This week’s Newsweek cover story is about male depression.  Great.

I am still deciding whether my depression is more like Churchill and Lincoln or more like Hemingway and Robert Lowell.  Maybe Styron and maybe Mike Wallace.  I don’t like pain, so Van Gogh is out.

Who knew being moody and irritable was so damn chic?

I always thought it was more than a little inconvenient to go through life as if each day were a burden, an imposition, an inconvenience, a rather brutal punishment.  Now, I find out it’s what all the cool guys are doing.

Turns out there are a lot of new treatments for male depression.  You can’t get ‘em yet because it’s all experimental, but they are coming on line.  Good news for those of us who put “suicide” on our calendar for 2012, but if it’s a bit more urgent … well … there’s always electroconvulsive shock therapy.  Thomas Eagleton and all you know.  That image you have of Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, just forget about that.

In the meantime, you can have some great drugs that will keep you from being quite so far down in the dumps.  Of course, your libido will be sleeping with the Fido in the doghouse.  You won’t actually be happy, you understand.  Zombie like is one description I’ve heard, but “happy”, well, …. uhm … nope.

Behavioralists have been in vogue the past couple of decades in the talk therapy arena.  It’s a great gig.  You tell them your problems, they tell you attitude is everything, move along, the bill will be in the mail.  You can try some other form if you like.  Keep a notebook by your bed and record your dreams.  Get hypnotized into infant recollections of trauma.  Or, you just might try a VooDoo witch.  I’m not always quite so sure that there’s all that much difference between an African Shaman who reads entrails and divines dreams and the American psychiatrist/psychologist.  Well, the African charges a straight up one time fee of a cow and the American charges $125/hour for the rest of your life and, as a result the American dresses better.

I took the fun online test for depression offered as a link from the online Newsweek articles.  It was great.  It told me that I should immediately go to an emergency room and check myself in, seek hard drugs and a size 40 long straight jacket.  Turns out that not every Rohrschach image is a knife wound or a fresh branding burn on the private parts of nuns and Republicans.

Who knew?

So, what do you think?  Just when I’m grousing about being depressed, along comes this Newsweek coverage of male depression.  Is that Jungian synchronicity?  Irony?  Coincidence? 

by the way, today was a great day.  Worked hard, billed hours, was productive at my desk and here at home.  Had the top down, washed the car in the sunny 70-degrees.  Last night, significantly advanced the ball on my income tax project.   I can’t explain me.  It’s confusing in here, too.

blogblah!!!

I’ve spent my whole life trying to be good enough for YOU.

I never was.

Now, I’m trying to be good enough for me.

I’m failing at that as well.

Oh, I can be good.  I can even be excellent.

Just not quite good ENOUGH.

For all my strengths, there are always weaknesses.

I just can’t get it perfect, of course.

Being a good lawyer isn’t ENOUGH.  I’ve MUST be a rich, successful, prominent lawyer.

Being smart isn’t ENOUGH.  I’ve MUST be the smartest man who ever lived, never making a mental mistake.

Someone, somewhere, has better clothes, better hair, better looks.  I’m not ENOUGH.

I wonder if someday I’ll have ENOUGH of ENOUGH.

I had fun at VZDs with Brave Combo Friday night, but the cover charge was $12.  That’s too much, in my opinion.  The crowd was truncated from its usual for this local favorite from Univ. N. TX and there’s no doubt in my mind that the cover charge accounts for some people just turning away.  Too much other fun stuff to do on a Friday night.

I’m having discussions with the Ultimate Webmaster and the look of this blog will be changing shortly.  If there are any disruptions in service or postings, I apologize in advance, it’ll likely be my fault for being so technologically challenged.  Anyway, if you hit your link and it looks different, don’t freak.

According to a 2005 study by Perseus, a Web survey firm, less than half a percent of an estimated 53.4 million bloggers are 50 and older.
 

Just finished the Augusten Burroughs book, “Dry”.

He’s the guy who wrote “Running with Scizzors.”

Who woulda guessed that a guy that grew up in that situation would, as an adult, find himself with a chemical dependency problem?

It’s a very good memoir.

It just about drove me out of my mind.

Lots of ickky feelings stirred up from my own getting sober days.  Lots of ickky feelings from the last days of my drinking.

The one thing recovery people hate the most is ickky feelings.  Makes us want to go back to the death path of dependency.  We don’t deal well with ickky feelings, which is what got us into trouble in the first place.  We just want them to stop and stop now and whatever it takes to stop feeling the ickky feeling, we’re willing to do.  Even if it kills us.

And, it does kill us.  It kills people every single day.

So, we make the choice all over again.  Do we want to live sober or die drunk?

Sometimes, this is not as easy a choice as you may think if you aren’t inside the disease.

This is a strange February for me.

This is the first Valentines Day in 20 someodd years that I haven’t handed out penny dreadful cards to strangers.  First Feb. 14 in many years that I haven’t run around and dropped off a nice card with almost every woman I know.  First VD I haven’t had someone I was either “with” or Jones-ing about.

I wasn’t up to it this year.

No enthusiasm for the project.

I lost my faith in romantic love.  Can’t worship in that church right now.  Can’t take communion and don’t want to.

Pure dumb luck has brought me to a place where I’m financially secure for the moment and I’m also not in any romantic relationship drama.

And, I’m scared.  Scared shitless.

I’m as anxious as I can be.  I’m a cat on a hot tin roof.

I don’t really know why.  It’s just where I am.  I don’t have any faith in the future.  My imagined catastrophic doom awaits. 

I’ve tried writing affirmations and a gratitude list.  I’ve called another alcoholic.  I’ve gone to meetings.  I take my meds.

