Depression is familiar to me and no longer holds much terror for me.   This lack of terror may be as much the result of my genetic coding as my experiences with depression.   During the worst of the times I was depressed, for example, I never considered ending my own life.   Killing myself always struck me as useless, worse than foolish, even when the world looked bleak, pointless and hopeless to me.   I understand suicide if you are faced with a painful terminal condition with no hope of cure, but outside of that, I do not understand it at all.   I can imagine other rare scenarios, about to be tortured by some powerful psychopath who has you chained up, with no way to escape or call for help, but with a cyanide pill in your false molar, OK, it might be reasonable then.   I never suffered a depression deep enough to make me feel suicide was the only way out.   I guess that’s the easiest way to describe my lack of terror about the Black Dog.  Having experienced a fairly mild form of depression makes it easier for me to be philosophical about it, for sure.   I recognize an element of pure, dumb luck in that.

All that said, the mechanism of depression, the complete loss of hope, is clear to me now, which also helps diminish the fear of it.   You get sucked down into a low energy state where not only is everything hopeless and grim, but, on a fundamental, undeniable level, it’s your own fault that everything is hopeless and grim because you are a colossal asshole.   I’ve heard, and it seems true, that depression is rage turned inward.  Your imagination, along with all the hope it contains, turns to mud, to quicksand, no productive or hopeful thoughts can bubble out of depression.  You cannot lash out at the oppression around you, which may be impossible to do in a productive way in any case, or at least unimaginably difficult, so you turn the whip on yourself.   

Learning to stop whipping myself was a major change for the better in my life.   It was a promise I made to myself about thirty years ago, during a very trying time in my life, when I faced the prospect of prison time (during the endless months before the charges were finally dismissed).   Scary fucking days, The People of New York State v. Me.   A little voice, my own, told me one night when I was quaking in my bed: whatever happens, I will be there with you, do not worry until it’s time to worry, and remember, add nothing to what the world is already doing to you right now.   We will face whatever happens together.  

I was, naturally, also filled with anxiety, biking twenty miles or more a day, up gigantic hills, lifting weights, got into the best shape of my life, against the day when I might have to fight for it in the narrow hallway outside of the exercise yard.

That little voice reassured the hell out of me.  If I was a different kind of person that voice would have been a come to Jesus type moment, the voice of God, my Creator.  In my own case, it was the voice of the best and wisest of myself, my internal parent, the voice I had nurtured every time the world made no sense to me.   The world had often made no sense to me as a child, for reasons I was only able to fully grasp starting about forty years later.

Depression is familiar, anxiety disorder (as common an affliction, I read, as depression) is alien to me.   Anxious as I was in those days when my higher voice had to reach down to pull me out of panic, constant anxiety is a different animal entirely, I think.  Just as the depressive way of life is to accept a shit situation as something impossible to change, the way of anxiety is always churning along.   Anxiety, I am pretty sure, never stops.  The ceaselessness of worry, being on the edge of panic at all times, fearing the worst and taking measures always to avoid it, makes it a full-time job just to get through the day.

The only way I can really picture anxiety disorder is to imagine as my permanent overarching feeling the moments when I felt close to panic.  Whatever else is going on, behind the scene terror is doing a mocking dance.   The person is reassuring you that everything is fine, you see a sarcastic demon behind the person doing a grotesque, leering pantomime, waving hideous fingers in “air quotes”, as the reassuring voice drones on, almost unheard.   That is my image of anxiety disorder, which I will refer to as anxiety for the remainder of this short piece.

