From Soundgarden to the Moody Blues

I’ve fell on black days, as Chris Cornell might say; my sun has set and left me in the shadow of its absence wondering, and pondering. Dawn is inevitable but far off, and our sundials give no comfort at night. When will it come? The night has just begun, and yet it feels as old as God himself, decrepit and staggering but eternal in all memory, reaching back to the image of what was before all reality became this instant. Memory, memory: when did the sun set? What things I’ve yet to suffer in the moonlight, trials borne witness and jury by an army of stars, what awaits the watchful this night? Herculean tasks to endure for the sake of seeing the sun again, and a life’s work to set about.
What secrets are uttered in the holy, frightful night, however shaken loose by stark, momentous transfiguration of the eyes, are the most sanctified of scriptures, the most sincere of confessions.
Let nighttime come! the braver, or rather bolder, men will say. What they forget is that the depth of each man’s sunset is suited to his nocturne capacity for blindness, and that night hits hardest those with the insight to lose. Perhaps the sunset treats you kindly, keeps you from the deeper blackness and leaves your knowledge of the darker places shallow. But this is rare, and most of us have suffered hardship enough to realize what it truly means, and how lucky we truly are.
Isn’t life strange? I always say that life is a trip. And, being myself somewhat of a drug addict, I mean that with entirely psychedelic connotations. The events, emotions, lessons, and just general nature of life, especially life as a human, are all incredibly trippy to me. Just to think of how many coincidences have historically and prehistorically occurred so that things are the way they are, and work the way they work, is amazingly striking, as are the many different forms and expressions that human life has taken throughout the course of its cultural explorations.
And whether you are a Hindu or a Buddhist or whatever, most people seem to agree that there is inherent in the universe a karmic mechanism that brings to people their just desserts. And things actually do tend to work out for what some may call “karma,” but what’s trippy is that it is just the nature of life that people attract trouble appropriate to their flaws, which is why karma works. So it is that the greedy receive no charity, and the brutal no mercy. Call it karma or God or life itself, I think it’s just the way things happen.
The purpose of the trouble is educational, of course, something sent to the individual from the universal as a message declaring one’s incongruities with the natural course. Usually people recognize poor actions as “mistakes” and “bad karma” as lessons, but if they ignore these things and continue indulging their flaws and vices the upshot of their attitudes will grow more and more severe.
So the question is this: What have I done? What flaw have I blinded myself to and nurtured, bringing about this dreary nightfall? What must I learn, and what must I change?