The Elliott Smith is on repeat.

‘Between the Bars.’ The macaroni is boiling in the frying pan. (We don’t have a proper pot these days.) There is hydrocodone somewhere and there is weed somewhere. Of course there is also beer and liquor but I’m just depressed, not stupid, and I know well enough that the idea is less, not the more that comes with drinking.

Over-eat = slower mind = less thoughts.

The idea is to flatline while staying alive. It is to hibernate until winter passes. It is to crawl into a box and (somehow) drop myself at UPS. Tell them to send me someplace where the air is different–or the values, or the people, or the sky, or the anything–anything and anywhere that is not right here, feeling how I do right now.

You know what would be nice? To be the sound the needle makes on the record once there are no more songs left to play.

So rhythmic. So soothing. But, above all, so nothing at all.

***

Anyone reading this who has never been depressed: I hate you.

***

What counts as progress is taking the iTunes off repeat and letting it go to the next song. ‘Alameda’, still by Elliott Smith.

“Nobody broke your heart/

You broke your own/

Cos’ you can’t finish what you start.”

Hello, nurse.

The macaroni is done. I mix in that powdered cheese. One nice thing about depression is it helps you see the absurdity in the world. Like that ‘cheese.’ If you didn’t know what it was and I dumped a handful of it onto your spaghetti you’d call me an asshole and think I was poisoning you. But tonight it is what will make my dinner Thick N’ Creamy. If you showed me this stuff in a test tube I’d believe it was Agent Orange. It’s as delicious as anything.

I go with the pain killer and I feel better already. There is an ache in my hip that wasn’t there before, but the pill is healing it. Problem invented=problem solved… the equation that makes the world go round, right? They make us believe we need something so that they can get us to buy it. But maybe that’s part of my problem, and the problem with all the depressives out there: we’ve been taught to believe that depression is a problem that needs to be solved.

Just maybe our emotions don’t fit so neatly into the commercial/industrial complex.

Maybe part of the problem with depression is that we view it as a problem.

Maybe, in some fucked up way, it’s actually the solution.

***

Let me tell you, the tender blue arms of Facebook is not a good place to find solace when you’re sad. Depression is made of a thousand tinker toys of loneliness that are easy enough to deal with on their own, but when you put them together they form some sort of unbearable monster.

And, oh boy, is Facebook full of tinker toys of loneliness when you’re a dude sitting alone in his apartment on a cold January night.

All the status update jokes I don’t get. (Are they even jokes? So many status updates make me feel like I’ve been socialized underground, like I’m watching Jamie Foxx say things at an award show I know are supposed to be jokes, but I don’t get how.)

The endless party pictures. I want to yell at all those round smiling faces, Are you really that happy?

All the little successes. The bits of womp-womp infused bad luck. All of these people joining groups, as if joining a Facebook group can, by some Vonnegut-esque doomsday trick, actually save a whale or a person or a soul.

Sometimes people ‘poke’ me on Facebook, but it’s so rare someone tries to hug me in real life. That’s pretty screwed up, right?

***

Maybe the only Elliott Smith lyric that doesn’t encourage sadness floats by:

“There is no nighttime, it’s only a passing phase.”

It’s true, right? There’s a Flaming Lips lyric with a similar sentiment. It goes, “You realize the sun doesn’t go down/ it’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round.”

And that’s why I only write suicide note status updates in my head and I don’t actually type them, or fully mean them. It’s why I do things like eat four servings of Mac&Cheese and take a pill now and again to slow the world down. It’s why I’m going to watch The Bachelor in fifteen minutes, and I’m going to allow myself to laugh at the stupid women and lust after the hot ones and long, in some utterly meaningless (but at this moment completely meaningful) way, for the intelligent ones.

That I know this depression will pass is the only reason I was able to write this blah blah blog. The morning is hope. Writing is hope. The way iTunes goes on to a new song all on its own is hope. The way my body is, as we speak, turning that neon yellow powdered cheese into hot steaming shit is hope too.

It’s all hope, when you let it be hope.

Or maybe that’s just the hydrocodone talking.

The Bachelor appears at 8 pm on your local ABC affiliate. Never, ever do a Google image search for Agent Orange.