"When I interviewed Duritz in 2012, he was nice and engaging and definitely a little tortured. He had recently been taken off "about seven medications," he said, which sent him into a tailspin of withdrawal that lasted eight months. "It's a very raw world right now," he told me, "because I've been coated in gauze and amber for the last decade or so and I am running around naked right now. It's like the difference between being deaf and everyone in the world talking to you at once. You can't understand what the fuck anyone is saying either way, but it's probably better to be here than not be here. But it's very loud right now. It's like an assault in a lot of ways."
This was from and interview with Adam Duritz from my favorite Counting Crows. I think that people with mood disorders have a profound ability to perceive the world as it really is sometimes and not what they want it to be. The truth ins't always convenient.
We just wanted to touch something that was forbidden to be touched. We wanted to be different from those that feared so much. In all of the time that has passed on this earth, less than 10% of the people who have lived here and worked hard here for their families have been remembered past a couple of generations. A guy will get up at 5 Am and get himself ready for sweat and grease and that longing for lunchtime. He will do this every day for 70 years, then retire to a life of walking to the store for the day's items that replace yesterday's uses. He'll grow older and die with a hundred people mourning his day to day. It will go on in people's minds for a while then smolder and fade into old campfire ashes. All he wanted was to be remembered, but the grass grows long around his headstone. This is the real fear of death. Actually dying is uneventful most times. I'v witnessed many deaths. Some of them never even have family to show up at all. Some people have erased the love a family used to give them. The lights on the tree. The freshly cut grass. The cracks in their skin. The weariness in their eyes when they would tuck you in at night. All forgotten. No one wants their weariness to be forgotten.
This is the saddest fact of life and death. This is what many people fear about it so much. One day, no one will remember a single thing about you or what you did here.
Your world is gone.
It's now being inhabited by people you don't recognize or understand. It isn't easy anymore. Life is more complex and even your children blame you for things you had no idea were harmful to them.
The point of life for me????? Just be that person your children are proud of. To not cause trauma to them and teach them what is right and wrong. To teach them that life is full of horrific things and people have the tenancy to abandon reasoning, but God is real and alive and standing next to their dead father that they were so proud of. There is no better a solution to the fear of death for me.
Sing.
Migrate.
We just wanted to touch something that was forbidden to be touched. We wanted to be different from those that feared so much. In all of the time that has passed on this earth, less than 10% of the people who have lived here and worked hard here for their families have been remembered past a couple of generations. A guy will get up at 5 Am and get himself ready for sweat and grease and that longing for lunchtime. He will do this every day for 70 years, then retire to a life of walking to the store for the day's items that replace yesterday's uses. He'll grow older and die with a hundred people mourning his day to day. It will go on in people's minds for a while then smolder and fade into old campfire ashes. All he wanted was to be remembered, but the grass grows long around his headstone. This is the real fear of death. Actually dying is uneventful most times. I'v witnessed many deaths. Some of them never even have family to show up at all. Some people have erased the love a family used to give them. The lights on the tree. The freshly cut grass. The cracks in their skin. The weariness in their eyes when they would tuck you in at night. All forgotten. No one wants their weariness to be forgotten.
This is the saddest fact of life and death. This is what many people fear about it so much. One day, no one will remember a single thing about you or what you did here.
Your world is gone.
It's now being inhabited by people you don't recognize or understand. It isn't easy anymore. Life is more complex and even your children blame you for things you had no idea were harmful to them.
The point of life for me????? Just be that person your children are proud of. To not cause trauma to them and teach them what is right and wrong. To teach them that life is full of horrific things and people have the tenancy to abandon reasoning, but God is real and alive and standing next to their dead father that they were so proud of. There is no better a solution to the fear of death for me.
Sing.
Migrate.
