Thursday, July 14, 2011

The Blues

The sky today is mezmerizingly blue with high, silken clouds slightly cooling the furious summer sun.  Two of the dogs who live here are looking around, as if captivated by the rising, falling trill of cicada, the occasional whistling chirrup of sparrow or robin or cardinal. It is the kind of summer day in midwest Ohio when it's difficult to believe that anything ever could be wrong.

But.

Yet.

Still.

I'm trying to wrench my psyche out of the molasses-like state most commonly referred to as "depression." I'm  arguing with myself, with the accumulation of "things to do" that aren't getting done. I'm fighting to ignore the gravitational pull of sleep, the murmuring assurances that a long nap, one speckled with dreams, one in which two or three 20-dollar bills fall from the pages of a long unread book, one in which the seemingly serrated edge of this life lived might be dulled, just a little.

It's tough to say, though, who, precisely, is winning that fight. From my perspective, it's a bit of a "zero-sum" game with emphasis on the "zero" and the gaping lack that empty value entails.  You see, we're broke again.
Flat broke.  Even though I'm working across the summer in moderate ways, our income is now defined in opposition to possession, and money, once again, is everything. Ironically, I am working. The money simply isn't enough to cover bills that were incurred in a different marketplace, to save a single penny, or to look forward beyond a few days.

When I started this, I can't have imagined that I would still be thinking about the economic crisis. I couldn't have believed that the housing market would still resemble a 1950s-era joke about marriage.  Take my house . . . please. I  And I certainly couldn't have entertained the notion that my wife, educated at a prestigious private university would still be unemployed--more than two years later--or that her unemployment benefits would have run out entirely.

I want, desperately, to take a nap and forget for a long while. I'd like to pretend that I could sell my house, which we bought in '05 for, say, a 5% gain over the course of six years. Or even a 1% gain. I'd like to think about other things like the light breeze pushing a child's empty swing in a neighbor's yard, a trip to somewhere heavenly like Taco Bell, the slow unfolding of a baseball game on television, or the tidy rhythms of a re-run sitcom. I'd like, in short, to be someone else, somewhere else, sometime else.

How then could I not be depressed?  Even on a day like this when robins chirp loudly enough to drown the sounds of cars and planes passing nearby for destinations I may never know? And perhaps more pressingly, how is my wife surviving this?

The point here is twofold: First, only the particulars of our story are unique. With an unemployment rate of 9.2%, there are likely millions of people in similar situations. Second, the psychology of poverty is brutal.  Whereas we tend to think of "depression" as an individual phenomena, a marker of bad brain chemistry, bad luck, or bad decision making, the fact remains that systemic forces (like the worth of our house) are contributing, and frequently, defining characteristics of such psychology. And in a while, I'll  tell you a narrative  (or two) to drive this point home as violently as I can.

For now, I need to go sell something for considerably less than its worth.