It has its perks

Here, we talk so much of mental illness rather than life.

What's gone haywire, who has lost their reasoning, the unlikely tragic (that in retrospect ___); our forgotten original projects. We exchange ideas about how to cope with the fearsome zealotry of our day and age; we discuss crime, illiteracy, head injuries.

If we talked of life, we would discuss everything that is progressing or unfolding and our strategies for managing. Our conversations and reporting would be about, say, our childrens' daily conundrums. We'd confabulate our own memories of childhood. We'd wonder together at the old encyclopedias and we'd marvel at new science.

We wouldn't wish to escape. No one would want to scream.

Sports. Finance.
In boredom, the weather.

No talk about art or religion, though. Not when we're talking about life. I think those subjects only come up when we're talking about mental illness. (I'm stifling some bitter laughter here.)

Is art only understood or accepted as self-expression now, a way to make shadow puppets to represent our own personal angels and demons that possess us? And is religion now somehow about self-expression too?

Just about everyone will either beg your pardon or, the other way, reassure you that they are spiritual, not religious --- heaven forbid and please understand!

Religion is displaced from life's discourse then, (and may as well be under the subject headings of mental illness). If it were only science which displaced religion, I wouldn't climb to this roof top and pretend I'm asking questions.

I, blogger, was just about to condemn blogger. I halt. I stop short for a moment to think. Forgetting entirely what I was about to write here, now I charge ahead:

To be divorced from generations and generations of tradition and religious belief, in this shudder-inducing isolation, leaves us transparently flimsy, unprepared for earthquakes, fire or flood. Deep, fundemental ignorance is a sub-section of mental illness here.

So I will talk about traditions and religion, some days.

But never mind the calamaties so large they skip generations at a time. They can be denied, their possibility must be denied. Nurse that denial.

I'm talking about day to day conversation.

I wanted to remark that I seem to wholly exclude myself from normal conversations about day to day life, and then it struck me.

"What, blogger?"

It's no wonder I sometimes want to escape, and no wonder that I also prefer to stay. We talk art and religion. Listen to Dylan...

Also, I have been so long in either addiction or recovery, it's best I only listen when people talk about life.