One: Beginning with Random Thoughts

          To paraphrase (or is it intentionally misquote?) Andrew Marvell:  "Had we but time enough, and world..."--I've always valued time more than anything else.  It's easy enough to find more world, but it's hard as hell to find more time.  I've been getting younger for a couple of months, but I think maybe I'll try getting a couple of decades older to see how it feels.  Hopefully there's a CTRL-Z to temporal modification.
*****
          I've always been a great one to avoid problems or ignore them.  But only recently have I started walking away from them.  Literally.  Walking far away.  I think I might be getting close to triple digits, considering I'm doing double digits every time I can.  But it's not helping.
*****
A few weeks (months?) back, I was well into a good sweaty walk when a friend texted me, asking what I was doing.
          "Three miles into a four mile walk" I told him.
          "Why the sudden interest in walking?"
          "It's my penance."
          "Penance for what?"
          "What have you got?"
          He didn't text back.
****
          It's the mood swings I can't handle.  One day I feel invincible, the next defeated.  If I could stick with one or the other I'd be fine, but my brain just won't let me.  Honestly, I'd be happy if I could just stay sad and not have to deal with the occasional glimmer of false hope.
 *****
Sitting here slightly drunk and thining about life, settling into a very nice deep depression, poetry is never far from my ind.  I'm reminded of a few lines from Poe:
          Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow
          From my books surcease of sorrow--sorrow for the lost Lenore--
          For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore--
                    Nameless  here for evermore.
                              --The Raven

​And that leads me for some unknown and ineffable memory to the poet Sappho of Lesbos:
          Come then, I pray, grant me surcease from sorow,
          Drive away care, I beseech thee, O goddess
          Fulfil me for what I yearn to accomplish.
                    Be thou my ally.
                              --Hymn to Aphrodite I.vii

and that inevitably forces the back of my brain to remember Catullus, Poem V:
          Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
          rumoresque senum severiorum
          omnes unius aestimemus assis.
          soles occidere et redire possunt:
          nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,
          nox est perpetua una dormienda.
          da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
          dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
          deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum,
          dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
          conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
          aut ne quis malus invidere possit,
          cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

I'm not going to translate that because far better men than I have far better words in which to express it.  I honestly feel that poetry is the true language of love and inebriation.  Love is much more potent a libation than the finest whisky.  I admit that I was in love once, maybe twice, and thinking about my utter failure in those pursuits brings me right back to possibly my favorite poem of all time, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot and the line that, ultimately, sums up my life:

          And in short, I was afraid.
​