FFF: Regression

"I don't believe in living in the past.  Living in the past is for cowards.  If you live in the past, you die in the past."  --Mike Ditka

Da Coach.  Great man and quite accomplished.

I'm certain I would churn his stomach.

Depression has been really getting to me lately.  It has mutated from sadness to a form of anxiety that borders on the crippling.  I'm talking about an icy cold fear that stabs its fingers into your chest cavity and pins you to your bed in the morning, threatening you that getting up would require a great deal of ripping, tearing, and pain.  And that's only the beginning of your day.  To very much my credit, I get up, go out, and do my job anyway.

So how do I do it?  I guess I attempt to lose myself in creative pursuits.

Yeah, yeah.  Depressed writer.  Angst-ridden artist.  The old cliche.  Yes, I'm aware of how boring, how insipid I've become.

Cliches exist because they often contain a kernel of truth.

This sucks.
Oh wait.  I know.  Those four words.  "Ask your doctor about..."

Forgive me if I'm suspicious of pills pushed far more in the interest of a medical-industrial complex than the health of an individual.  Besides, I've found something else to...however futilely and temporarily...ease my "heat oppressed brain" as the Bard would say.

Regression.

Indulging myself in dalliances from a (perhaps deceptively) simpler time.  This was a time when fun was the main purpose to existence and someone else handled all those pesky matters of mortgage payments, grocery shopping, insurance co-pays, and whatever other inanities came in life's way.  I was free to create and imagine without pressure.  For me, I place this halcyon age as somewhere circa 1979.




The quintessential geek, I eschewed sports and outdoor activities, preferring to cement my thoughts firmly in "a galaxy far far away..."

Beautiful, aren't they?

I've found a few of them at my parents' house.  They've seen better days but they sure bring back memories.  I even found an Indiana Jones action figure that I forgot I actually had.  You know, the one with the "whip action" arm?  I've also taken to eBay, looking up other Star Wars toys that have long since escaped my possession.

"Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law,
Pleas'd with a rattle, tickled with a straw." --Alexander Pope

It hasn't stopped there.  Late at night when I can't sleep, I binge watch episodes of Battle of the Planets, the old Batman TV series, and Superman: the Movie.  Yes, I have copies of old Battlestar Galactica episodes, but they're in VHS format and my access to the arcane device known as the "VCR" is limited at best.  I'm always reading comic books, but I've focused my attentions on those originating from the idem time period.  Marvel's Shogun Warriors and Godzilla are probably my favorites at the moment, given their startling lack of depth but confectionery-like addictive properties.





"Inside every adult is a kid wondering what the hell happened."

Like any drug user, I usually feel worse about myself after these indulgences.  Here is a man in his 40s attempting to find refuge...however temporary...from his present condition via his childhood.

That is until I found The Happening Book.

The Happening Book is a Tumblr produced by someone my age who kept a journal when he was in second grade.  He now revisits those entries through his current eyes.  This means, among other things, healthy doses of Star Wars fandom.  While he certainly pokes fun at the crazy notions he and the rest of us had at that age, I believe that he operates this Tumblr page out of a need for an ameliorating nostalgia...kindred to what I've been doing.

Which makes me wonder.

Maybe all of us adults are just faking it.  We're all just pretending that we have it all together.  We project a front that says "I know what I'm doing" when there's a scared kid inside each one of us, one that wonders where it all went to.  I don't care how much capitalism has crowned your fucking ass, part of you is scared.  It's just a question of to what degree.  And there are those of us who through either biology or situationalism must face that fear to a greater degree.


What would Batman do?

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