DEPRESSION

Sittin’ and Smilin’, Thinkin’ ’bout That Dock on the Bay.

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I ran across a version of Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay” at a time when I needed it the most. I didn’t realize I needed it but sometimes life gives you little gifts to smile about.

On a site, Playing for Change, musicians from all over the world came together to lend their voices and musical talents just to help my spirits rise and give me a chance to have a productive day even if it is just sittin’ and smilin’.

Roger Ridley and Grampa Elliott Playing For Change

This is my dark time of the year and not because it is still the predawn hours of the day. Depression and anxiety cloud my thoughts despite the clear morning, stars twinkling over my head. The days are lengthening but it will take time for the early morning sunlight to wash my depression away. I’m struggling for motivation to write, motivation to get out of my chair, and I can’t keep my train of thought on its tracks. My mind is like Ricochet Rabbit, bouncing from place to place without settling.

I am downright morose until I find joy in a simple song.  A song about sitting in the sunlight…an ode to sunlight. I can hear the Redding’s whistle in my head, and it makes me smile, whistling away my dark clouds. Music does that sometimes…most times.

Redding was dead by the time “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” hit number one. He recorded it just three days before a plane crash took his life on December 10, 1967. He was twenty-six and left behind a wife and four children. I remember lying in my twin bed, the transistor radio struggling to pick up late night WLS in distant Chicago when the news came through. Otis Redding killed in a plane crash along with four members of the group The Bar Kays. My own “day the music died.”

The song itself is melancholy but contains hope for me. “Sittin’ in the morning sun, I’ll be sittin’ when the evening comes.” I can almost feel the sun on my face, the light shimmering across an emerald bay, a blue sky, and a sea breeze blowing in my face. Sea gulls mew and pirouette in my mind. Hopeful that I’ll get a chance to be “sittin’ when the evening comes” when the days of Summer lengthen. Sometimes there is productivity in “just wastin’ time.”

This 2011 version features Roger Ridley, a street singer and guitar player from Las Vegas, and New Orleans’ Street icon, Grampa Elliott Small. They are backed by musicians from across the world and I genuinely believe Otis Redding would be proud.

According to Wikipedia and the Playing for Change website, “Playing For Change (PFC) was founded in 2002 by Mark Johnson and Whitney Kroenke. Mark Johnson was walking in Santa Monica, California, when he heard the voice of Roger Ridley, who joined Redding in “Rock ‘n Roll Heaven” in 2005, singing “Stand by Me”; it was this experience that sent Playing For Change on its mission to connect the world through music.”

Travelling the world with a small film and recording team, producers Johnson and Enzo Buono developed a mobile recording studio (originally powered by golf cart batteries) for recording and filming musicians live outdoors, and progressively editing all the separate artists, blending all into one performance. Epic performances and epic editing.

I see the sun is out and calling me. Actually, a water leak is calling me, but it is outside, and a plumber is to join me after it warms up. It is bright but cold in the foothills of the Blue Ridge…but it is not a bad leak.

The sunlight is golden, and it is time for me to go out and bask in it, whistling as I go, a song looping in my head, a smile on my face. Thanks Otis, thanks Playing For Change.

The Original Version of (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay by Otis Redding

Don Miller’s latest offering is “Pig Trails and Rabbit Holes”, available for download or in paperback at https://www.amazon.com/Pig-Trails-Rabbit-Holes-Southerner/dp/B09GQSNYL2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=FXC3AISNRIU7&keywords=pig+trails+and+rabbit+holes&qid=1640701551&s=books&sprefix=Pig+trails+an%2Cstripbooks%2C299&sr=1-1

The Morning I Woke Up Crazy

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“When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.”― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

I remember waking up crazy.  It was a summer morning in the late Seventies or early Eighties.  I know it was the summer because I didn’t have to go to school that day… maybe it wasn’t summer, maybe a weekend day. Sometimes you just don’t know if you are loopy. Probably a good thing on the day you realize you are going insane.

You do realize, I didn’t just wake up and say “Well Don, you are insane…around the bend, looney, as crazy as an outhouse mouse.”  I had to get used to it, ease into it, take my time realizing I was looney-tunes.

I know now my deep slide didn’t just happen overnight.  But this wasn’t now, this was then. Then, I just thought I awoke one day with a mind like a broken kaleidoscope.  All the pieces were there, they just didn’t fit together anymore. Now, I realize it occurred slowly over time until one day it was “Wham-oh, Change-oh” I have gone off the deep end.

