Category Archives: Depressive Meditations

Getting On With It, Somehow

The bed is warm, the room is cold.  There is no particular thing to be done outside the bed on any given day, except everything undone that has been that way for months or years.   It is a luxury and a sentence, staying under the covers where it’s warm since I am not running late, no matter what the clock says.  

Think, man, while you stay warm, there must be something you haven’t thought of that you can do out there.  The dream you’ve worked on for the last few years, and proved again and again is hearty enough to walk in the world, bring happiness and engagement to everyone it touches… well, if you don’t figure something out soon you’ll have to nail it into its tiny coffin.

When three queries are unanswered, and then five, when pitches fall silently into silence, your best shot at a short promo is deemed “almost good enough” by the people with the most media savvy, when the City and State agencies designed to help small businesses have no concrete help to give, don’t even return calls and emails, when the friend of a friend at a large nonprofit declines to forward your pitch to her educational director, as she promised, when the mentor you spoke to once shies away, overwhelmed by the immensity of the challenges your stalled, perfectly working program faces, you start to get a certain picture of your chances.   It is possible that a real winner would not be deterred by the cumulative weight of this, I suppose.  

Bad luck has played its part, the early death by cancer of one of the few people who really got the potential of the program, overpaid for it,  put it in three schools.   Our fees for the sessions at the last school, months after her death, never paid, her business went under, angry parents also ripped off when they brought their kids for the first day of summer camp and found the program gone.  No current workshop to sustain my spirits, the program’s viability.

Making a convincing, winning pitch, closing deals like a successful salesman in Glengarry Glen Ross, seems to be the only way this thing can be sustained.  Read a good book on the subject by a guy who set up a consulting agency to help people get it right the first time.  He teaches them to speak well, to the point, convincingly, and close the deal.  They do indeed have a discounted rate for non-profits, I learned yesterday when I finally called them at a friend’s urging.  One four hour session, the recommended dose, special price for not for profits:  $3,000.  

“What’s your budget?” the breezy receptionist asks when I seem to balk at the number.  “Maybe we can work with you.”  She later recommended that perhaps the budget two hour session would be helpful, only $1,500 at the discounted rate, and probably more than half as valuable as the full session.

There must be some kind of way out of here, as the song goes.  Working on a soundtrack the other night I pictured the five way headphone splitter, four kids and I sitting around the laptop with garageband open.   I’m getting them started.  Listening to the beat with a bass track open, I’d show them how to lay down a simple bass line, let one of the kids play it.  Add a piano track, pick one note in that key (we’d use A minor, the white keys), lay it in on or off the beat in a spare pattern over the bass, see how music is starting to suggest itself?  The next kid adds a touch, the fourth kid adds a drum, kid number one adds a sound effect.  Showing them the importance of really listening to the other parts, playing sparely and leaving space in the mix for other things to be heard.   There are many music making apps that let you create music tracks intuitively, no knowledge of music necessary, but showing them how to lay parts against each other, using actual notes, seems the better way to go.  A kid or two will discover she is a musician and begin to pursue it.  

I am day dreaming again, clearly, to keep from screaming at the frustration of the situation I have gently placed myself in by not knowing the first thing about business and marketing, and knowing much too much about fucking creativity for its own sake.  Meantime, it’s cold in here, I have to get into the shower and into a shirt and pants.

 

Maybe the DU was right after all

The old man was wrong, but maybe he was also right.  

He believed, after couple of decades working optimistically toward progressive social change, that hope for change was for suckers.  Our deepest fears, prejudices and hatreds, he concluded bitterly (as he’d suspected all along), were beyond reason, will and the most ardent desire for change.  

We fought this back and forth for years and I won’t recount the tedious exchanges I’ve already set out on this blahg and elsewhere.   He was wrong, clearly, things do change, as do people and their reactions and ideas.  He was right, though, that on a fundamental emotional level most people are set, blessed or doomed, by their genetics and programming.  

