This morning — well, technically yesterday morning, being as how it’s after midnight now — I was thinking about late-summer malaise, about the doldrums, about ennui.
I’m going to revisit this topic, not because I’ve got a whole lot to say on it, but because I can’t sleep and I have to write something.
I think there are people out there who understand ennui and people who don’t. Ennui, to me, is an overwhelming sense of what’s-the-point. It’s a low-grade existential crisis, a sense that nothing matters, that nothing means anything. It’s an acute case of profound disinterest in the world and all there is in it. I mean, really: who cares?
For some people, ennui is just a word, something experienced by other people, or maybe not even experienced but just talked about by people who want to give off the impression that life is somehow harder for them than it is for everybody else and that they’re in some way special.
For me, ennui is the real deal. It hits me periodically, and when it does, it just weighs me down. This is because life is harder for me, and I’m special. Remember that.
Ennui is distinct from depression. Depression isn’t ennui. Ennui is an entirely different emotion. Depression is an ice pick through the heart. Ennui is a cold drip through the short hairs at the back of your neck. Depression is “just fucking kill yourself and get it over with.” Ennui is “oh, why bother.”
I have ennui tonight. Tonight it feels like the whole damn country has ennui. It’s gonna rain tomorrow. Nobody will move. Everyone will sit in their air-conditioned enclaves and wait for the clouds to part and for the sun to go down and end the day.
There are a lot of great things about living in Texas. The weather ain’t one of them. Neither is the ennui.
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