I was functioning despite my madness. There was such a stigma during this time.  You didn’t even whisper you were having problems.  People were still being locked away in asylums.  Electroshock Therapy was still used.  Remember “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?”  There was the proof. 

No one could know I was crazy.  No one could know all I wanted to do was lower the blinds and draw the covers over my head…forever.  There was no one I could talk to…well, there were plenty of people I could have talked to if I had been willing to tell them my secret.  The stigma!  “Hey Bud, how are you doing?” “Well.  My television seems to have lost its vertical hold, can you help me?”

All I wanted to do was sleep…except when I tried to sleep, I couldn’t.  I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t focus. When I was awake I was like a Mexican Jumping Bean. I didn’t want to be awake.  

Depressed, anxious, sad, melancholy…more than just a “bit blue”, I was suicidal.   That’s when I knew.  I had a great life, why was I contemplating removing myself from it.  I had a great job, a home, a wife…a wife I was driving away…drove away. 

I hated the questions I asked myself.  “Am I depressed because my marriage is bad or is my marriage bad because I’m depressed?” Well, that certainly worked itself out now didn’t it?  Any question beginning with “Why?” drove me even crazier.  Can a crazy person be driven crazy?

I didn’t want to be around people.  The more people the more anxious I was.  I remember putting on my happy face as I met my classes later in the year.  Every minute was like fingernails on the chalkboard.  I lived for my planning period.

I lost weight, I had no energy.  I was worthless, lower than whale poop in the deepest trench in the Pacific Ocean.  I wanted to die.  Worse, I worried someone might find out.

One evening I sat on the foot of my bed.  A tiny 32 caliber pistol in my hand.  I remember the oily feel of the weapon.  I remember emptying it, reloading, spinning the chamber.  I remember the fear I felt realizing what I was contemplating.  I called my doctor the next day.  Stigma be damned!

I talked, cried a bit.  I answered a questionnaire and he talked with me at length.  Blood work and more talk.  Clinical Depression. A chemical imbalance in the brain.  We’re going to try Elavil, “better living through chemistry”, and therapy.  I also decided to tell someone.  It wasn’t as bad as I expected. No one showed up with a white jacket with belts.

It has been over forty years and I still have bouts of depression.  I’m not cured but I’m off of the drugs.  Every time I begin to slide I worry I might stay there.  I still become unfocused, my mind wanders but one thing I can concentrate on. “I know what it is.  I know I can climb out of the valley.”  Knowledge is power.

I know I’m not alone.  There are others just like me, and I know it is a disease just like any other. It is not something we asked for, it just is.  It is not something that would go away if we were built of sterner stuff.  Yeah, some idiot told me that and suggested it was a weakness in character. 

I don’t worry about stigma, I don’t worry about people knowing because I tell all who will listen.  Stigma kills people and there should be no stigma.

Today is World Mental Health Day, an international day for global mental health education, awareness, and advocacy against social stigma.  The one day of the year that we set aside to make people aware mental health. 

The other three hundred and sixty-four, we kind of ignore it…unless there is a school shooting.  On those days we spin platitudes expressing our concern over mental health to deflect from discussing gun violence until a couple of days or weeks pass and something new has taken over the news.

We don’t talk enough about mental health and the stigma that causes people to die.  Nationally, the suicide rate increased 25.4% from 1999 to 2016, with increases occurring in every state, save for Nevada. In 2018, there were an estimated 1.4 million suicide attempts and more than 48,000 deaths by suicide, making it the tenth leading cause of death in the United States. Firearms were involved in half of all suicides, and there were more than twice as many deaths by suicide than by homicide during the same period. In 2020, suicides decreased by five percent to a bit less than 45,000.

Men are over three and a half times more likely to commit suicide than women. Native Americans and Alaskan Natives have the highest rate of suicide.  Older adults have higher rates than younger adults, LGBTQ adults and youth are more likely to commit suicide than hetero counterparts.  Veterans are one and a half times more likely to commit suicide than nonveterans. 

So, on World Mental Health Day let us all pledge to destigmatize mental health.  Let’s pledge to be a friend to the bullied, to accept LGBTQs as first and foremost, as people and call out bullies.  Let’s cut out a couple of Tomahawk missiles and provide the mental health services our veterans need.  Above all, let’s try empathy, something we once had but seems to be in short supply.

The national suicide helpline number is 800-273-8255. Use it! The number is manned twenty-four hours a day.

Don Miller’s new release, “Pig Trails and Rabbit Holes” maybe purchased at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM?fbclid=IwAR3NeUQc6vEYiJm1P_3pB-pn0LHPonVrvst95cfhs4HxF5jNjIkwp6mO2q0

Fair Winds

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The warm and freshening breeze blowing across the lake brought memories flowing as swiftly as the breeze itself. Most were as warm as the wind driving them. The ones that weren’t were forced away by the bright sunshine.

