I’m pretty sure I figured out the proximate cause of my depression attack.

It was this.

A YouTube video of Linda Ronstadt singing “Long, Long Time.” (This is a truncated version, by the way, omitting the plaintive third verse so the producers could fit 20 seconds more of valuable commercial time into the slot.)

One of my favorite songs of all time. It’s so beautiful. So poignant. So evocative.

And it makes me feel so very, very sorry for myself.

LOVE WILL ABIDE; TAKE THINGS IN STRIDE.

SOUNDS LIKE GOOD ADVICE BUT THERE’S NO ONE AT MY SIDE.

Takes me back, that does, to my year-and-a-half of servitude at a country radio station. It was a country station in two senses. Not only did it follow a Nashville format, but it was actually located in the country, out among the cornfields in rural Wisconsin.

The managers did at least one thing for the announcers that was kind of nice. They’d approved a work schedule that allowed each of us to enjoy a full, two-day weekend—once every three weeks. If you’ve ever worked radio, you’ll know that’s pretty rare. Radio announcers are assumed to be doing “fun” work—“Heck, I’d pay them to let me do this!” says the company man—so a ten hour day and a six day week is pretty standard. (I used to say that if I’d known about this before I got in, I’d have just become a migrant worker and saved the expense of broadcast school).

But this schedule required one weekend guy, on rotation, to work a pretty brutal weekend schedule. Part of that schedule involved doing the sign-off on Saturday night (at midnight) and then being back in to sign on again Sunday morning (6:00 a.m.).

When I had one of those weekends, I’d sweeten the ordeal by signing off with “Long, Long Time” the last thing Saturday night. This would put me in the mood to drive home alone in the darkness to the trailer I rented (and couldn’t afford to heat properly), and lie in the embrace of insomnia, running those lyrics through my head and thinking back six years to The One That Got Away, The Bus I Missed, After Which There Were No More Buses…

CAUGHT IN MY FEARS; BLINKING BACK THE TEARS…



I don’t think I’ve ever been so frightened in my life as the day I called her to ask her out. I first met her when she was next-door neighbor to a friend and his wife, living in residential houses converted to apartments on a college campus. She was studying drama, and she asked my friend to take a part in a one-act play she had to direct for a class. “And do you think Lars would be willing to take a small part?” she asked him.

“No, I don’t think so,” my friend said. “But if you’ve got a large part you haven’t cast, he’d probably do that.”

And so I worked with her on the play (a cut of Anouilh’s Antigone, if you’re curious), and the more time I spent with her, the more I realized that, although I’d originally thought her skinny and kind of horse-faced, she was in fact slender and graceful, and she had the kind of grave beauty I associate with Pre-Raphaelite paintings. She was funny and smart and spontaneous, and one day I realized I was falling in love with her, and I did not fight it one little bit.

And so I said to myself, “You’ve got to ask her out. There’s no chance that a woman this wonderful is ever going to just drop into your life this way again.”

I was 23 years old. I’d never asked a girl out before.

WAIT FOR THE DAY YOU’LL GO AWAY;

KNOWIN’ THAT YOU WARNED ME OF THE PRICE I’D HAVE TO PAY…

A spring afternoon in 1974 (the following year). It must have been late May or early June, because she went away that June. I called her (I could have just walked over and asked [I’d shrewdly taken over my friend’s apartment]. But somehow it was easier to call first) and asked if she wanted to walk down to the Dairy Queen.

“Well, I guess I could,” she said. “Just a minute.”

A few moments later she said, “OK, I just subtracted the money from my trip budget.” (She was a missionary kid, and she was going back to see her parents.)

“I’m paying,” I said.

“No, no,” she replied. “I’ve written it down now. I’m not going to go to the trouble of adding it back in.”

So we took our walk. I tried to memorize every moment; every word. Soon she’d be gone, and she wouldn’t be back for eight weeks. Eight weeks seemed like forever.

AND LIFE’S FULL OF LOSS; WHO KNOWS THE COST?

LIVIN’ IN THE MEMORY OF A LOVE THAT NEVER WAS…



When we got back we sat on her front step and talked. Somehow the conversation turned to the old bromide that goes, “If you love something, let it go. If it does not come back to you, it was never yours in the first place.” I said I agreed with that.

“I talked to my mother about that once,” she said. “I told her, ‘If you really love someone, you have to give them their freedom.’

“And she said, ‘No. If you love someone you want them with you forever.’”

‘CAUSE I’VE DONE EVERYTHING I KNOW

TO TRY AND CHANGE YOUR MIND;

AND I THINK I’M GONNA MISS YOU FOR A LONG, LONG TIME…

After she flew away, I got letters from her. She wanted to be pen pals. Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity.