“That’s a depressive line of thinking, son,” a kinder, wiser father might say.  

“Maybe so, pops, but I’m looking at your own life, my life.  I’m granting you a measure of correctness against the position I argued for so many years, that people can, and do, change for the better, if they work hard enough at it,” I would reply.  

“Would, should, could,” said the kinder, wiser father wistfully.  “When you’re dead you’ll hear how poignant all those words really are.”  

It won’t take that long.  I recall the state the old man used to get into when he misplaced the change from his pocket.  He’d be beside himself, cursing, unable to get over his anger at himself, over the 43 cents he couldn’t find.   He’d received the change at the dry cleaners a few hours earlier, taken it out of his pocket when he changed his pants, goddamn it, and if I didn’t put it on the dresser where I always put it, what the fuck did I do with it?!  Goddamn it!!  He’d be inconsolable as he stomped around the house in a rage at himself, looking on all the end tables, the kitchen table, the bathroom sink, in the basement, upstairs again.

 “Losing 43 cents was the same to him as his favorite dog, or one of us, being hit by a car,” my sister pointed out correctly.   The loss of control of any kind was a lightning rod that electrified him right back into the center of his worst fears.  

“Easy for you to say,” he said.  

I suddenly think of the wallet I lost on the circle around the retirement village my parents lived in for their final years.  The wallet had dropped out of my cargo shorts pocket on to the road as I spoke to Sekhnet on the cell phone carrying the bicycle upstairs at 2 a.m.   I didn’t notice it was missing until the next morning when I went to get dressed and take a drive to visit friends.  No license.  No wallet.  Several days of desperate hope, checking with the security office over and over, until piecing together that the angry redneck security guard I’d disrespected a week or two earlier, and who’d been on duty that night, had found the wallet, had a good laugh seeing my photo in it, harvested several hundred dollars from it and tossed the rest in a garbage can somewhere.  Three or four years ago.  Randomly, the image comes up and punches me hard in the face, the stupidity of carrying my wallet in those baggy pants for a late night aerobic session, of not checking for the wallet when I came in, etc.  

“Depressive thinking, son,” the compassionate skeleton of my difficult father said softly.  I need to get screened for depression, though I haven’t much hope that anyone can help with it, certainly not a drug, beyond the placebo I already take.  I’ve made an e-inquiry with my health insurance provider and a robot wrote back telling me how to find a doctor with a specialty in mental health care on their website, no referral or paperwork required.

It’s a depressing thought, finding a doctor to screen me for depression, even though the Affordable Health Care Act apparently covers me for it.  The doctor is most likely to prescribe a drug shown to be better, on a certain blind test, than the placebo that was 84% as effective as the patent drug overall.  You can read a wonderful scholarly article that lays out the whole psycho-pharmaceutical industrial complex here. 

“Do you sleep more than usual?” the doctor will ask.  

“No,” I will say, and I have the data to back it up on my fitbit profile on the computer.  The average of  seven hours is steady going back two years.

“Are you exercising less?”  

“No,” the five to six miles I walk a day is pretty steady across the time I’ve worn the tiny pedometer.

“Have you had a change in your eating habits and weight?” the doctor will ask.

“No,” I will say.    

“Do you ever think of suicide?” the doctor will ask.  

“Not as an option for me, no,” I will say.  

“Why is that?” the doctor will ask.  “If my life was like the one you describe yours as I would honestly have to at least consider it as an option.  Why do you think you close your mind to even considering that?”

The doctor I go to might not necessarily be quite that moronic going through the checklist of diagnostic symptoms, but these would be among the questions asked to screen me for depression.   The thought of reading the list of two hundred names of unknown doctors to pick the one I might consult with, hoping for a doctor of great insight, is like buying a lottery ticket.  

“Better not to help yourself at all?” asks the skeleton who raised not a bony finger to help himself, before he fell into that predictable long-term state.  

All of the time honored, proven ways of beating back depression, vigorous exercise, cleaning your place, making and keeping to daily to do lists, require an energy and optimistic sense the depressed person is often hard pressed to muster.

