The funk

"Today I put pen to paper to..." do absolutely nothing.

I turned down a request for a drawing yesterday. This makes an interesting bookend to the happiness I felt in the fall, when a local group requested some of my work and I cheerfully complied. They ended up ditching me for someone better known, and never paid me for the piece that they did use, but that's not the cause of the funk.

The funk needs no invitation. It relies on no inspiration. It just settles in and blankets everything with a thick layer of dust. The dust is made of particles of every setback and obstacle, every disappointment, grief, and sadness.

Among the billions of humans crawling the Earth, waste no time on those whose weaknesses make them fall and die. Feel justifiable anger about those who are struck down by the actions of greed and prejudice, but anyone who just runs out of energy is easily replaced by someone more fitted to survive.

The funk is like the winter as it affects wild animals. A particular weakened individual might make it through to spring, if no predator finds it. If the weakened one can keep trudging forward, foraging minimally, greater light and warmth might save it. But let one blop of snow fall a little too heavily on it or in front of it, or let the cold wind rake it for just too long, or a carnivore spot it and give chase, and the story ends there.

Functional depression is just that: functional. In that condition, a person can go through the motions of daily routine and continue to work, but that's the limit. It may be beyond the limit for someone whose job calls for too much spontaneous energy or complex thought.

I turned down the request for artwork because I haven't picked up a pen in months. What used to be a compulsive habit has deserted me. I don't want to tell someone that I will produce for them when I don't know if I can, or how long it will take me. Interesting ideas occur to me, but the habit pattern is broken, like almost all of my other habit patterns: exercise, music practice, exploration, interest in the future.

Enough spark remains to warm me almost to the point of enthusiasm at times. Food brings comfort, so cooking seems worth the  effort. Music was a comfort, but suddenly I ceased to progress and started to lose whatever scraps of ability I had managed to compile. "Don't be afraid to make an awful noise," a generous and kind professional musician and teacher told me. But now that seems to be the only kind of noise I can produce. I'm on the verge of quitting my weekly music group because everyone else is capable of producing so much better sounds. Why should I mess up everyone's evening? The group's teacher can use my money, but the shared goal is the music that I'm butchering. Poof goes another refuge from solitary darkness.

The biggest problem is time. I have a job that I used to enjoy. Now I'm just good at it. I need it to earn income to keep myself fed and sheltered. But, as the business I work for struggles for its life, I cannot fill the blank spaces in the work day with my own ideas anymore. I have to look as if I am busily engaged in things when there are no actual productive things in which to be busily engaged. For the peace of mind (relatively) of the poor bastards writing the checks, I have to fill every moment with something, even if it's just carrying a clipboard around and looking thoughtfully at some pile of clutter that used to serve a function when more people needed what we do and sell. And then it's time to go home and feed myself, do whatever domestic chores demand my attention, and fall into bed.

You need to learn to kill your dreams early enough in your life to come to grips with the reality of survival. Survival itself is victory. If you haven't amounted to anything by the time you're in your late 20s, it ain't going to happen. You blew it. Find something useful to do and crush out your imagination. That shit about how it's never too late? It's just that. Shit. You're burning daylight. Get busy.

Having used drugs and alcohol, I can tell you with certainty that they don't work. You may pass time in oblivion, but when you emerge from oblivion the things that sent you there will be waiting, and they have not been on vacation while you were away. I am fortunate that my consumption habits have never managed to take over my life. That's a lucky accident of my own physiology, not a commendable result of my iron will and strong character. For the benefit of all I report on the ineffectiveness of chemicals to truly banish the funk, to save anyone else from repeating the experiment. But in a way that makes it worse. There's nowhere to hide. There may, however, be somewhere to run. Physical activity can banish the funk, if you can get into it on a routine enough basis. It will be a struggle.

This fall, I resumed a regular schedule of really trivial physical exercise -- just a few light weights and some stretching -- that improved my outlook considerably. Something blew me out of the groove, probably the holidays and expanded work hours. I look now at a few hours or a day or two to myself and see a chaotic pile of everything I wished I had done for the past 40 years. See earlier reference to killing your dreams. But it's hard to know exactly when to put a bullet through their head. It's so irrevocable. You will be tempted, as I have been, to reanimate the corpse many times as the years pass. You'll fall for that bullshit about how it's never too late. I really want to. But I look at the work of people who did settle in and focus, and I see how wrong I am to believe that any other way can work.

The exception, I suppose, is writing. The verbal diarrhea never quits. Whether it's worth reading is another matter. I have been putting together words since I could hold a pencil. You can write whatever you're feeling and thinking, even if what you write is, "I feel like shit and I would jump off a bridge if that didn't seem like it would require too much energy."

When the funk lifts, it leaves us embarrassed by the feelings of uselessness and despair that had so recently seemed like the only reality. It can seem like a responsibility, to be that flat-affect character incapable of pleasure. Everyone is used to you in that role, so why disorient them? Besides, you know that sorry bastard is only off taking a piss behind a dumpster and will be back to inhabit your skin as soon as whatever sparked your unseemly bout of euphoria goes away. It even provides a nifty gateway to further self contempt, because you aren't even world class at depression.

For the moment, I have baked goods and cats. Much of winter lies ahead.