A good long cry is cathartic in the deepest of griefs,
so they say.

So why is it when I cry, I only feel worse afterwards?

Perhaps this grief etches the center of my heart,
like a signature on a tree's bark
that fades with time but never disappears

or a wound that festers forever
still trying to push out its cause
years after it has been sustained

(Perhaps I am picking at it?)

I wish not to rage
against the dying of the light.

For sometimes the light must go.

Into the night.

In the darkness
Flashes of light above casting
Brief sunlight onto the ground below
And then the distant rumble
Like cannons in some old forgotten battle
And the pat-pat-pat of rain against the window.

A cricket makes his brief song. A frog croaks.

The sudden reminder coming of a brief life in the marsh.
A place now gone forever as it was, only to live on in memory
And half-forgotten dreams.

This seductive South wraps its warmth around me.
And I soon forget the politics, the semantics, the loneliness
And I fall into the dreamland
To sleep in its breast

BORNE on the low lake wind there floats to me,
Out of the distant hill, a sigh of bells,
Mystic, worshipful, almost unheard,
As though the past should answer me, and I
In pagan solitude bow down my head.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote:
"The world is a fine place, and is worth fighting for"
To which Morgan Freeman at the end of Seven added:
"I agree with the second part"

An alcoholic writer who ended up killing himself
Was the inspiration for that iconic last line

Sometimes I wonder how I end up so deep in the bottomless pit
That I fall into
I sometimes fancy being a nihilist, because what cruel sick ****** of a God
would allow me to have my heart break multiple times a day?
And what are we, really, but chemical reactions in fluid
defined by the boundaries of a roughly three-pound case of tissue and neurons?

I tell myself how much I hate this world, this society
And then the smile of a stranger or the humor of a joke
Lifts me out of the pit and back onto solid footing

And I go about my day, until I fall again

I bought a bunch of wooden soldiers.
I bought them from the store.
And now a hundred tiny soldiers
guard my bedroom door.

So if you're a scary monster-thing
who wants to go to war,
my bedroom door is open.
I'm not frightened anymore.

Mark Kozelek sang about it for his first album as Sun Kil Moon, to remind himself of lost loves.

So did Modest Mouse, probably in a methed-out spark of inspiration.

And Neil Young, immortalizing Kent State.

And Damien Jurado, going back to love.

What is the draw for Ohio? Is it the landscape? The memories? The people?

A couple of friends of mine moved there not long after getting married.

She is from Cincinatti, he's from Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Oh, Ohio! Maybe one day I'll visit you to try to understand your lure
Why so many musicians write about you

But I'll have to come in the late spring or summer, otherwise
Your winters will be a ***** for this Louisiana boy.