Sunday afternoon, chilly, the short days of winter creeping up.   Outside Sekhnet’s plants shiver under the flapping plastic covers she’s tucked around them.  The clocks have been turned back.  The only sound is the ratlike tapping on these metallic keys, clack, clack, clack-clack.  The clicking is a comforting sound a person could almost dance to.  There is a certain music in it, I have to say.  I say it.   Having said it, what now?

 

Short Bark

Explaining the perplexing standstill my life and work have seemingly come to, I described in great detail the workings and potential of the student-run animation workshop.  My friend grasped it in unfolding steps as I laid it out to him and said “wow, the kids must love it.”  

“They do,” I said.  

“Well, then you need to take your strength and inspiration from them now, until you figure out the next move,” he said.  

“True, but I haven’t had a workshop with kids since May,” I said.  

“Oh…” he said, the syllable expressing perfectly the enormity of what I’m up against at the moment.

After FUNeral musings

The rabbi conducting yesterday’s funeral had actually met the recently deceased several times over the years, my friend’s father who passed away Sunday at 89 from a late diagnosed cancer.  The deceased had been a strong, vigorous man with a handshake like a vise, I was amazed to learn he’d been close to ninety.  His nephew ended his funeral remarks by calling him a mighty oak and there is nothing lacking in that description of him.

It occurred to me, listening to the moving stories of his youngest daughter and two of his grandsons, that stories told at funerals by people who love you present your best qualities while the rest, to reverse paraphrase the Bard, is oft interred with your bones, as Aaron’s were in the Jewish policeman’s funeral plot in some Queens cemetery.

I am muddling this, because in a hurry to pack up and get back to my cracked and depressing hovel which I have once again vowed to tidy and have patched up.  There is too much to tidy and too much work to patch and paint and re-tile all the things that need to be fixed once the clutter is removed.  A powerful metaphor for my life of action-stalling deliberation that went through my mind after the grandsons spoke lovingly of how their energetic grandfather never wasted a moment of his life.  After retiring from a long and vigorous work life as a police lieutenant and later insurance inspector, he was either strengthening his already strong body or keeping his mind sharp with a new book.  Or walking with or playing with his grandchildren.

The rabbi spoke of the dead man’s uprightness and nobility.  It would not occur to this man of integrity that there could ever be a good reason to depart from what is true, and right, and decent.   His name, Aaron, said the rabbi, was the name of the Jew who had created the priestly class and a fitting name, for the deceased was a true aristocrat.  I thought then of the analogous speech at my own funeral, the final rites of a man who has spent too much time brooding and too little time  pitting himself directly against life.

“He embraced his arbitrarily given name, The Prophet Elijah, with humility and an absurd sense of purpose.  He accepted without apparent complaint the difficult, essential, unpaid task of returning the hearts of children to their parents and the hearts of parents to their children.   Only this reconciliation could prepare humanity for the coming of the Messiah.  Undeterred by the impossibility of the assignment, knowing that the Messiah is not of this world, as subject to wishful imagining as any concept ever dreamed up by people facing the worst and an idea more objectively dubious than all other such human imaginings, even if more laudable than most, he persisted.   Our Elijah was not dissuaded by any of these things, even though he received no reassurance from God, as his biblical namesake had, and thus had no expectation of being taken alive up to heaven as a very, very old man because God loved him so much.”   A pause to look around at the assembled in their suits and nice dresses, letting the immensity of this sink in.  

It is a depressive move to think of your own funeral at, or immediately after, a funeral for somebody else, I think.  I wonder idly now how many others were measuring their own lives against the life of this mighty oak in his flag draped coffin to the rabbi’s right.

Many who give these funeral orations have never met the deceased.  This man did, and gave a few personal reminiscences that were meaningful and moving.  I thought the bit about the name was a little forced, perhaps, especially when he added that the last name, written in Hebrew, formed the root of the word sustainer, nourisher, giver of life, and that he was, indeed, an aristocratic nurturer who sustained us all by his example.   It set my thoughts back to my father’s story about the funeral of our neighbor, Sonny Friedman.

