Generation Hex
ABRACADEPRESSION
When a massive portion of your life can be framed by extensive periods of panic, generalized anxiety, and depression, as well as lifelong ADHD, introversion and shyness, it’s small wonder that navigating the waters of daily existence can be, at times, a bit dicey.
What appears to come easily for others can be practically impossible for me. I’ve always noticed it, it’s always bothered me, and I’ve never fully grasped how to stomp it on the balls and get on with it.
I was born in 1968, a year which by most modern measures was a globally chaotic one, full of upheaval, unrest, an uncertainty. The hippies spread their stink from the West Coast all over the planet, quickly devolving from a promise of peace and love into a miasma of drug abuse and broken lives. Those that escaped relatively unharmed turned into the well-to-do rule makers they grew up trying so hard to rail against. All that blather about “The Man” and that’s who they became.
For those of us who grew up in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, we passed through the Iran Contra Affair, Reagan, the fall of Communism and the Berlin Wall, and found ourselves smack dab in the middle of the affluent ‘90s, when Clinton reigned and the ultra rich got ultra richer, consolidating wealth into a smaller and tighter little cabal of soulless swine.
The US was flush in money, and despite all the news about how great it all was, living through it sucked ass. College degrees started become expensive placemats, good work became scarce, heroin went fucking batshit crazy, killing way too many people, and good music (good art, period) went deep underground.
It didn’t take Wall Street long to figure out how to turn dissent into dollars, in turn draining all the life out of the underground, before it ever had a chance to thrive. By god, if it was cool in the ‘90s, it was for sale. Which in turn couldn’t be less cool.
For so many of us who eked out some semblance of a life from those years, reality was more like an endurance test than a dream. That America we’d been raised to believe in didn’t exist anymore, if it ever did. It all came down to bucking up and moving along or drowning. Your choice. To thrive was all about privilege, advantage, and luck, as well as class, race, and gender, than anything remotely close to hard work and pluck. If you yanked on those fucking bootstraps like you were told, they were likely to tear off.
On the other side of all that, here in the mid 2020s, in my mid to late 50s, the entire world has swung towards absolute fucking insanity. The great US experiment seems more like a nightmare than a laser-like concentration of freedoms and liberalisms. Instead, years of economic flatulence has led people to become increasingly paranoid, selfish, and reactionary. It’s age old, this descent into fascism and embrace of authoritarianism. And the sad thing is, it has been predictable all along.
The US has been too willing to give up liberties and freedoms and plurality for the strong arm of government control and force. Racism, xenophobia and ignorance has take over this country and it’s been sad to live through it.
Not that I ever entertained a notion that this country was the near-utopian society it pretended to be. The evidence to the contrary has been plain, endless, and blatantly out in the open. To ignore it, or be ignorant of it, is pathetic at best, and treasonous at its worst.
And yet that’s exactly what millions have chosen to do. I try not to talk too much about politics anymore because it’s damn near pointless, it’s dangerous, and usually it just makes me upset, angry, and hopeless, and I don’t have any more time for that. I want to enjoy the time I have left, whether that’s decades or hours.
But god fucking damn it if it’s not a brutal ride.
I’ve worked hard on myself. As it stands, I’m sober. I quit smoking, hopefully for good. I meditate almost every day. I rerouted my thought process into a healthier sphere. And despite all of my efforts, I still have weekends like the last two.
I went into both of the last two weekends with a head full of steam. I had things I wanted to read, records to listen to, movies to watch, occult weirdness to study, a fuckload of cool shit. So what did I do with my time?
Well, mostly just sleep.
Like a lot.
And when I was awake, I was either thinking about sleep, eating, or imagining the things I wasn’t doing.
All that work over the years, and that’s how I spend my free time. Depressed and sleepy.
My biggest joy was making my son smile, passing on a guitar and amplifier to him, a record player and some vinyl from my old bands. Seeing his excitement, and knowing that he might take up making music is an unspeakable joy.
At this stage in my life, that is where I have found purpose. The joy and success of my children.
I suppose that’s biological, instinctual, encoded in our DNA, this need to push them into the world prepared to EXPERIENCE life, and not just exist. I think I’ve done that with both of my children. That is my greatest success in life.
But I still crave to transcend in my own life somehow. So I guess I will do what I’ve always done. Tweak, endure, fight, and keep on. It’s all I know.
After my nap, of course.