In one letter she said she’d like to stay in that country, if people weren’t waiting for her back here.

I told her she should do what she felt was best for herself. I hoped she didn’t think anyone was trying to force her to do anything she didn’t want to.

So she didn’t come back.

And then she got engaged to a guy over there.

And I’ve always wondered—had she told me what she really wanted, that evening 33 years ago this month? Had she been telling me she wanted a man who had the strength to say, “Come back to me. I need you in my life”?

I’ve wondered for a long, long time. But I’ll never know.

It was a nice two days, anyway.

But I couldn’t expect my depression to stay away for much more than that.

What I’m experiencing now isn’t a bottomless, cosmic cold sore, like last week’s depression. But it’s a definite downturn. And that (plus the fact that I’m stuck for other material) gives me an excuse to post a little essay about depression I’ve been thinking out. I justify this in two ways. One, I’m going to make a literary comparison. Two, some of you may be writers who don’t know much about deep depression (or is that an oxymoron?) and I hope to clarify exactly what the experience feels like. For the record.

One of the most notable (and surprising) characteristics of a truly ripe depression is the sense of clarity it seems to give.

Deep depression is like Occam’s Razor, a simple, elegant answer to the whole messy problem.

It’s like the “payoff” in a classic mystery. You know the scene where the detective gathers all the suspects and explains everything, extending an accusing finger at the true culprit (who generally pulls out a hidden gun and forces the detective to dispense quick justice)?

When you’re deeply depressed, you look over your whole life—everything you’ve done and experienced, and you say, “Oh, that explains it. It’s all so simple.” It’s like that moment of clarity one imagines one has just before one dies. Which, the depressee feels, is likely to happen any minute.

So it resembles the payoff in a mystery, as stated above, but the mystery isn’t an English Cozy, or even a Thirties Hard-boiled. It’s a Noir, directed by a Frenchman

I suppose it’s a little like the experience of LSD users. I don’t know about this from experience, but I’m told that musicians (for instance) who performed under the influence of the drug thought they were producing brilliant stuff. And were appalled when they heard recordings once they’d “come down.”

When you’re deeply depressed, all your questions are answered—unpleasantly. “Why am I having trouble at work? Why are my relationships going badly? Why is my health failing?” The answer is simple. “It’s all my own fault. I am a miserable, stupid person whom nobody loves. Not only is my life lousy, but it’s going to get worse and worse until I die. Which will be soon.”

I believe in reason. I’m a strong defender of reason (all praise to Francis Schaeffer). But human beings don’t always recognize reason (or unreason) in their own heads.

That, I think, is one of the things we need other people in our lives to help with.

I’ll go out and find some. Just as soon as I’m a little less depressed.



(Please note that the above, written under the influence of a certain level of depression, may all be complete hogwash.)

Via James Lileks’ new Minneapolis blog, buzz.mn: Don Herbert, better known to my generation as “Mr. Wizard,” has passed away. I hadn’t realized he was a Minnesota native.

I don’t recall that I watched his show a lot. I have an idea I was never sure when it was on, or the station moved it around, or something. But I remember really liking the show when I did see it.

And that wasn’t because of my deep love for science (I possess no such alien commodity). As I remember it, I mostly liked the idea of a smart grownup with a lot of neat toys who never had anything more important to do than explain stuff to kids. There were precious few adults anything like that in my own world.

So now you’re asking, “Well, now that you’re a grownup yourself, are you like that?”

My answer would be to scream and run away at my personal best speed.

Middle-aged, single men are not advised to have anything to do with children if they can help it, in today’s world. This is no great sacrifice in my case, as I really don’t like children much, and can never think of anything to say to them anyway.

Come to think of it, I don’t think we ever saw Mrs. Wizard.

But I’m confident there was one.

Well, I didn’t see today coming.

And I mean that in a good way.

Last night I had one of my insomnia attacks. I lay awake, obsessing between dozes. That’s usually the prelude to a really Huxleyan, semi-comatose work day.

But somehow, when I got up, I felt that today would be different. Taking silent inventory of my thews, sinews and reflexes, I realized I felt pretty good. Somehow I knew that when I got to work I’d catch up on several projects I’d been dogging, and I wouldn’t slip on my diet, and I’d have a good evening walk.

And behold, it came to pass even as I foresaw. All day I felt as if I was looking at things from above, like a grownup, rather than from below, like a helpless kid.

I can think of two explanations.

One is that I’ve been sleeping too much. Maybe God designed me for five hours a night.

The other is that somebody’s been praying for me.

If it’s the second, and you’re the one, thanks.

