Sometimes You Need to Put it Somewhere

Some ass named John Barth once said that nothing ever lasts longer than a mood, and maybe I'm bipolar but I think that of any line of anything I've ever read this has resonated with me more than any. Nothing lasts longer than a mood and we flash from one to the next on the rise and fall of crashing and soaring and plummeting and flat lining chemical reactions in our heads, and for a while I couldn't handle that but who gives a fuck, we are what we are and what we are can't change that, doesn't change that, and if somewhere there are enzymes catalyzing the rush of whateveryouwantocallem's through our veins like so much water through so many canyons, if it's these little chemical process pulling the pulleys and booms behind the scenes of what we think of as our selves, what's to lament about that? I am a massive machine that's nothing more than molecular ups and downs but those molecular ups and downs are all that I am and why not fold them in rather than force them out?

Nothing lasts longer than a mood they say, which means that nothing lasts after the adrenaline fades away, resolution rides on receding streams of dopamine and we are (are we), as it were, at the whim of our brain chemistry, but sometimes, when a mood is real good, you need to put it somewhere. Somewhere you can get to.

Brain Chemistry. It moves the pulleys and booms but, can I tell it where to move them? A silly question, or perhaps the central question. Someone else said I'm never the same person when I go to sleep as when I wake up, as when I wake up, but when I go to sleep a figure of flame do I have to wake up a thing of stone? Can you bottle fire? Can you keep it? Can you put it somewhere secret and safe for the night and open it up in the dim, sputtering critically flawed 9mm film of the early morning and have it come rushing out, the only spear you ever need to meet the day, the only shield you ever need against whatever tribulations the world might send your way? Can you make a mood last forever? There are times when I'm as the ebb and flow of a steely gray sea; slow, incessant, largely irredeemable, a sullen stagnation with too much momentum to gain any. But there is a flame inside me to scorch that world in streaks of whatever it is for which light seems to be the readiest and most overused metaphor. I'mma find turn that shit into ink and write it on my bones.