Home

Live from a small, creaky ground floor one-bedroom on 20th near 1st. Our hosts are off to and heading off to work, leaving the day ours. And it is definitely mine. I am home. New York, the Fatherland.

Solitude

Night: I am in bed alone, windows open, listening to street sounds and reading Bukowski. And were it not for the wife downstairs, the mortgage, the paid-for car, the steady paycheck and the absence of two packs of smokes and clouds of depression I could easily be 24 in my Boston brownstone again. Consistancy is non-linear sometimes, but it inevitably follows a direct path.

I've been thinking about solitude and all its connotations lately. I'm at an interesting point of symmetry: I basically spent the first half of my adult life alone, and I have spent the last half happily attached. But where is the middle ground between? And how far on either side do I want to go? I know the answer is not very. And I'm definitely finding healthy ways of stepping out into my own, and it's been very beneficial to do so. Still, it's hard to find a balance.

It's nice to be suspended between, though...

Lifting

It's getting a little better. Time provides distance from the epicenter, perspective returns, the negative feedback loop softens, I realize what I can and can't take on alone.

Doesn't stop me from taking on as much as I can alone, of course, but I'll take newfound perspective...

Torpor

Hi, I'm Beer for Breakfast and I'm Depressed!

I have lived with diagnosed clinical depression for eleven years now. Over this time, medication and therapy have allowed me to live a 90% normal life, free of the unchecked neurosis that rendered me basically incapacitated for most of my twenties. And I have come to be greatly at peace with this quirk of my DNA: I'm okay, it's an errant synapse and nothing I did or didn't do, and I'm certainly not alone. Impossible to explain to those that are blessedly depression free, this illness sneaks in and robs the victim of reality, creates feedback loops of negativity and steals away all energy and general well-being. It is a bitch, and it is, after what I went through before getting help, incalculably destructive.

And it can still strike, even when one is 90% cured as I am, as I discovered this past week...