Labor Law Outline_TB

There was a fine mist of rain as I was walking towards the school today - fairy drops on the grass oppressed by a silent gray sky. The reflection of lamps in the window, identity refracted, like clones of each other in a muted shadow-world beyond the pale of this plane. It's quiet but for the soft shuffling of papers, the rustling of bodies, the shuffle of feet across the tile. Whispers and secrets as girls walk by through the door.

I have work to do but the thought of doing it is paralyzing. I'm tired, and the world collapses in on itself. There are many places - infinite places - that I would rather be. My life as a bookmark among the pages of the real.

Late afternoon stifled by rain. The sound of the television downstairs. The possibility of peace inside oneself.

The soft falling of the surf outside the window yesterday, like the beacon of an unseen world. Tentative and curious. The still expanse of sky. The feeling of contentment, like a perfect, unruffled pool. That perhaps the answer, whatever that may be, is not external but instead a quiet realization of the self.

The sweetness of past innocence.

Ah, people taken over with the poison of pretension. I hope that I never have acted as if I had all the answers. All I have is thousands of questions. 

I have found myself in a place where I have  lost any kind of beauty in the world. Everything is dark, joyless, melancholic. It's my fault, I know. The world has not changed - and I, in some vaporous, indefinable way, have. And certainly not for the better. 

It's as if I fight a constant battle everyday with myself, with my dark self, like some kind of ridiculous, self-indulgent movie (I'm looking at you, Spiderman 3). 

Well, I could be dead and that would be far worse. I don't know - I think I have disappointed myself in a deep, terrible way, which is worse than any other kind of disappointment. I don't appreciate myself like I once did. I know this sounds ridiculous, like some kind of Richard Simmons bullshit where everyone hugs each other and cries. Eh, whatever. I have to take out the trash. 

So filled with self-loathing that I don't know how I go on. Alone in a quiet house, face buried in my hands, sobbing senselessly with great, hitching breaths. Sobbing not about one thing but about everything, feeling so abandoned, useless, loveless, forgotten. Overtaken by a bitter, cruel kind of irony, the kind of irony which finds humor even in the darkest, most horrible of acts. Self-pity, self-loathing, pathetic. Lost on a path obscured. 

I cannot take comfort in anything anymore. Not in my relationship, my family, the divine, and certainly not myself. And here it is again - to run away, disappear, lose myself in the deserted plains and mountains and valleys of places unseen. All my life I have just wanted to run away, even as a child when I threatened to bundle all my things in a blanket and sleep in the bushes outside, as if that would solve everything. I still think it would solve everything.

God, how I want to start over. Lord, how I wish You existed. 

The day is cloudy, misty, joyless. Wanting to disappear like the raindrops into the ground. 

It's raining again, a slow, gentle rain like a sonata. The house is quiet, filled with the downy, golden light of the lamps, and I'm on the computer, fingers tapping in the same rhythm as the raindrops.
It's so terribly tragic how life catches you in a cage, like "the cage in search for a bird." It is how you fight your way out of this cage, if you can, which defines you.
Sometimes I think that there is only crushing ruin, that the lift of that lock only brings a deeper and more horrible mistake.
The terrible traps of modern-day life.
That boy, the one who disappeared in the wild when he was twenty, with only a burro for company. He was seized with the spark of adventure and comforted by a love of loneliness, leading his burro among the soft, red sand of the desert, camped in the cool shadow of nature's grand, terrifying wild. How the burro's velvet nose pressed against his hand, the sun a smear on the horizon like melted paint, and the empty expanse of the sky filled with a kind of limitless, boundless freedom - you against the vastness.
I think sometimes that was how man was meant to be, standing in the darkness, entranced by the incomprehensible wonder of the world. Now, instead, we inhabit office buildings and shopping malls.