The Lifting of Negatives

Hello. We’ve been feeling way too apathetic this past week. I’m not usually prone to heavy fits of depression but for the better part of this past week a blue funk had me coiled deep into its groove. And the worst thing about it is how nebulous it makes me feel, as though all my best laid plans were carted off in the middle of the night to some remote, unobtainable location. I awake in the morning, not quite a husk of my former self, but definitely lacking in the essentials that allow anybody to approach the day with the curiosity necessary to enable adventure, delight, satisfaction and all the other requisite ingredients that add up to what you might call, after a luxurious sip of red wine, a good day.

The word for this is blah. Blah. It’s low-grade neurosis. It’s psychodrama. It’s personality deflating or personae with a limp. And it happens and what I probably dislike most about it is that I don’t feel much like playing while it’s running its moronic course. No catching fireflies or building of forts and definitely, most definitely no after dinner puppet shows! Nope, none of that. Just moping and big thick clouds of sullen resting between the eyes. Blah.

There are solutions for a case of the blahs and they don’t include pharmaceuticals but they do include alcohol. Not immediate cure-all’s or anything- just a bunch of moments when the clouds lifted and levity was introduced. Little things, too. Eggs with bacon, for instance. Putting the blinds up. Eating a Nutrageous. Climbing 9 flights of stairs. Sharing a beer with Cathy. Hearing Baba O’Riley played live and loud. Those decorative snowmen lining Broadway (just north of Bryn Mawr) especially, all sordidly brackish from accumulated holidays spent hanging on the light polls- I especially like these- how they’re anything but white- how they resist the purity associated with the holidays- how their original snow-whiteness has gone and mutated into something vaguely sleazy from the splash of gingerbread slush and car exhaust. Maybe I saw something emblematic in them- their state and mine. Sweet context. Laughter nevertheless.

Presently there is a thaw and a lifting of negatives. I’m hoping this current sticks around.