I Harden Myself

4^th December 2018

Dear Cassi,

Another year has passed, and I harden myself to the fight ahead. Every year I do this and every year I fail as badly as the last with my life looking no better than it did a year ago.

My home is under siege by Pony Girl hoping to have me gone so she can have my part. My neighbors are ready to kill more of my animals, and Pickle still refuses to unload the dishwasher. Things are looking bad.

By the New Year I’ll have two workstations (I hope), and be able to do almost everything I do on my drafting desk that I do on my main desk. If that works out this should be a year for getting things done.

I will have the drafting desk and the main work station. Then I will have the laptop in the studio. I have computers, computers, and more computers to work with but it feels like the lack of more than one me is the problem.

Well, this is depression. Depression is like swimming upstream in a river as cold and relentless as time and never being able to find safe harbor. I swim because if I stop and drowned or fall back so here I swim.

Keep your head above water, little sister,

Richard Leland Neal

Images: a Poem

Richard Leland Neal as an idiot 16 year old

Having found this on an old floppy disk I can say that it took me back to a time in my life I hated. This is a poem I wrote back in July of 1995, high school, and the old place was a dump I wanted to stay in forever.

 In other words, these are the words of an idiot fifteen year old. I had to do some major editing because back then I was suffering from the worst depression of my life and couldn't write much. My damaged brain simply didn't have the energy to form words and so reading any of my work from that time is like looking through a fog. Well, find what meaning you will in this, I sure did. 

Images

 by Richard Leland Neal

a world of  beautiful images

a world I cannot enter

like a chorus of  life

I sit in an audience

 my peers in this cold computers

they have no soul, they have no god

no will no mind no reason

there glowing screens looking in to the world

but they stare expressionless at me

 I am one of them

I reach for an image from the cold of the crowds

 my hand is stopped

as if  by a wall that holds me back

and I strain to bridge the gap of empty solid air

as I push harder and harder

beads of sweat dot my brow

drops of  blood streak my hand

sweat flowing, blood running

stinging pain and yet I persist

muscles tens and shaking

my eyes monitor the slow progress

I finely bridge the gap and stop

the distance the trials and no reward

for I think is it worth it

to stain the image that was my goal

destroy it with my blood

and then in bold

no!

I am not worthy of their world

then a wall on either side

the two worlds of beauty and of cold resist me

but it is not even the sting

that the devils make that would drive to allow

the passage out of my frozen hell

the reason for this is so plain to me

the reason is this you see

no point, no plot,

 no common ground lies between either

In my world it seems I soar aloft and am looking down

but I'm like a worm in the ground

I am lower than low

I can't be found

Like a part of a broken puzzle

I have no match

I’m searching out a missing piece

that has ceased to exist