“Never understood that it ain’t no good/You shouldn’t/Let other people/Get your/Kicks for you…” Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone”

mayhem is wartime chaos

or a four-hundred-pound left guard after the ball snap

or a school of piranha disassembling a swimmer

..

contrariwise, mehhem is the “quiet desperation” henry david thoreau mentioned in walden

it is t s eliot’s j alfred prufrock asking “do i dare to eat a peach?”

it is gonna and not done

maybe and not yes

a mononucleosis of your soul…

and if you think of yourself as a “wage slave”

and/or sigh a lot

and/or get sucked in by endless random reels on ticketytok or instagratis or fuzzbook,

you may be in mehhem’s gentle deathgrip, my friend

..

my unsolicited and easily discarded advice is to make a pie chart of your activity and your passivity

doesn’t have to be fancy

or even finished–here’s mine:

and then be brave

change things up some

stop treating yourself like a child you are determined to spoil rotten

and when you find yourself backsliding, rise up and say “Enough of this Mehhem!!!”

or not

wotthehell

it’s only your life

..

Grateful acknowledgment to the late Harlan Ellison for the concept behind his groundbreaking The Glass Teat, written last century but still spot-on