According to the sign the trail we walk is 1.25 miles. I don’t believe the distance is accurate, but the lake it surrounds is much too small for me to be thinking about sailing.  Yet I was.

Ordinarily my bride would have had me talking or listening to her prattles, pointing out strangely shaped mushrooms or having me wait impatiently as she took pictures of the waterfall she has taken pictures of for the past three hundred and sixty-five days. Instead, she was quiet, as deeply into her own thoughts as I was in mine.  I did not know her thoughts, scary I’ll admit, but I knew mine. 

As I watched the wind driven ripples race across the lake, I thought of a twenty-two-foot sloop with a Bermuda rig from a time far, far distant. Mostly I thought of the people who crewed the boat…some gone but not forgotten.

The warm for November breeze stiffened in my face as I thought, “This would be a great day to be sailing,”  or for partying with friends while sailing.

In my mind’s eye I saw the white sailboat on a close haul, mainsail and jib pulled in tight, the sails singing as the wind’s pressure heeled the boat, the gunnels dipping perilously toward the water. I see us scurrying to the high side to keep from being capsized.  The high side of life?

Battling the tiller for control of the rudder as the speed and water pressure builds. Could this be a metaphor for life…my life? Where did my runaway thoughts come from and why did I quit sailing?

The little boat, narrow of beam with a swing keel, was quick and nimble with her racing rigged main and jib.  I’m surprised I remember any nautical terms; it has been nearly forty years since I gripped the tiller with an unsteady hand.

“Sailing takes me away to where I’ve always heard it could be.  Just a dream and the wind to carry me, and soon I will be free.”  Damn, Christopher Cross is playing in my head…can “Southern Cross” by Crosby, Stills, and Nash without Young be far behind.  “So we cheated and we lied and we tested, and we never failed to fail it was the easiest thing to do. You will survive being bested, somebody fine will come along make me forget about loving you…
And the southern cross.”

It was in the late Seventies when I was invited to my first of many sailing weekends.  “Bring a date, spend the weekend.  You’ll love it.”  I did. Bill, Koon, Bobbi, Sybil, myself and a date.  There were a few others who sailed in and out on occasion.

Six of us on a small sailboat on a large inland lake in South Carolina.  Coolers filled with adult beverages or the mixers for a liquor drink.  The alcohol loosened our tongues and greased our laughter. Bill, our captain, always managed to sail us back to our home port, sometimes in the dead of night.

Too much liquor, well grilled steaks, great friends sitting around a wood fire, and a plus one…whomever she might have been at the time, there were not that many. ..or there were too many. Laughter was abundant. Good times. 

Any good time you survive should qualify as a great time.  Great times.  Somehow, we survived our youthful foolishness.  I remember nothing but clear, bright sunshine and fair winds…am I dreaming? No, I don’t think so.

Taking the tiller for the first time, I might well have been at the wheel of the Queen Anne’s Revenge awaiting Blackbeard’s next order.  “Arrr, let them eat steel maties”…or have another mixed drink.

Manning the tiller may be a metaphor for my life.  Sometimes it is hard to stay on course. Life, like tacking against the wind, tends to be made in zigs and zags.  Some zigs are short, some zags exceptionally long…or seem that way. Coming about into the wind can have painful outcomes if you aren’t paying attention.

For some reason my sailing days came to an end.  The storms of depression left me dead in the water. It was my actions I’m sure. There were bad times, dark times.  Depressed times. 

Times improved with understanding and a little wisp of a girl who calmed the winds and seas…except when our own hurricanes blew up.  Our foundation must have been built upon the rock of understanding…we are still here and still together. Our breezes are mostly warm and caressing like today but for some reason I never got back to sailing.

I purged those ill winds from my mind to keep from being driven crazy upon the rocks of life.  I keep them locked tightly away until a fresh, warm breeze hits me in the face allowing only the good memories to flow. 

In my depression I cut myself off from people who didn’t deserve to be cut off.  That was a failure on my part…I demasted myself and lost my rudder to boot. Like a solitary sailor, I battled my storm tossed seas alone…until my North Star became my guide.

I choose to remember the fair winds.  A bow cleaving the water. Great sailing in bright sunshine.  Sybil sitting on the bow, her legs straddling the bowsprit mocking a figurehead on an ancient sailing ship.  Koon’s big laugh and smile with a liquor drink in her hand.  “Now let me tell you one thing….” Blowing off steam in the sun and the wind on a small sailboat.  Sharing the joy and laughter with friends.