As I recognize features of anxiety in old friends I learn new things about it.   One complaint I’ve long had about one old friend is an inability to remember many of the specific, specifically troubling, details of a difficult discussion we’ve had.  The troubling section of our conversation is erased, like an incriminating tape.   This constant partial erasure appears to be a mechanism of anxiety.   The things that make you anxious must be continually repressed, it seems.  The strategy doesn’t really help in relationships, unless the other party is willing to simply accept that any emotional difficulty will be resolved by pretending everything is fine.   Like the depressive’s neurotic willingness to accept the intolerable as the best the person deserves, the anxious person’s over-riding desire is to avoid anxiety.   Anger?   OH FUCK, NO!!!!!   ARRGGGGH!    ARRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Anger is a common and natural emotion.   It is arguably the most difficult emotion we regularly have to face.   Some unfortunate people face it by turning that supremely threatening shit on themselves.   Can you look into the barrel of your own gun and say “fuck those fucking assholes!!!” and shoot yourself in the face if you are not full of irrational, inchoate rage?  Let’s be kind, maybe the rage is neither irrational nor inchoate– does anyone but a nut shoot himself because he can’t deal with his own anger?   (And, yes, for the gender pronoun police, part of that vast force of politically correct over-reactors who helped get the cruel Trump elected, He is more prone to shoot a gun in rage than She is, at least statistically). 

Anger to a depressive is turned inward, a kind of self-torture.  Anger to an anxiety prone person… I don’t know.   I guess it’s pushed away, denied, buried under constant frenetic activity.  It’s compressed, shoved down somewhere, rationalized, stored away as fodder for future anxiety — I literally have only the foggiest idea.  It’s the same exercise to me as trying to imagine the quiet, inner life of a devout Christian, or Muslim, or Buddhist, or Jain.  I have only the faint outlines, the imagined idea of what it might be like in the quiet heart of someone truly imbued with holy beliefs and living a highly moral life in accordance with those beliefs.   

Living with anxiety is like that to me, a world I can only imagine.  The full-flight pattern my father used to complain about his old friend running, in hindsight, is the perfect indicator of anxiety disorder.  The day was divided into a highly scheduled series of tasks, each one allotted no more than the actual time it was supposed to take.  In the real world, this ideal schedule is almost impossible to carry out, so the full-flight pattern requires constant triage, cutting corners, cutting short one thing to have the time to do another– the whole planned enterprise impossible, but, nonetheless compulsory.  The anxious person is unable to be fully present because… already running late, late, got to get to those next things, shit, things are falling apart, goddamn it…

Time is all we really have here.  Elmore Leonard has his idiot criminals and smart cops alike, in every book, “taking their time.”  This shows that they are cool.   What is cool but doing things the way you want to, not the way others demand?  So a guy asks an Elmore Leonard tough guy “what the fuck?” and glares at him, waiting for an answer.   The tough guy turns his head toward the window, through which a strip of the ocean is visible, takes it in, breathes the salt air.   Reaches into his pocket, takes out a cigarette, reaches for his lighter on the table, lights the cigarette slowly, draws in the tobacco smoke, taking his time.  “You know what?” he finally says, taking his time, “fuck you.”

The words above are “b’tzelem Eloheem”, a biblical phrase that means “in the image of God.”  Man and woman were created b’tzelem Eloheem, in the image of God.   To those who believe in an all-powerful, all-merciful creator who watches over the world (God), the connection between the divine creator and His creations is more than a metaphor.    Sentience, the ability to feel the many miracles (and pains) of this world, is an attribute of God.  Empathy is an attribute of God.   Jealousy and rage are also attributes of God.   That’s righteous jealousy and rage, mind you.   We are, every one of us, created in God’s likeness, animated by a divine spark breathed directly from God’s soul.  Accordingly, we may never behave ruthlessly toward fellow creatures created in God’s image.

In my view we’re on our own down here, God, in whatever form we may imagine, has long ago been driven mad by the wickedness and brutal folly of those He created in His image, but that is another story. 

One should not look for consistency in religious views.   Humans are not known for the consistency of their beliefs, any of their beliefs, religious or otherwise.   If you truly believe God has created every human in God’s own image, it would call for different behavior, difficult behavior, Christ-like behavior.   You could never, for example, condone the torture of anybody.   The ripping of babies from their mothers’ arms at a border?  God simply would not tolerate this, Jesus would have his proverbial mildness tested.   Concentration camps?  No way.   Poverty going back many generations in the wealthiest country the world has ever known?   God would send a plague against that Pharaoh.