“The rabbi said that he was called ‘Sunny’ because of his cheerful disposition, that he lit up the room when he walked in,” my father told me in his sardonic manner after Sonny’s funeral.   I wish I was artist enough to convey my father’s wry, disgusted expression as he recounted that clinked attempt at a warm, personal touch.  Sonny was a nice neighbor, but withdrawn, a bit dour, perhaps, and I don’t remember that his understated, slightly forced smile lit up any rooms.

Our view of a person, from life to death, is clearly dictated by our perspective, and you know how dictators are.  My sense of this man I’d met a few times was much different from the portraits those who knew him well, and loved him best, painted.  These paintings were striking, majestic, highlighting what was best in him, colored with bold, poetic strokes.  

My sister had seen our father paint such masterpieces at funerals, I had too.  He could make the person live again for a moment among the gathered as he led them through laughs and tears.  “The D.U. could do that for someone he hated,” my sister contends to this day.  “It was just a gift,” she says.

In the audience, in a suit that bound me here and there, to remind me it was not my regular, comfortable clothes, I compared my own life, with its generous swathes of wasted time, to the deceased’s energetic striving, even in the weeks before his painful death, his unflagging strength and discipline, the full exploitation of his engine’s potential, run full-throttle, every day.  

In my seat on the wooden bench, squirming in my suit, I felt the opposite of that.  A trailblazer with tired eyes and quivering rubber legs, resting up apprehensively for the big day as winter prepared to bluster in.

 

 

Protagonism

Twenty-five or thirty years ago a friend of mine coined this term, as far as I know, to indicate the tendency, in our celebrity culture, to present oneself as a protagonist.  In the years since, everyone vaguely inclined to it has become a star.  Some of these stars shine over a city of two or three, some over an entirely empty yard, but while they write or perform they indulge in the dream that someone, somewhere, gives a rat’s ass about what they think or feel.

“Protagonism!” my old friend snorted, to indicate that the long-ago soundtrack I’d improvised and recorded on magnetic tape was mere showing off, did nothing to enhance the audience’s appreciation of the movie, instead merely pointed a constant finger at its author.  

“Nobody cares, nobody cares,” the world-weary dispatcher at Prometheus Courier Service used to say many times a day, especially when people tried to share their concerns with him.  He drank himself to death alone in a rented walk-up in Chelsea, and indeed, nobody cared.  Not to say he wasn’t a very nice guy and a lot of fun to shoot the shit with.  

People photograph their lunch and post it online.  OK.  Same with opinions, which, like cloacae [1], every one of us former reptiles and our bird cousins possess.  Unlike these primitives, we can post them as fast as we think them up.

I wonder about this desire to make oneself known to others, in the form of writings, photos, videos and music posted on the weird electronic spider web most of the world is connected to.    Zora Neale Hurston, a woman who knew a good deal about it, called this desire to make oneself known to others the oldest human longing.  

But thinking about it now, I wonder:  who can possibly care that a stranger’s father, when he was a baby, was whipped in the face, setting in motion a long chain of regrettable events that weighed on his children and his children’s children?  Or about his speculation on the terrible life of the insane mother that caused her to whip her infant in the face, before she left forever the town that would be wiped off the map twenty years later, the blood of everyone she knew in childhood plowed into the mud.  

I suppose one might as well wonder why people read poems, or enjoy psycho-biographies, or watch violent movies where terrible events are portrayed vividly, or smile at idiotically idealized comedies, or love head-banging music.  The things created by human souls as they hurtle between infancy and death.  Could be I’m just thinking too much, having nothing better to do.  You wanna see what I had for lunch?   I’m almost done digesting it.

 

[1]   In birds, the cloaca is the terminal chamber of the gastrointestinal and urogenital systems, opening at the vent. Excretory systems with analogous purpose in certain invertebrates are also sometimes referred to as “cloacae”.

