Vlog the Inhaler, or The Occasional Video Blog Musings of Jim Thornton

Misery is one of the least appreciated of human emotions. In the spirit of Christopher Smart, who died in an insane asylum where he was incarcerated for religious mania, and in which he wrote about his most famous of all cats, Geoffrey, permit my small indulgence here.

Let us agree, for the sake of today's swimming-related vlog, that the cause of misery is exile from the pool waters that usually provide respite from life's bejangling predicament of nerves.

Yes, we will, for the sake of a swimming vlog, specify this as the exact source of misery--a surfeit of excitatory neurotransmitters with no place to go-- though there could, of course, be any of a myriad other contributors, too. There always are!

For I will now consider my misery:
for in ones dotage it slows the speeding clock
and gives reason to hope the winding spring soon breaks;
for it surges a tide of memories past,
and brings back from the darkness most of life;
for it reunites you with your authentic self;
for it removes the gauze and the glass darkly;
for it will not let you look away;
for it burns your skin from ear to pubis;
and pares the tallow from your hide,
and obliterates the need for sleep,
and jacks the marrow with tinctures of terror,
and removes promise, that demon tormentor,
for it makes you twist the same idea endlessly;
for it preminisces no end of ends;
for it makes you friends with your enemies,
who cannot deny the gift you've given them;
for it removes all fret about things without weight;
for it proclaims your guilt and absolves it through dumb rage;
and lets you do what must be done,
and ensures it cannot be undone;
for it will not swim but it can sweat;
for it creeps no faster than a child's hours;
for it is incurable.