Sybil and Koon are silent now as is one of my plus ones.  Silent in the physical world.  Quite alive in the memories on a close haul through my mind.

I couldn’t help but smile as the warm breeze caressed the lake’s shoreline and my face. I miss them but see them sailing across the firmament at dusk. A small sailboat sailing close to the solar winds, white sails glowing red in the sunset.

Fair winds and following seas my friends.  May warm breezes caress you. You are missed.

Sailing by Christopher Cross

The image is from https://www.yacht-rent.com/talking-the-talk-basic-nautical-terms

Don Miller’s author’s page https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM?fbclid=IwAR3BYeO7eRpFl647KXrqSJD31DxD_NP-u4TMGa1hRS_EpP7vZ-4xQ06JjvM

Running Delight

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A simple joy?  I ran…I jogged…I shuffled my feet…slowly.  Call it what you want but “jogging” seven minutes out of fifty-six brought a river of “good” endorphins and a bit of hard breathing.  Little “feel good” opioid peptides that have raised my spirits at a time when my spirits have been quite low.

To think, I sooooo hated running…I still hate the actual act of running.

I flirted with exercise my entire adult life.  Flirted like the unsure introvert gazing wishfully at the beautiful homecoming queen from across the room.  I’d contemplate asking her to dance and then take a good look in the mirror as I straighten my tie.  Why would she be interested in dancing with me?

Similar to the pain of rejection, running was painful.  Aching muscles, being short of breath, the queasy stomach after strenuous exercise…and…left to my natural state, I’m basically lazy.

The mirror suggested, “You don’t look like a runner…you are too round, your legs are too short, your feet are too big.”  Compared to a thoroughbred horse, I was at best a mule, at worst a donkey…built for carrying burdens not speed.

A birthday gift from hell changed the way I looked at myself in the mirror.  I embarked on a running program six weeks after a birthday heart attack in 2006.  After the heart attack, I decided the homecoming queen could be damned.

Four stents overcame a life filled with Southern cooking, I completed cardiac rehab and embarked on a walking program.  An old school coach, I just didn’t feel the “no pain, no gain.”  I needed to hurt…and I did.  I needed to pay for those caloric indiscretions of my youth…and I did.  I used the “Couch to 5K”1 workout and found the pain to be manageable.  I also found there were unforeseen benefits.

My feet were still too big, my legs will always be too short, but I wasn’t as round…sixty-two pounds less round.  Those changes or lack thereof were foreseen.  It was the changes in my mind I didn’t foresee.

I have battled depression for over forty years and suddenly my broken kaleidoscope of a brain seemed to reset itself.  There were days I still battled but the din of battle had quieted.  The voices in my head whispered instead of yelling.

There were (are) still days when I didn’t want to get out of bed, but they were less numerous and harsh.  I had a reason to get out of bed…my early morning run.

Running for me was like the guy hitting himself in the head with a hammer.  It hurt like hell while I did it but, “It felt so good when I stopped.”

I wasn’t satisfied with 5Ks and continued to push through 10Ks and half-marathons.  I even wrote down a marathon on my bucket list and began to train.  For five or six days a week, I battled my body instead of my mind.  I was addicted.  I wasn’t fast and would win no races.  I might win in my age group if everyone in my age group had died.

My running wasn’t about competing with others it was about competing with myself.  My running was about finishing a workout or finishing a race.  I could put a 13.1 bumper sticker on my Jeep and look in a mirror and say, “I am a runner!”

And then I wasn’t.  On my last run before a half-marathon in 2015, a misstep opened a can of worms.  For two years I hobbled through workouts, tried to prepare to run only to reinjure myself until I decided I was being hardheaded and put my pain into a doctor’s hands. A torn meniscus was an issue…also the discovery of early-onset osteoarthritis.  “A knee replacement is in your future,” he said.  I wish I had never gone.  I wish I had never found out.

For two years I have walked or rode a bicycle and mentally bitched over every mile. Walking doesn’t do it for me.  Cycling doesn’t blot out the voices in my head no matter how much I crank up the volume.  Walking fails to reset my brain.

This winter season has been the worst.  The SAD and depression had laid me low until the New Year.  I decided to run…jog…shuffle my feet.  A different program, a thirty-second jog out of every two and a half minutes the first week, a minute out of three the second, the same next week.2  Twelve weeks to a 5K.  I feel like a baby taking his first steps, but I am hopeful.  Even my walking days have been…hopeful.