Birds also reproduce with this organ; this is known as a cloacal kiss.  

 

 

A Walk in the Dying Light (#2)

A cool fall day, sunny, the leaves just starting to change color on the trees in Queens.   I took a long walk toward evening, since I avoid the direct rays of the midday sun, what with my nose’s history of cancer and all.  The end of the long loop took me past a suburban house, on Tudor Road, where usually I see as many as a dozen feral cats lounging, clearly being fed and cared for there.  A couple of small dogs lived behind the fence, and they were pretty calm little dogs, by the looks of it.  The cats always seemed very comfortable there, a tiny one slept in a little hollow in the strip of grass by the sidewalk, others were arrayed on the sloping lawn.  This evening I passed as the light was dying away into a chilly fall evening.  I was struck by the lack of animals.

It was light enough to notice that the car parked in the driveway was encrusted in grime.  It was a small, squarish car and it would have been hard to see through the windows of it from the inside.  I noticed that the passenger side front tire, the only one visible to me as I approached, was flat.  There was no kitten curled in that depressed spot in the grass by the sidewalk, nor any other cats that I could see.  There were several black plastic plates with the remains of some wet cat food smeared in them.  There were several dirty plastic bins on the sidewalk, packed haphazardly, lids askew, their contents seemingly random.  In one, on its side, was an almost colorless orange cat, lying on a red towel.  

I paused to look at the cat.  The cat raised its dirty head listlessly and looked at me with slight suspicion.   It’s cat disdain was clear to see, as was the missing eye on the side of the face that had been resting on the towel.   There were no other cats to be seen.   This one glared at me for a moment, until I moved on, then presumably continued its nap in the dying light of one of the first chilly days of the fall.  

Life for feral cats is short and brutal and the winters are certainly no fun for them.  Few, from the evidence of short lives of the kittens and adult feral cats around Sekhnet’s, survive more than a winter or two.  The world weariness of this cat was striking.  I could have been looking at a veteran of ten consecutive deployments in a hostile and senseless war zone.   I walked on, thinking of how savagely hard so many lives are.  It appeared that the eccentric old protector of these feral cats on Tudor Road had probably moved on, by the looks of it.  Every thing that lives moves on.

 

 

Depressive Meditation # 1

In the shower just now, the hot water falling in a lovely cascade, I put my head against the tiles and thought how nice it would be to have a cry.  The water felt so good, the warmth flooding over my skin, and instantly connected me to a sense memory of my earliest life.

Or so I surmise, based on a story my mother told me more than once.  I was a cranky, challenging, surly infant, I’m told, a defiant little chap who would often fret or rage for no apparent reason.  The only thing that would reliably calm me, it turns out, was a nice warm bath.  I would unclench my tiny baby’s fists and my creased brow would smooth itself out.  I would suddenly grow calm and content, suggesting to me that I must often have felt cold as an infant and that my parents’ lack of insight into this is why I was pissed off so often.   I don’t remember this directly, of course, but I recall my mother’s description of it much later in my life.

It is this memory, I suppose, of my mother telling me how the warm water would instantly calm me, as well as the calming influence of the warm water itself, that makes the wonderful feeling of the warm water hurtling down so poignant to me.   The skin is the body’s largest sense organ, and a very sensitive sense organ it is.  The warm water instantly changes the temperature of the skin, which on days when I give in to the feeling, makes me put my head against the tiles, rub my hand over the top of my head, and try to give in to the urge to have a good cry.  

Tears, alas, so rarely come.

Four Cruel and Predictable Koans

While walking a man paused periodically to scrawl these in a small book.

Do you hear the man on the plunging plane exhorting his fellow passengers, with no oxygen mask on himself, to put their oxygen masks on before trying to help other passengers?

In that same man’s defense:  he’s excellent at several different hobbies.

Wishful thinking makes no more than a wish.

Stopping to note a thing doesn’t make it noteworthy.