It seems the best I can do right now is to fake it until I can make it.  I’m trying to act my way into a new way of thinking by dressing in a suit and tie and coming to work and being around friends and pursuing enjoyable and satisfying goals.

Right under that surface, I’m a scared little boy (sorry, Flibbertigibbet!, that’s just who I am.  I’d like to be your stand up guy, but I’m not.).  The problem is that I’m not a little boy.  When a little boy lashes out against his fears, it’s harmless.  I’m a supersmart grown up lawyer and when I lash out, it’s not right, it’s not pretty and it’s not harmless.  I hate that.

I hate me.  I hate having to be me.  I’m like a lot of drunks who think that one day they will be sitting in a bar drinking and some supernatural power — usually the next drink — will lift me up to a place of exhaltation where I will not be bothered by the day to day problems of being a human being.  All my problems will go away.  I will be in control of the universe and the world and its people will bend to my personal whim and will.  I will be a president or a general or a great scientist or whatever.  I have accepted many Nobel Peace Prizes in my fantasies.  I’ve been applauded by huge numbers of people, adoring crowds.  And the reality of my life, by comparison, seems so tawdry and boring.  It just isn’t fair.  It isn’t right.  Don’t you all know who I AM?

Yeah, John, I know who you are.  You’re a recovering drunk barely functional after a dozen years of sobriety.  And lucky to be even that.

I so wish I could go someplace and hide.

I have a passport.  I’ve put some cash in a hidey hole.  I could run away.

I have razor blades and topical anaesthetic and hot water.

There are those people who know me who think I’m an arrogant ass because of my manner.

If they only knew.

Today, I will live sober.

Today, I will not try to cure my addiction geographically.

Today, I will live like the person I want to be be and not the person I feel like.

Today, I will not believe everything I think.

Today, I will not listen to my fears.

Today, I will try to be led by my hopes.

Today, I will try.

I’m gonna chalk this one up to male goofballness, although I think it’s more widespread.  I think this is done by some women to some men and by gay men on gay men, but it’s something I see most often done by goofballs in bars to unsuspecting girls with cooties, bootys and boobies.

It’s a very goofball thing to do and something I’m sure Flibbertigibbet! will recognize instantly.

It goes like this:  Since I really really really want to get into your pants, ergo, therefore and perforce, you must want to get into my pants back.  At least you’ll want in my pants when you find out how much I really really really want to get into your pants.  No thought is given to giving some unsuspecting woman a reason to want to get into his pants, because that is assumed.  Right.

It works like this:  you are sitting at a bar, minding your own business and maybe having a conversation about gasoline prices and the Iraq war with your best girlfriend.  OK, maybe you’re having a conversation about that bitch at the desk next to you at work.  In any case, you’re having a conversation.  All at once and completly out of the blue, some schlump of a goofball appears in a chair next to you.  He’s holding a cocktail he may or may not be spilling.  “You’re really beautiful,” he tells you.  If you say “thank you”, you are in for some unpleasantness, because it won’t stop there.

He will tell you it was love at first sight.  He will tell you that you are the perfect woman.  He will tell you that you are perfect in every detail and that he finds your ___________ (insert body part here, but often eyes, lips and/or hair) irresistable, it’s just like in his dreams. 

It’s just like obvious bullshit.

It reminds me of that scene in Adaptation where Nick Cage tells himself about the importance of how much love one gives.  Or, “Love is never having to say you’re sorry.”

In all events, it’s a common bit of goofballness to believe that my deep lust results in a mutual feeling.

Here’s a second bit of goofballness … unfortunately, one with a mirror image cootieness on the part of women.  A lot of people are like cats.  You can’t chase us down, but you can entice us easily.  When it comes to flirtation, we can be extremely gullible.  We can really really hear what we want to hear.  In fact, we can hear hints that are not there and make ourselves believe that nothing is something very important.

That same goofball, on the other hand, if she turns around and says: “well, dog, you caught this bus, now what’cha gonna do?”  Oh Fuck.  He will run like a goat on fire.

So much fear.  We fear that we don’t deserve love and that we aren’t loveable and that we’ve been so long without love that we’ve forgotten how.  And on and on.  Goofballness!  Long live avoidance!

And, finally, because these things come in threes, I want to affirm Flibbertigibbet!’s observation about lard ass couch potatoes.  What kind of obvious bullshit is it when a guy who is no more than a 3 on his best day of his life wants nothing to do with any woman who isn’t at least a solid 8+ at the worst point of her life?  Do you really have to be Sigmond Freud to figure that one out?

Get a fucking grip!  You only get to date Julia Roberts and look like Lyle Lovett if you are fabulously talented and brilliant.  You are not Lyle.  You are a goofball.  Get over it.

Ladies, if there is a man in your life who is exhibiting one of these behaviors you are going to want to tell him he’s a goofball in no uncertain terms.  You may even wish to say that his fellow goofball, blogblah, says so.  You may wish to point out to him the error of his thinking and the high obnoxious quotient of his behavior.  Resist the urge, I beg you.  We are goofballs.  We won’t understand and will just be grateful for your attention.  We will think you want to sleep with us as badly as we want to sleep with you.  You will only encourage us.  Your best outcome if you should give into the temptation to be absolutely and positively right is to be called a controlling bitch in every bar on the north side of town.  Worse, you could end up sleeping with a goofball.

That’s how you get cooties, by the way.

blogblah!!!

AIDS patients suffering from debilitating nerve pain got as much or more relief by smoking marijuana as they would typically get from prescription drugs — and with fewer side effects — according to a study conducted under rigorously controlled conditions with government-grown pot.

Read the whole Washington Post story here.