I am also going to be smart.  Three days a week only, on the grass, not the pavement, no back to back days no matter how many workouts are rained ut.  Good shoes and braces.

I scratched the marathon off my bucket list.  It will never happen.  I do hope to do a 5K even if it is a walk/run…jog…shuffle.  Anything to reset my mind.  Anything to keep the negative voices at bay.  Anything to repair the broken kaleidoscope.  Anything to get my mojo back.

1 Couch to 5K  http://www.c25k.com/

2 None to Run Plan https://www.nonetorun.com/

Don Miller writes on many subjects, fiction, and nonfiction.  His author’s page is https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM

Nothing

/ cigarman501 / 8 Comments

 

It’s Tuesday…I have been sharing my great wisdom and sense of humor on Tuesdays.  Sometimes I rant on all the subjects that bother me so….  Sometimes people even read them.  It’s Tuesday and I got nothing… nil, nada, zip, zero, zilch, nowt or is it spelled naught.  Hey, that’s something.

For a week I have been awaiting something to trigger a thought, something that I might find interesting to write about.  Something uplifting on World Human Rights Day?  Nothing!  I have waited patiently for divine motivation.  Nothing has sparked my interest.  I…GOT…NOTHING!

Clear your mind, something will manifest…I… GOT…NOTHING.

My mind is literally filled with thousands of subjects, nothing very interesting.  Nothing whispering, “Now this is something you need to blog about.”  No cute stories about forgotten youth, flamingoes, puppy dogs, or coming of age.  No rants on the joke that is the state of national affairs.  N-O-T-H-I-N-G!  At least nothing I’ve not spoken to.

Be honest.  There is something.  Anger.  I’ve turned into an angry old man. Angry because I’ve got nothing.  Angry because I’m afraid.  Afraid I’m running out of stories.  Angry because I can’t seem to get motivated beyond the occasional shower and change of underwear.

I have a vision of an old man sitting in his recliner surrounded by empty beer cans and molding pizza boxes.  Flies buzz overhead.  An ashtray is overflowing with cigar butts.  His tomato sauce stained t-shirt is covered in ashes and burn holes from the embers falling from his cigar.  He is staring at his TV set wondering where he hid the remote, deciding the infomercial about incontinence is better than getting up and searching for something to change the channel.

Is thinking about nothing thinking about something?  Elevate your mind…but ‘maryhoochie’ is still illegal in this state.

I need to do something positive…but I want to do nothing.  Is stepping out into the rain and removing overnight puppy turds positive?  I guess avoiding stepping in dog sh!t is positive.

Oh, my poor daughter.  “What is your father’s legacy?”  “Writing about dog turds.”  I have become an embarrassment to my wife, daughter, grandchildren, puppy dogs…and myself.

Okay, I’ll quit the self-pity.  Writing about nothing has done nothing for my mood.  I’m sure it has done nothing for yours either.  Tune in next Tuesday…it’s got to be better.

For more uplifting blogs or stories go to Don Miller’s author’s page at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM

Flatter Than a Toad Frog…

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…on a four-lane highway.

It’s mid-November and I’m cold…freezing in my fleece sweats.  I feel the cold deep in my bones and today was quite mild.  The cold days are long, but the nights are even longer.  The darkness fogs my brain and waterlogs my soul….even in the brightest sunlight.

It’s months before the days begin to lengthen…well, a month before the Winter Solstice.  I can’t be wishing my life away; I don’t have enough life left.  This is the winter before my seventieth year.  What is it?  Four scores and seven…and we are certainly not guaranteed that.

Mid-November and I’m flatter than a toad frog on a four-lane.  December, January, and February could be a test of my waning resolve.  My cornbread already ain’t done in the middle and maybe a gooey mess before I feel the winds of March.

There is absolutely no reason for me to be flat…well, I’ve been seeing Christmas decorations in stores since mid-August it seems.  It’s Halloween, then Thanksgiving and then Christmas.  I’m waiting on April Fool’s Day.  For some reason holidays are tough.

It’s five forty-three in the evening.  We have a small mountain range to our west. The sun disappeared a half-hour ago.  It is five-fifty now and darker than the inside of a cow.  I think I know why people went to bed and rose with the chickens…boredom.  I also know why old-timey farm families were huge.

I try to stay busy during the in-between time when it is too dark to do anything constructive and too early to go to bed.  I fill the time as best I can.  Obviously, I write badly, I read, I watch TV, I play online Scrabble, I click on Facebook…sometimes I do all at the same time, slowly flipping from one to the other and then back again.  Sometimes I catch myself simply staring off into space.  Everything in a dim, soft focus, wondering how long I’ve sat with my mind in neutral.

