Market Theocracy

For the past week or so I’ve been pretty fucking depressed. This wasn’t the wimpy ass pretend depressed that doctors slap you on Paxil or Zoloft for and claim is the result of a chemical imbalance or what-not. Those sorts of depressions may or may not exist. Mine is never of that sort.

I always have a reason to be depressed, and the reason is always blatantly in-my-fuckin’-face obvious. It’s also usually more than one thing, the result of crap building up over a period of time and working together with surgical skill to reduce me to a sullen, un-communicative asshole who wants to sleep all day and glare at people.

Didn’t want to write. Didn’t want to play games. Didn’t want to chat with people on the ‘net. Didn’t want to surf. Didn’t want to listen to music really loud or beat on a guitar and sing in my shitty voice until the dogs howl.

In short, didn’t want to do any of the things that lift me out of meat space and remind me that the essential nature of the human being is transcendental in essence. That while being human is 90% grunt work, physical labor and action — that it is the 10% that is magic and ephemeral that matter. That we, in fact, do the 90 in order to enjoy the 10.

I never think of suicide when I’m depressed. There are two reasons for this: the first is that when you are feeling bleak and washed out, why in hell would you consider going on over the edge to blank and nothing? Depression, if you look at it properly, is kind of like getting a little death on your shoes. Sucks, yeah — but at least the fucking truck didn’t hit you.

The second is that I’m completely convinced that the universe is run by the weird three-way drunken love child of Rod Serling, Ray Bradbury, and O. Henry. I’m not certain what death holds, but it’s sure to be weird, surreal and viciously ironic. So fuck that killing yourself stuff.

And, in the end, it always lifts. I woke up this morning and knew it was lifting. I walked outside and the rain was over and — while it was still cold as fuck — the sun was shining down. The sun, like optimism and all that jazz, always comes back. Hell, it’s billions of years old, still young, and has nothing better to do.

The older I get, the shorter my little depressive episodes last. I think my brain is getting tired of the moping. “Look, dammit — we’re old and getting older. Stop whining and lets go get laid or something.”

This is just my usual blabby way of saying that progress on the novel now re-commences, the music is blasting again, the guitar is being abused, and the family dogs are howling.

Let’s rock n’ roll.