Snowflakes on a Dry and Sunny Day

Have you ever wrestled with a depression so deep and so impenetrable that you begin to think there’s something organic going on? You look around at your life and you say to yourself, Well, things aren’t that bad so why the fuck am I so depressed?

As I write this it is 2:30 on a bright, sunny, and dry Tuesday afternoon. I receive maid service at my flat six days a week with Tuesday being The Big Cleaning Day. That’s when the housekeepers scrub the bathroom floors and the toilet and the bathtub laden with discarded flakes of brown and red patches of skin. They also vacuum on Tuesdays but that’s redundant since I long ago procured my own vacuum cleaner and run it at least three times daily, once in the morning to sweep up the AM exfoliation, once in late afternoon after another shedding, and once in the evening for all the stray flakes of skin that made a valiant attempt to cling to the carpet fibers and escape extinction at the hands of my Hoover Quadraflex.

On Tuesdays I try to tidy up the flat a bit so the maids don’t have extra work to contend with. But this morning there was simply too much to deal with. Everywhere I looked there were fine layers of snowflakes. At my bedside table the spine of my hardback edition of Nathanael West’s “Miss Lonelyhearts” is coated in skin. The edges of DVDs, packed so neatly on a bedside bookshelf, have been caressed with small mounds of snow. Skin, skin everywhere. Any surface that has a dark hue — my computer keyboard, the TV, tiny objects d’art, coffee mugs, the VCR and DVD player, book shelves — all inundated with snow in January.

Depression is a common friend of severe psoriatics but I was diagnosed as having bi-polar disorder in 2000. I went on Wellbutrin for eighteen months and then abruptly stopped taking it because, well, I had no insurance at the time and the shit was getting expensive. Dealing with life post-Wellbutrin has been, as Mickey Kaus would say, too interesting. Gone are the manic phases that used to plague me and the dark down periods when I would pull out of a manic episode. Cool. But guess what? The Wellbutrin regimen also left me with a seeming inability to fully enjoy anything anymore. Lately that feeling has intensified tenfold. I eat because I have to not because I want to (This ten-month flare-up has caused me to lose enough weight as it is).

For the last couple of weeks it would not be uncommon to still find me in my bathrobe at 4:00 PM. I finally dress when the lure of Modelo and a pack of cigs beckons me to the corner market. By 6:00 PM I’m back in my bathrobe.

After fifteen years as a working writer I am totally unimpressed and bored by my own output. I lost the thrill at seeing my name in print years ago. I suppose there are markets I could write for that would invigorate me and make me fall in love with the writing game all over again but I’m too lazy and lack the ambition I once had.

I took a break from my depression this afternoon to read a couple of shorts from Charles Bukowski’s “South of No North”. The lead graph of “Guts” from Saint Buk perhaps best sums up how I feel about myself :

Like anybody can tell you, I’m not a very nice man.  I don’t know the word. I have always admired the villain, the outlaw, the sonofabitch. I don’t like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions … I’m more interested in perverts than saints. I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don’t like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don’t like to be shaped by society.

Sounds a little like Trace, huh? That’s because — to settle the question once and for all, as if anyone gives a rat’s ass, except maybe Joe Romano — I am Trace. But I’m not writing to you as Trace this afternoon.

“Work on the depression first and foremost, Rodger,” Joseph Mailander counseled me via e-mail early this afternoon.  “Keep moving and take time for Rodger.  No need to mask it with Trace, either.  I’d write a post on exactly what I’m feeling.”

So that’s what I have done.  And now I have to go because the housekeeper is here. I’m going out on the balcony to have a smoke and to avoid that look of disgust that will cross her face when she shakes the bloody sheets and a flurry of snowflakes is unleashed. She will sneeze. They always do.