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I’ve been a bit preoccupied with bottle feeding that I keep forgetting to post this article on Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit I wrote for Meow Meow Pow Pow. The band and Hutchison’s lyrics meant a great deal to me. Anytime we have people like Bourdain or Huchison leave this earth-people we feel like we know intimately-it gets me down. But don’t worry about me friends. I am fine. Really. I still drink the drink the drinks and sneak cigarettes but I’ve never been better. A daughter will do that to you. Anyways give it a read and help destigmatize mental health!
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Levi Justin Rogers
Words. Sentences. Poems.
Tag Archives: Depression
NPR
In the mornings I like to listen to NPR. I drag my half-dead self out of bed (never as early as I want to, thinking foolishly that somehow I’ll have the energy to write or run before work) and stumble my way through making a Chemex. Coffee being one of the few things that has the ability to rouse me from the covers. My thoughts switching from: Who am I? What am I? Is there meaning to any of this? To: I would like some coffee. I then collect few Tupperware’s full of food from the fridge and throw it in my bag. I get in the car and turn on the radio.
Good morning. It’s 8:45. Today is Monday, October 27th. The temperature is a high of 75 with lows in the 40’s. Currently it’s 60 degrees in Salt Lake City. You’re listening to KUER. You’re listening to morning edition. You’re listening to NPR.
I like the sound, the comforting, though generally dismal topics of conversation. The radio grounds one in the present space-time continuum.
Ah, I think. It’s October. It’s Monday. I am in Salt Lake City. The weather still happens. And I’m not dead yet. It’s almost meditative. To stop the spinning in my head, the daily chores ahead of me, and the existential/theological thought experiments I torture myself with.
I drive to work and I think. How do people do it? Work more than eight hours in a day? Keep getting up and doing their jobs day in and day out? And if you do work eight hours a day, where do you get the energy for exercise, for art, for social activities?
I work a conservative fifty hours a week now. Some of that has to do with running a business. Some of it is just normal work stuff. And in America, I am the lazy one. We have many gods in America. One is work or specifically, the power and money work brings. We have other gods. Family and Sex. Which funny enough, are on the opposite sides of the spectrum.
Anyways, there’s a moment each morning when I’m sipping coffee and taking a bite out of an asiago bagel that I’m no longer thinking. I no longer worry. I am listening.
Optimism
There are upsides to depression. For instance, say you are on your way home from a long day working at a factory somewhere and you find out your dog has eaten your favorite pair of shoes and/or your birthday cake. Most people would become furious, start waving their arms and raising their voices all shrill like. But you simply walk in the door, notice both the shoes and the cake, and just sort of shrug your shoulders because you don’t really care about anything these days. Your nihilism has reached an all time high. See what I mean? It’s not all bad having a chemical imbalance in your brain that makes everything as bleak as a Bergman film. Anger for instance goes away and the caring about small things like a pair of shoes and/or a birthday cake. Of course happiness goes along with it but no one ever said you could have it all.
Another upside to depression is that you never expect anything good to happen in life so when something good does happen well, it really makes your day. Like when someone offers to pay for your coffee or your parents remember your name. I mean, sometimes you wish for death and when that doesn’t happen it can be a little bit disappointing but this can also be a good thing because you don’t really fear death. You welcome it. And because you don’t fear death you are completely immune to the worries and fears of other people’s lives such as “What if I get hit by a train?” or “What if I get cancer and my balls get chopped off?”
Are there other upsides to depression? Probably not. But I one or two upsides is better than none.