Reconciliation

I’ll Give You Something To Be Depressed About

January 23, 2019 
Long Beach, CA

Yes, it has been a long time since I posted anything.  Yes, I felt like I was pledging to post every day, live my life in a sort of real time-real world purge of idealistic adventures and meaning, self and world betterment theories, bon mots, keen observations and witty celebrations of the joie d’vivre that at best I am faking and at least I am projecting as an alter ego character of my tarnished soul.  

Pave Dostal, anyone?

And unfortunately depression got in the way.  Fucking depression.   The giant turd in the drain of life that mostly gets flushed away by some unseen hand of God and/or municipality that I never have to look at again, unless perhaps I go swimming in the ocean (but let’s not go there now).  Depression seems to shut down my personal government, making it impossible to legislate around any of the conditions of my life with any alacrity.  Its ability to rain down immobility and inward thinking while stacking catastrophe like cordwood in late autumn Northern Maine can be stupefying.

I also realize that, you the reader, may play some role or be affected by my depression (or heaven forbid yours).  Whether it be through some daily interactions with my unerringly jubilant alter ego Pave or as a business associate or client or advocate for talk therapy or concerned citizen, I am writing about some pretty soul bearing crap that perhaps betrays what you think of me.  I know other people do this on Facebook and other forms of social media.  When they do, sometimes I act with empathy.  Sometimes I roll my eyes.  Feel free to do either (or both).  I don’t really know where this writing is going but if ultimately it is an exercise in exorcising the demons on their morning stroll of my fragile ecosystem, then so be it.  At the very least this is a creative writing exercise.  At the very most it will be the longest suicide note in history.  I can’t be too sure which.

Speaking of suicide notes (get to the point, Dave!)  I watched the film “First Reformed” last night.  Directed by Paul Schrader and starring Ethan Hawke, it’s a film about climate denial and the denigration of faith based institutions and their relation with commerce and big business’ hijacking of social voice and a lot of Christian mumbo gumbo (a pregnant woman named Mary and her love for the priest wrapped in barbed wire who saves the day with her pure love).  An effecting film where the main characters’ (potential) thrust was that he was terminally ill, sad and depressed and that if he was going to die anyway he ought to take some of these corporate climate denying evildoers with him.    I feel the same way.  Nobody is leaving a suicide vest in my sparsely furnished apartment, but in these dark moments I often feel as though if I am going down, I am taking some of these fuckers with me.  It did nothing for my mood, but he too kept a diary of sorts that ultimately descends into a mad/lucid string of plans that ultimately plays out through the course of the film.  Eerily prescient?  Only time will tell.

My old friend Neil used to say that he hated having to start every story with the phrase “I was born September 22, 1959” when explaining a situation and I concur.  I will try not to go back that far.  I am only giving myself an hour or so to write, so I will cut to the chase.

This current depression started right before I found an $80 one-way ticket to Ft. Lauderdale on the JetBlue site.  I have taken this trip before and I think this was a savings of about $50 off the regular cost.   I have also often flown to Florida with no round trip ticket because Jet Blue’s reliable non-stop sojourns between LGB and FLL are pretty reliable.  I can always find an easy flight home on the come. 

Plenty of good things happened on this trip, don’t get me wrong.  I live in a good world with good people.  I do a lot of fun things that bring me daily joy, momentarily respites from the hellhounds at my medulla oblongata.  I will talk about some/most of those at some point (maybe even in this post – as I am grateful for my relationships however infrequent and distant they may be).  However, let’s cut to the band-aid rip.

I booked a $9 per day car rental that turned out to have a lot of hidden costs that they don’t reveal and I am now fighting to get the charge taken off my card because I rented elsewhere and they think (know) they can hold me to paying them.  I dropped my laptop computer on a tile floor totaling the hard drive, already costing $200 to put in a new hard drive and even more in an attempt to gather all the information and put it back into the machine.  My telephone has decided it no longer feels like charging or taking phone calls and intermittently shuts itself off and reboots, which will require purchase of a new fricking phone.  My watch stopped and it turned out the number 9 (number 9, number 9, number 9) has swung loose from its moorings obstructing the justice of the big hand to make its obligatory rotation around the dial.  It was hard to find a return flight home, which forced me to stay several days longer than planned (thanks Howard and John), cost me as much as if I had booked a round trip, took me to LA instead of Long Beach (costing me even more to take a shuttle home) and, oh yeah, I lost my house keys and car keys where the innumerable expenses of making these possessions whole again are still to be counted.

