My last post was a self-pitying self-indulgence, and garnered a few comments, most fairly supportive. But, you know, the way I see it, you're allowed one of those. If you keep it up everyone gets sick of you pretty quickly, and you're in store for a major tuneout!

So I've waited until I made a few changes before writing again. In other words, I've waited until I had a goddamn decent thing or two to say! And what I found out is about as earthshaking as making some utterance like, 'When you buckle your pants you have a better chance they won't fall off.'

Then why is it so hard to get up and get moving when we're feeling blue? At least that's the case for me. I'll get up (usually really late) and sit and check my email, then maybe read a few Salon or New York Times articles, check that asshole Drudge, then skim the local paper. All the while I'm trying really hard to NOT turn on the fucking TV and wade through the 40 or 50 shows and movies I've DVR'ed. But most days I eventually turn it on, check to see what Oprah's got going on (hey, maybe it'll help me feel better!!!) then settle in for one of the 25 episodes of West Wing I have saved. And during all the above, I know, deep down, that if I just GET THE HELL OUT AND DO ANYTHING, I'll feel better.

For reasons I can't really recall, I did get the hell out the other day. I hit a couple of furniture stores, checking on sales on stuff I really needed to furnish the addition I had constructed last fall. I showed up at my son's swim meet to volunteer as a timer. I had lunch with an old friend and hung out with him at the locomotive he and a bunch of guys are restoring. I actually started my taxes (ok, I HAD to do that because the deadline for the financial aid forms loomed).

But a funny thing happened while I was spending three grand on furniture, and faced another five or six grand tuition nightmare - I began to feel better. Big surprise, no?

I don't know, but I suspect, that depression one of those hideous things that is so self-fulfilling and destructive, so unbelievably hard to get out from under, that most of us really can't pull it off much of the time. I do know that one of the worst symptoms is the feeling, the certainty, that what I'm feeling is permanent! That I'll always feel this miserable, that nothing I do can possibly ever make me feel better!

So what you have to do, what I have to do, is fight those lies and get up and get out. It really does work. And I never once mentioned alcohol in this post.

Now if I can just get up off the couch...