It’s part of my affliction.  I can’t seem to stay focused on any one thing.  I’m fragmented. If I didn’t know I was clinically depressed I’d swear I was suffering from ADD on steroids.  Anxiety?  I’m driving my wife to distraction.  When I’m not bouncing from thought to thought I have a desire to sleep but even my dreams are fragmented.  At night, when I do sleep, dreams are wild and in 3D.  Luckily that is all I remember.

“Are you listening to me?” she asked.  “I told you that five minutes ago.”  “How many times are you going to ask me that?”  “You sure are sleeping a lot.”  “I’m beginning to worry about you.”  Like you don’t have worries of your own.  I have no answers to her questions or her observations.

Clinical depression with a good dose of SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder.  I just searched Amazon for a Happy Light…I do spend too much time in the dark.  I should have been a vampire…or a mushroom.

What I hate most?  The depression strips you of the desire to be productive but not the guilt of failing productivity.  Like a vampire, it saps your energy upon rising from bed.  It is a thief stealing my joy and happiness.

The very idea of going for my morning walk triggers an argument with the voices screaming in my head.  Faceless voices screaming “Gooooo!  It will do you good!”  Other’s yelling, “Stayyyyy!  Keep your rear end in that recliner!”  That might be a wee embellishment or I’m actually crazier than even I thought.

Like many, I am high functioning.  I hide my sadness and anxiety from those around me.  I am the subject of Smokey Robinson’s opening lyrics from “Tracks of My Tears”, “People say I’m the life of the party ‘cause I tell a joke or two.  Although I might be laughing loud and hard, deep inside I’m blue.”  It is easier to share this with people I don’t know on a blog than to confess to those closest to me.

Time drags, sleep is fitful and dream-filled.  it is the next morning, exactly twelve hours since I began this pity party, and it is even darker than it was last night.  It seems an unexpected rain shower decided to make its way north and camp over my head.  I must have been playing Scrabble during last night’s weather report.

Over an hour before the official sunrise…add another fifteen minutes for Old Sol to climb above the ridge and its trees to the east.  I guess I will add gloomy to the darkness.  Hopefully, the front will get out soon enough to trigger my morning voices spatting over to walk or not to walk.  That is always the question.

The good news?  I haven’t given in yet.  The bad?  I so want to.  My resolve is eroding.  I want to take to my bed and suck on my thumb.  Instead, I will put on my shoes and begin the day putting one foot in front of the other.  I’ll put on my rain gear and be confident no one will see the “tracks of my tears.” I will battle with myself.  I will climb the hills and try to use music to drown out my voices.  Hopefully, the walk back will be easier, hopefully, the malaise will pass…as it does.

Don Miller’s author’s page may be found at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM

The image was from https://werunandride.com/2017/07/11/frogs-on-the-highway/ July 11, 2017

 

 

Life in Black and White

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I share quotes on my social media accounts.  Quotes I can’t create because I’m not bright enough or because someone said what I wanted to say first…and said it better.  I wish I could be profound but instead, I rely on the words of others to enlighten, humor or sometimes, provoke.

I call these quotes, Don’s Daily Dose because a former student suggested the moniker after reading a few day’s worths.  I’m thankful to her for suggesting the title and helping me to realize someone was actually reading them.

I share these quotes along with some form of artwork to emphasize the point…or just because I liked the snake wrapped around an arm attached to a hand holding an apple… the quote was about temptation after all.  The apple different shades of red, the snake a bright kaleidoscope of color…I find the painting tempting.

2-original-sin-raluca-nedelcu

Original Sin by Raluca Nedelcu https://fineartamerica.com/featured/original-sin-raluca-nedelcu.html?product=art-print

Usually, the art I choose is psychedelic, me embracing my inner hippie.  Vibrant and wild colors from the LSD trip I never took; peace signs, VW microbuses, Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix….  Sometimes I use the book covers from the authors I quote from.  I lean toward bold colors with purple and pink being favorites.

Then I quoted Ansel Adams and looked for art to go with my quote.  I was awed by his landscapes in black and white.  The quote was about the environment, something Adams photographed in black and white, his mode of artistic expression.  Mother Nature stark and sharply in focus…maybe auster.  Nature laid bare, no makeup to soften its features.

The picture I chose of a two-lane blacktop took me back to those thrilling days of yesteryear when “filmed in Technicolor” was the exception, not the norm.  Stark blacks and whites along with muted grays were the standards, life laid bare in living black and white.

Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams Road, Nevada Desert, 1960

Movies, television, stills from Life magazine, most were in black and white in those days.  If I wanted color I thumbed through my grandmother’s National Geographic.  Wild animals and bare-breasted native girls filmed better in color.  In this modern-day, life is replicated exactly as it is on large screened TVs, tablets and I Phones. I still find black and white to be more poignant, more shocking, more potent.

Doretha Lange’s depression-era Migrant Mother does not reflect her pain in its colorized form.  Color is too soft.  Her turned down mouth with fingers stroking the side of her chin…pondering her lot in life it would seem. Her furrowed brow, two of her seven children hiding their faces from the camera.  There are no soft colors, just sharp black, and white pain.

DortheaLange

Destitute mother of seven, Age 32 Doretha Lange https://www.wdl.org/en/item/81/

Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski pleading for “Stella”, wearing a torn and dirty T-shirt, his hands clasped against his head…Same in Technicolor?  Only if his head explodes.  Stanley Kowalski was not a nice person, black and white suits him.

streetcar named

Marlon Brando, A Streetcar Named Desire https://macmcentire.com/2017/04/03/random-warner-bros-a-streetcar-named-desire/

I watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, Freedom Rider buses burn, and Walter Cronkite tell the nation a war was unwinnable after Tet, all and more on a black and white TV.  Those depressing moments were befitting of black and white.  No color necessary, no sugarcoating with pastels, no bold makeup.  Just stark black and white.

Jack Ruby

Jack Ruby shoots Lee Harvey Oswald as Detective James R. Leavelle looks on.  Leavelle passed away on August 2019.  He was 99.  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/us/james-leavelle-dead.html

Most of my childhood memories are in black and white.  Friends and family posing, smiling on three, frozen as a Kodak catches their likenesses.  My parents so young in their courting pictures, people long dead, their faces faded in the old albums I liberated after my father’s death.

I sigh, exhaling heavily as I think about them. My winter depression may be sneaking up, edging closer.  It is a bit early yet but it always catches me by surprise like those “backshooters” in the black and white “oaters” I watched as a child.  Bad men willing to do their worst to the Lone Ranger and Tonto.  Willing but not able as they live on in the reruns of life.

It is still pre-dawn as I edit this and there are no colors other than black and gray of night.  Not even a hint of the sunrise to come.  The almost full moon nearing the western horizon doesn’t give enough light for colors to reflect.  I seem to do my best writing in the dark, surrounded by blacks and whites.   My best writing is relative and it is not the way I want to spend the rest of my life.

Life in black and white seems harsh and I’ve had my black and white moments.  Life needs a few black and white moments to give depth and meaning to the warm colors in between.  Profound.  Maybe I am capable of a good quote after all.  Time to greet the sun.

sun2

Autumn Sun by David Galchutt in 2019 | Fall | Sun art, Moon …

Don Miller’s author’s page may be found at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM

The featured image was lifted from https://pearlsofprofundity.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/life-in-black-and-white/

 

 

 

Dealing with Writer’s Block

/ cigarman501 / 1 Comment

 

And that is a huge joke…one I’m not laughing at.  It’s not writer’s block, is it?  No, it is insanity.  It’s a little early for Seasonal Affective Disorder to rear an ugly head.

Writer’s block…”All work and no play make makes Jack a dull boy…Don a dull boy.”  I feel like Jack Torrance in The Shining although I’m not ready to chop a hole in a door….Maybe mad enough to chew nails and spit rivets…what in the hell does that even mean?  I think Don was a dull boy before the writer’s block.

Writing about writer's block

I’m writing about writer’s block.  Geez.

Honesty is the best policy.  It’s not just writer’s block.  It is do anything block.  I gave up and tried reading and then continued to binge-watch the series Justified… looking for motivation, to no avail.  I failed. I didn’t get my chores done either.  I’m such a slug.  All I did was vacillate between the activities I refused to do.

writer-meme-5

I have too many voices chanting in my head.  Imaginary friends, voices of long-dead friends, voices of enemies I wish were…no, I don’t wish that on anyone.  I have voices from characters in three different storylines I’m having trouble completing.  Completing?  I just want to move forward a bit.

I just reread forty-four chapters in one and deleted half of them.  I deleted them on purpose…garbage I say, garbage!

Writer'sblock1

I went for my morning exercise.  Usually, a bit of exercise will clear my head and quiet the voices.  I focused on the portion of the story involving the death of a major character.  I wrote it in my head, around and around it went, like flushing an imaginary toilet until I got it just right.