This is going to be a political post. I’ll say that up front, so that those of you not interested in my politics can surf on. And why should you be interested in my politics? I have a little bit of credibility when I post on writing and books. I have none at all when I talk about politics. (“Why then,” asks the perceptive reader, “do you write occasional columns for a political organ like The American Spectator Online?” The answer is that I write for them because they pay me. I’m a capitalist. At least I am now.)

20 years ago tomorrow, President Reagan made his famous “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” speech. That was 1987 (in case you were having trouble with the math), and it was just about then that I was going through my great political transformation.

I grew up a Democrat. Dad was a Democrat, heir to an old strain of Upper Midwest Scandinavian populism, embodied even today in the name of the Minnesota liberal party—the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party. Those pietistic Scandinavian pioneers I like to write about had been political radicals back in the old country, and they continued pro-worker and anti-corporation in their American politics. Back in those days, nobody saw any disconnect in William Jennings Bryan being a fiery, Bible-thumping evangelical even as he railed against the oppression of the bankers. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, chief force behind Prohibition, was the mother of every liberal world-fixing organization that’s come since, from the ACLU to PETA to NARAL.

But during the Reagan administration I began to re-think all this. All my fellow Democrats despised Reagan. They called him “Ronald Ray-gun,” and described him as a superannuated, has-been actor with polyurethaned hair. But he was growing on me. I don’t think I ever voted for him, but I couldn’t help noticing that he kept saying and doing things I just liked.

And I was more and more uncomfortable in my own party.

The first thing that began to distance me from the Democrats was a thought—a thought that started as a tiny little shoot in my mind (planted, I think, by an article on the new phenomenon of the neo-cons in Time Magazine) and grew tenaciously once it put out roots. This thought went like this—“When you look at another human being and say, ‘That poor fellow is not capable of looking after himself. He must be cared for all his life, or he will die,’ you are not investing that person with dignity. You are treating him as subhuman (indeed the defenders of slavery had made a very similar argument). Some people may indeed be incapable of caring for themselves, but that judgment does not give them dignity. To expect a man to work is to treat him as a man.”

On top of that, my party was changing. I remembered when there were lots of pro-life Democrats, and when support for traditional marriage was not only the majority position, it was the only position. But it was growing more and more clear that there was no place for those opinions in the party anymore.

So one day I looked around me, and I said, “I guess I’m a Republican.”

Warning: All I’ve got to post t about is what I did today. Which, as faithful readers know, is a subject both dull and irritating.

I actually accomplished a small achievement. One of the burdens of my job, a job which I generally like very much, is the business of book returns. No matter how canny you try to be when ordering textbooks in fall and winter, you always end up with rows and rows of unsold books, staring back at you with a “You brought us out here for this?” expression on their spines. (Yes, books look at you with their spines. They’re books, for pete’s sake. If they have eyes at all, they have them all over, like the living beasts in Ezekiel.)

I hate doing book returns. It’s one of many activities which normal people accomplish without a second thought, but are like East German tax audits to me. I hate to call strangers on the phone, for one thing. And of all the things I could call them about, asking their permission give back something I asked them for in the first place is one of the worst. One of the numerous absolute rules in my shabby little interior world is that I should never ask for anything that might possibly be refused. Refusal—rejection—is intolerable. Refusal is judgment on my personal worth. There’s no possible reason anyone would ever turn me down on anything, except that they hold me in utter contempt.

Sometime last term, one of our instructors ordered five copies of a particular book, then changed his mind after it had been delivered. So (at great expense in emotional effort) I called the distribution company and faxed them the information the lady said she needed to provide a return document.

But when I’d done that, I got a fax back from her saying she had no record of that book in their stock lists.

This was in April. Since that time I’ve had the books sitting in a box in my office, and I’ve told myself every day, “I’ve got to call her back and find out what the hang-up is.”

Today, I called at last. The lady I’d dealt with was on vacation, but the lady I talked to said I needed to talk to another number (some sort of publisher/distributor division of labor). The lady I talked to at the new place took my information, then e-mailed me a .pdf of the return document I needed. I put the box of books in the mail this afternoon.

Success!

My reward? I get to do the same thing with a bunch of other books and publishers.

Headed home, I noticed that all the traffic lights were out in my neighborhood. I wondered if we were having a power outage.

We were. The problem, apparently, was some kind of fire or accident just down the street from me. The street where I’d planned to walk after work, taking advantage of the rare sunny afternoon in a rainy week.

And, of course, when the fire department barricades a street, I don’t go up it even on foot. Somebody might tell me I wasn’t allowed to come that way, and that would be a judgment on my personal worth (see above).

So I mowed my lawn. Which is just as good, and accomplishes something besides.

The moral? The moral? After a day like this you want morals from me? As my enemies have always maintained (when they’re not refusing me things), I’ve got no morals.