Well okay, the argument you can make here is that these are,  as I am prone to call them,  “first world problems”.  Boo-hoo, Dave, you went on a 2 week vacation to an even warmer spot you already live in during the dead of winter and vacation discomforts reared their ugly heads.  Boo fucking hoo, get over it.   

As I wrote that last paragraph I guess I am in agreement.  Boo fucking hoo.  Shit happens.

So the real reality is that I visited my dear friends Howard and John who I love more than the earth itself.  I can count on them, and you really need someone to count on and I am grateful.  Plus they have such a large inventory of friends, there’s never a dull moment of new people who I have met through them.  I visited Maddy and Roy, my unerringly devoted Scrabble Masters.  I got to spend time with my old friend Marc from Boston, who I have known for 31 years and is always up for a day at the beach peppered with his gadfly status of knowing everyone in town.  I saw my aunt Linda and got to catch up with her and her life and her kids etc etc.  I saw my ex Jeff who, beyond anyone I have ever known in recovery has turned his life 180 degrees around.  I spent an evening with my co-star of a high school play.  I enjoyed my budding acquaintance with Teresa, who is devoid of negative, I want to dump her on her head and see if she is battery operated.  We went swimming in the Gulf, birding in Din Darling park in Sanibel and I got to hear/dream about her nomadic voyage around the globe over the next 2-3 years.  Inspiring. 

This is what you’re depressed about?  Your fulfilling relationships?  Girl, please.

I think the thrust of what I discovered is that the screaming majority of my friends are upwardly mobile, happily married and comfortably retired and/or retiring and can fill their days with talks of Teslas and month long cruises, and overflowing pension plans and pricey vases, and physical, financial and emotional security.  Through a lifelong dedication to making sure they took care of themselves, they assembled the requisite cadre of life, love, material comfort and security and feathered beautiful nests and donned colorful plumage. 

I have not done this.  I have intermittently feathered the nest only to watch the wind blow it away. Bought my plumage at the Goodwill store.   Saved a little but not enough.  I have eschewed romantic partnerships (can they also passively eschew me?  I will look that up).  I have ignored the highway signs that clearly announce there is a toll bridge coming by throwing nickels out the window in preparation. 

It reminds me of the song “The Unicorn”:

Then Noah looked out through the driving rain
Them unicorns was hiding, playing silly games
Kicking and splashing while the rain was pouring
Oh, them silly unicorns

There was green alligators and long-necked geese
Some humpty-backed camels and some chimpanzees
Noah cried, "close the doors 'cause the rain is pourin'
And we just can't wait for no unicorns"

The ark started movin', it drifted with the tide
Them unicorns looked up from the rock and they cried
And the waters came down and sort of floated them away
And that's why you'll never see a unicorn, to this very day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4bc9UwZsYs

Playing silly games, indeed.

I am teetering toward the causeway that leads to the drain.  I am Nero tuning up the fiddle.  I am keenly aware that the clock is ticking even on the façade of my upwardly mobility.  And two weeks of all my electronic gizmos and gizmas falling apart (didn’t mention I had to replace my washing machine, either, did I) is a reminder that the expense of my lifestyle can’t be borne with little income.   

My Boston friend, Marc, never known for pulling any punches when it comes to open-eyed reality around finances, pointed out to me that other friends have fallen into this pit, where they haven’t been able to pull themselves out of it and ultimately have had to take shitty jobs, and in the case of one friend, commit suicide at age 58 when he ran through all his money.  Unnerving. 

And my reaction to this?  Plan a week long Scrabble Tournament in Santa Fe.  Or a month long jaunt around the upper Northwest in July after the giant week long Scrabble Tournament in Reno.  Or sign up for guitar lessons.  Throwing nickels out the window indeed.

My inability to show outward concern about this is offset by my inner concern that each new mounting financial pressure is like a Jenga log I pull out and set to the side.  Before long this whole thing will collapse and my Tesla driving, cruise-taking, vase buying friends will be out to dinner at the latest Ethiopian/Peruvian fusion restaurant and I will be living in the dumpster behind it.  

And the answer seems simple.  GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER.  Get a job, run your stupid ad agency.  Scoop up all the money around you and run for opportunity.  Pull it together Dave.   That seems to be the logical thing to do.  Yet my brain thinks about guitar lessons and Scrabble studying and learning how to play bridge and the next vacation.   My actions belie my concerns. My concerns belie my actions  It’s as though the depression (I’m not blaming it) has found the autopilot button and sent  the aircraft toward the mountainside.  

As if to say,  "I'll give you something to be depressed about".

To be continued.