Life On the Frontier

Buff Neighbor Ken reports a bear in his driveway. A BEAR! He caught it on surveillance camera midnight before last.

I live on the frontier!

At cah1470's recommendation, I started watching Fleabag. She’s right. A protagonist I can fully relate to. And deeply funny in the most morbid, disturbed way possible.

In fact, I should probably take to my bed and do nothing but watch Fleabag for the next couple of days because whatever this mood is, it’s not going away. I stumble through my days: Exercise! Garden! Scut Factory! One thousand words on the Work in Progress! Eight hours sleep! But it all seems worthless and kind of beside the point. Some kind of psychological Maunder Minimum.

I don’t like the word “depression.” The word “depression” grounds sad feelings in the self—which I suppose is appropriate in this most solipsistic of historical times, which grows more solipsistic every day as people increasingly project their needs for intimacy on to aluminosilicate blips on a smartphone screen.

Plus “depression” is monochromatic. There’s a whole arsenal of words that evolved to capture more ontological nuances: sadness, sorrow, melancholy, grief, regret, gloom, remorse, loneliness, anguish. But people don’t use them anymore.

It would be easy and bespeak a nobility I in no way possess to attribute what I’m feeling to the X-husband’s condition. But I don’t think it is connected, though it may have been triggered.

I think it’s more likely to be connected to the fact that until the check engine light situation is sorted out, I don’t have the option of jumping in my car, filling my tank with gas, and telling the world to kiss my ass.

Escape is so important to me.