That old mantra...

Mood: Paranoid but Happy

I found myself muttering a familiar old mantra today. “Jag mår illa. Jag vill dö. Låt mig dö.” This is something that slipped up from my depressed teenage past. I’d walk around, muttering it to myself wherever I went… and after a year or so I added another part which meant “No. I didn’t mean that. I take it back.” For those of you who don’t speak Swedish, the mantra means, “I feel bad. I want to die. Let me die.” It’s very simple, very boring, and rather pathetic. Even when I said it I never meant it, but something summoned it out of me nevertheless. I was sitting on the toilet at the time, but I can assure you that it had nothing to do with this thought. It merely gave me time to breathe in a maelström of an evening.

It’s like the “I wish the earth would swallow me up”-thought that most people have every now and then. The truth is, you don’t really wish it, no matter how embarassed you are at the moment. I mean, wouldn’t it be far more embarassing to go that way than to just ride it out? The floor drops out from under you, glimpse of your surprised face, and then you’re gone. It would be funny in a Bitte Lächeln not-really-funny-at-all kind of way. Or if it slowly swallowed you, you would provide your viewers with an embarassingly agonizing display of your heels, ankles, legs, crotch, belly, etc being eaten, slowly and painfully and in a most messy way. This reminds me of that old song my first-grade teacher would sing. “I’m being eaten by a boa constrictor…”

Boa Constrictor
by Shel Silverstein

Oh, I’m being eaten
By a boa constrictor,
A boa constrictor,
A boa constrictor,
I’m being eaten by a boa constrictor,
And I don’t like it—one bit.
Well, what do you know?
It’s nibblin’ my toe.
Oh, gee,
It’s up to my knee.
Oh my,
It’s up to my thigh.
Oh, fiddle,
It’s up to my middle.
Oh, heck,
It’s up to my neck.
Oh, dread,
It’s upmmmmmmmmmmfffffffff . . .

I say these things and don’t mean them. But today I thought it and I surprised myself. I realized I hadn’t said it for weeks or months. I’ve been genuinely happy for quite a while now, perhaps blissfully so. This proves that though my physical health has been wrestling with the most stubborn flu for a few months now, my mind can get along fine without my body.

If I write that I won’t say what elicited this thought from me today, then it is pointless in a way since I am already displaying that something spurred it. And yet, a brainless bit of me wants to say it anyway. So I will humor it and leave it at that.

For the whole evening, a smell of smoke has lingered throughout the ground floor of the house. No one else seems to mind, but perhaps this is because they are all upstairs. It’s me who has to sit down here and smell the smoke and smell of smoke. The funny thing is, I don’t really mind. Or I wouldn’t mind if it weren’t for the fact it’s making me hungry. Brings scrumptious cold-smoked things to mind, like salmon.

I feel as sensitive as our poor paranoid fire alarms. As they go off from even a whiff of steam from the iron, I’ve been off on mad sprints after my own tail and gnawing it to the bone, thinking it was something else. A squirrel, perhaps. Ratatosk. Have mercy on the snake. Nidhögg is too tired today.
I think that today I have been treated to the smell of a pot burning instead of the usual chicken or steam. It’s still no fire - the house hasn’t burnt down.

I’m getting selfishly cryptic. I would apologize, but some darker being in me is enjoying it.


Sometimes it feels good to write for yourself.