It goes beyond the flesh. There's some kind of alma within us all; a breath of creation that keeps us up and running even when our bodies fail us. Within the material corpus there exists an hostage fighting to be free. And what can we call that other than the soul?

The Dream:

Listen man, it says, you don't want to stop where you're at. It might take some time and effort; a little bit of derivative exposition and maybe you'll even have to put the old suit back on again. You might look tired and dusty. We're getting up in the years now and we don't know how many solar eclipses we'll see again. Better yet, how many we'll see together. Distances seem to grow with age. We get more patient, but we also get more slow.

I get morose this time of year. Might be the oncoming winter. Might be my birthday or the passing of the time when I lost my father to that inevitable machine of inertia and thermodynamic decay. You know, death. It lingers and haunts us and scares us more the older we become. I once laughed at? with? my grandmother when she complained that most of her friends were already dying or dead. I couldn't imagine her going; ten years later, she went.

What fills me with the real terror is the fear of forgetting. Losing my sense of who I am in the world. Floating through the rest of my life like some kind of dreamlike trance. It happens to people with degenerative brain disorders, and it's never terribly fun to watch. It must be worse to live through.

The Road:

But as many a mental health professional has said already, it's probably best not to obsess over the things we cannot control. We can't forget what we do and what we don't have within arm's reach. A lot of people had their hearts broken last week, and if you're one of them reading this now, I beg of you to find a way to take care of yourself. Let loose. Get tippled. Delve into something other than the news. Spend time with your family and friends while they're still close to you. Squeeze your pet, your kid, your mom. Make something of import. Make a dirty joke. Stake your claim and hold it fast.

The Ring of Melek Shlomo:

If I've learned one truth, it's the words we say were writ on Solomon's most prized ring:

גם זה יעבר

Gam zēh ya'avor. This too shall pass. All things; the good and the bad, the beautiful and the terrible, all near their ending. And when they're gone, the world will not see their like again. All you can do, love them or hate them, is witness their passing. Martyrion might be the Greek term for that, but I'm not sure.

And if I don't find out, I never will be.