There are righteous followers of every religion, gentle men and women of peace, generosity, humility.   These humbly religious people are one of the great hopes of humanity.    There are also followers of virtually every religion who are complete, even murderous, assholes and hypocrites.   To be sure, they may pray to God for guidance in how to live with the atrocities they wink at, sometimes carry out with their own hands, but these folks have no hesitation to spit in the face of the God who urges them to treat the least of His creatures the same as the most powerful, when it suits their righteous purposes.

This is not intended as a critique of religion, though there’s one image I can’t seem to shake lately.  My parents toward the end of their lives, tutored elementary school kids in reading.  My mother worked with one little girl, a tiny beauty, who, although very sweet, was, according to my mother, the dumbest girl she ever met.  The kid simply could not grasp the first thing about reading.   My parents met the girl’s parents and struck up a friendship with them.    This couple were Born Again Evangelical Christians.   They had turned their backs on their parents, who self-righteously refused to accept Jesus as deeply as they had.   My parents became surrogates for the grandparents their kids would never know.

My mother, a woman of strong opinions, got into a dispute with them one day about the supremely simple Christian counter-myth certain believers argue: Intelligent Design.  Under this theory, used to refute another theory, Darwin’s theory of evolution (merely a theory, say the Born Again, no better than our “theory”), God created everything perfect the first time, there was never any need for improvement of any creation of the Supreme Creator.  For whatever reasons, my mother found this theory fantastically imbecilic, impossible to swallow.   A good natured argument raged between my mother and the mother of the beautiful little girl.    The husband stuck his head out of the kitchen door to chime in on his wife’s side.   He was eating a banana, half of it was in his mouth, the other half in his hand.  “You’ll never convince me that I evolved from a monkey!” said the father.   Everyone in the room laughed, because in that moment, he resembled nothing more than a monkey.  Even he laughed.

When my father was dying the couple showed up with a few other people from their church.  They formed a prayer circle around my dying father and called for him to accept the Lord Jesus Christ into his heart that he might be saved from the flames of eternal damnation that await the righteous of all nations who do not accept Jesus.   Had I been there, I’d have gone Jesus at the Money Changers on them, overturned their tables, dashed them out of the dying man’s sight.  I was not there.  They prayed over my father and left.   Then my father died.   And these righteous Born Again lovers of Jesus never contacted my mother, his grieving widow, after her husband died.   I think about this every time Evangelicals wink at some sinful thing their politicians do, when I think of how many of their leaders uncritically support our cruel, unChristian president.  “Who among us, if famous and powerful, has never grabbed a woman by the pussy in a moment of lust?”

I am thinking about this because I looked up the name of that Israeli peace group B’Tzelem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and was reminded of that biblical phrase.  B’Tzelem’s position is that, since Jews and Palestinians of every political orientation are all created b’tzelem Eloheem, Jews must not treat others brutally in the Jewish State.  There are many current examples of the the Jewish State behaving brutally, often under the name of Ha’ Shem, God, the Supreme Ruler and Ultimate Real Estate Mogul.   God gave this land to me!  Who am I going to believe, God or some so-called “refugee”?

I was referred to an article that describes the Palestinian Refugee Issue as something of a massive fraud.   The article was not published in the Jerusalem Post, as I was told, but here.  The piece was supposed to convince me, I imagine, that since Palestinians and the surrounding Arab states are manipulating and misstating the scope of the Palestinian refugee problem, and creating this gigantic political wedge to hammer into the heart of Israel, that I should not be so quick to condemn the use of live ammunition against those who hate Israel.   I haven’t checked the facts asserted in the article, but for the sake of discussion, I’ll accept everything as true.   What does any of that have to do with using live ammunition against a massive demonstration?   This article also appeared on the website, and I think it is more to the point and provides a bit of nuance.

Of course, as any Christian preacher will tell you, the Devil is fond of quoting scripture, and good at it.  Infernally good, yo.   That motherfucker can quote the hell out of biblical wisdom.    Word.