u s e y o u r h a n d s

My frien Ethan has been reading a lot of Algonquin Round Table folk recently. Alexander Woolcott, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker. I got an email from him the other day telling me about a Parker biography he’d picked up recently. “She had a really sad life,” he said – and I imagine, wistfully – “There’s one person who would have benfitted from antidepressants.”

I’ve weighed that very question. To take or not to take. Do I really want to pick up a trend this late in the game? Is Prozac passe? But that’s a silly concern and it keeps me from really considering the issues that frighten me.

Not least among these concerns is the idea of shame that my brain or sheer willpower can’t improve my outlook. How trivial. Why can’t I transcend? Do I not deserve contentment? It’s something that runs very deep and I’m not going to go into in on my webbity not only because I don’t want to talk about it, but also because I wouldn’t know what to say. I’ve been running away from that question a long time and I think the road’s almost up.

I went to go see The Hours this weekend. I guess I should have realized it was about depression and suicide, but I just didn’t think about it. It was not the movie for me to see. There’s a part that resonated too deeply. Virginia Woolf discovers that she can use suicide as an out when pain becomes too much. That’s something that we all think about at some point. If this gets too tough, I can choose whether or not to endure it. It’s a question of legislation for some, morality for others. And while it’s a great source of comfort to many terminally ill patients, I can speak only as a chronically depressed person. That choice to live – that some people make every day – is too much. It’s too great a temptation and too empty a comfort. I’d rather not have to think about life in terms of days or weeks of pain.

But without insurance, I guess even pondering the question of chemical mediation is moot. However, it’s good, solid thought in advance. If I ever find myself in the thick of the shit again, I can always rely on this cogent pro-prozac argument. I can print this out and take it to a pharmacist and say, “I’ve given myself license!”

I’ll make reference back to the title of this entry. Will I have an even day? The same day that I had this heavy Hours/depression experience, I was flying high in a happy way. I really enjoyed watching an MTV reality show called Sorority. Wow. And I wasn’t making fun of it all the time. I was engrossed. The politics of an all-female organization. And in pastoral California! And I had yummy Entenmann’s. It was sunny-ish. The morning was good.

But then I turned some corner and my head and took a nose-dive into the shit. That happens way too often and always has. The ups and downs take too much out of me now. I need better shocks on this car.

Let us segue.

The 11 a.m. air is heavy with the smell of fried food and ketchup. How, on earth, can that be?

In the suburbs, it’s snowing. Horizontally. Every time I use “vertical” or “horizontal,” I think back to 7th grade and a mnemonic device courtesy of Patty DeHaven: “Vertical is upright, like a virgin. Horizontal is flat, like a whore.” I know the difference, but every time I use those words, that’s what I think of.

Overheard:

[at home] “Your face smells horrible.”

Listening to: Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville. It’s got my song on it, “6′1″ Because that’s how tall I am.