I hate to even bring this up here, but it's a comfortable place for me since people can read it or not and it will not be seen by anyone in my immediate vicinity (J has never read one post on this blog ever), which is sometimes for the best. About once every year or so, I find myself way down deep in some kind of morbid depression (as in
much much worse than my normal everyday dim view of current circumstances). I've sensed it massing for a few days, and I spent all day today deliberately doing things that normally keep me cheerful in hopes I can push it away. It didn't work. I failed at each thing, even cooking dinner which is normally a guaranteed moment of success for me no matter how frakked up the rest of the day is. I never ruin dinner...but I did tonight. Just one symptom.
It would be so easy to just list objective things that seem to contribute to my foul state. Like the usual shit: I hate my day job, I hate this city that we stupidly moved to, and so on. But that's not it. All of that was just as true yesterday and last week and last month and six months ago and it didn't cause this feeling, this creeping crud that's almost a palpable and visible thing around me right now.
This despair happens, as I said, on a fairly annual basis. But this time, the timing could probably not be better. This is happening within days of the release of M-Brane #5. I am locked into that. It is happening on schedule no matter what. Last time I found myself in the crud was during the pre-M-Brane era. I didn't have the zine, this blog, Twitter, any email correspondence to speak of, no other hobbies or pastimes of any sort really--wasn't even seriously working on any fiction--so I was able to thoroughly wallow in my stupid self for days on end and do nothing else. That option is not available to me this year, and I'm so glad of it.
It's just a temporary (albeit recurring) neuro-chemical fuck-up, a mess of synapses not firing in the right way, the "wiring" between memory and current circumstances all dicked up somehow. It's easy to say (when you're not feeling it), "It's all in your head." But I guess that's literally true, isn't it? There is no palpable, visible crud other than what I imagine. I'm entirely sick of it and myself tonight, but I bet tomorrow will be better. I even think it will lift a bit when I hit "publish post" in a few seconds.
[Accompanying image represents the cleansing fire that I've been thinking I need tonight...not REALLY, but hmmm....]
Today, for me, began rather poorly. Then it improved and seemed fairly decent. Then it went to hell again. No rational explanation for any of these phases, nor the changes from one to the next, presents itself. It's just a symptom of this annoying depressive phase that I have been in lately. I have, however, started a project that I think will have some salutary use: I have decided to start keeping a private journal. I haven't done this on any kind of regular basis since I was in high school when I was a daily journal writer. But even that wasn't really a personal and private venue for my thoughts since those were periodically shown to my English teachers, and there was always the sense that I was writing it for someone else to read. My new journal, begun today, is purely private. I can say whatever I want in it and not even have to make it make sense. The concept is twofold: 1) to document my thoughts and observations (some of which may be usable for fiction writing someday--or not, it doesn't matter) and 2) to expose myself to myself in a way that might help me dispose of my nonsense more efficiently. 
