Winter In Cleveland

"Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does a damn thing about it."-Attributed to Mark Twain, but probably said by somebody else.

Last week, I visited my parents in Sandusky when I was on vacation from work. At one point, my mom noticed that something seemed to be bothering me and asked what was wrong.

"It's just my depression," I said. "It tends to come and go."

"Oh," she said. "What are you depressed about?"

I didn't know how to respond. Because most of the time, there is no reason. Depression is something that doesn't have a particular cause or a motivation. It just exists, like the weather. Asking someone why they're depressed is like asking why it's raining outside. And like the weather in Cleveland, it changes every day. Some days are filled with sunshine and beauty. Others are like a torrential downpour with no shelter anywhere to be found. You can't really stop it. Sure, I take antidepressants and try to maintain a good sense of humor and positive outlook, but it's not something that can ever really go away. It will always be a part of me. Maybe it's because I was bullied as a child. Maybe it's because my love life has seen more wreckage than the Daytona 500. Maybe it's because I tend to fall in love with all the wrong people and take it too hard when my heart gets broken. Maybe it's the fact that I've been in the same retail job for over a decade and feel like I'm not not really going anywhere in life. I don't know. Speculating as to why I'm this way or trying to pinpoint the cause of it is fairly useless. It's just something I carry with me, like an invisible weight hanging on me that I can't take off. The election of President Fascist Cheeto certainly doesn't help matters any. It's hard to keep a sunny outlook when your civil liberties are slowly being eroded every single day. It's easy to feel powerless and pessimistic, especially in such dark times. You just have to keep moving on, like a snowplow digging through the blizzard.

You can't stop the rain or the snow from falling. All you can do is navigate through it the best you can and hope it passes soon. Just be careful and drive slow.

I'm sorry that this post is so melancholy. I promise some more happy ones will be coming. I'll end this with a quote from the great singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, in response to a concertgoer who kept asking why he wasn't playing more happy songs.

"Lady, these are the happy songs. You don't wanna hear the sad ones."