Returning home, I sat the chapter aside and let it marinade before sitting down and failing to get it written down.  Could death be the problem?  She is a fictional character and the story won’t work without her untimely demise…Geez.  I’ve become attached to someone who doesn’t exist.

2eikm7

It is another day and I write in the morning, in the pre-dawn hours…or in this case stare at my computer screen.  It suits me most of the time.  Friendly ghosts seem to surround me, whispering in my ear.  They provide no help.  I hear their little “Casper the Friendly Ghost” voices ridiculing me.  Maybe they are not that friendly.

I’ve wasted two hours of prime writing time writing this blog.  My story sits, unwritten…all three of them.  Lucretia still lives.  Allen Kell is frozen in my mind, his hand hovering above his six-gun as he tries but fails to save her.  How will he not save her?

Total word count for today

I must shut down the computer and start my day.  Exercise and then major chores.  Like the story of the hard-working ant and the lazy grasshopper, winter will soon be upon us and there is so much left to do…from not doing it during the summer.  Preparations must be made, must be made, must be made…if I say it enough….  How does a fiddlin’ grasshopper morf into a hard-working ant?

Don Miller, when sane, writes on various subjects, some real, others imagined.  Access his author’s page at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM

Images from various meme mines.

On World Wide Suicide Prevention Day

/ cigarman501 / 14 Comments

Originally entitled, “The Easy Way Out,” I first wrote this three years ago and it bears repeating.  “Suicide is not an easy way out.” My own contemplations of suicide and my battles with clinical depression fuel my emotions, along with the thoughts of three friends and former students who in the last few years have opted to take the “easy way out.”

No one who knows me would think, “Coach Miller is suicidal” without being told so and many would say, “Aw shucks, you’re pullin’ my leg.  You?” Yeah, me.  Many people who contemplate suicide don’t “look like someone” who might because we are masters of disguise.  “So, take a good look at my face, uh-huh. You see my smile (looks out of place). Yeah, look a little bit closer it’s easy to trace, oh the tracks of my tears.”  The problem is Smokey, we do our crying alone and put our smiles on when we are out in public.

The Easy Way Out

Rewritten 9/10/2019

“A brave man once requested me,

to answer questions that are key,

‘Is it to be or not to be,’

and I replied, ‘oh why ask me?’”

“’Cause suicide is painless,

it brings on many changes,

and I can take or leave it if I please…

and you can do the same thing if you please.”

Theme from MASH, “Suicide is Painless” by Johnny Mandel

 

I don’t believe there is anything easy about committing suicide nor do I think is it totally painless. That would be two of the major reasons I don’t attempt it. When you are sick like me, one may find it not to be the easiest of ways out. I don’t mean sick as in “I have a terminal illness and it is going to eat me up from the inside out” kind of sickness but the “I’m crazy as a bed bug” kind of sickness.

I have suffered from clinical depression for over forty years now, so I believe I have the right to say, “I’m crazy as a bedbug.” Also, like a world-class alcoholic, I have become very adept at hiding it. You see, almost daily, I still have thoughts of suicide or when I do something I consider “wrong,” there are the thoughts that I deserve to be hurt in some way even if I do it to myself. YES, I JUST CUT OFF MY FINGER ON PURPOSE!!!! I’ve done neither so suicide may not be the easy way out after all.

Being suicidal and repeatedly not pulling the trigger, not slitting a wrist or taking a short step out of a very high window is hard. I spend some of my “very best” depressed “self-speak” contemplating, quite morbidly, the pain of a bullet entering my head as opposed to the pain the same bullet would have on the people I leave behind. The people I love and, despite my depressive hate speech, those I know to love me, at least I think…maybe.

My wife, my daughter, and son-in-law, my grandchildren, who I don’t yet know as well as I want, my brother and my friends. So far, my belief is that the pain of my action on those I leave behind would be greater…therefore, I don’t do it. There is also the fear of the unknown. Am I going to find myself inside of a vat of boiling “hellfire and brimstone” for instance, am I just going to “wink” out of existence or turn into some type of cosmic energy? Will I be reborn as an Egyptian Dung Beetle?..one of my favorites.  All options are scary, as are others, and I find I am not a very brave person or is “sticking out” the mental anguish, itself, brave?

Clinical depression is one of the odd ducks of mental illness. “Oh, you are just a little blue…” and the Grand Canyon is a little hole. Logically you ask yourself, repeatedly I might add, “What have you got to be depressed about?” Nothing!  Absolutely nothing.  Or, friends and loved ones ask, “Why are you depressed?” Those questions are quite tiring because there is no answer unless it is everything.

My depression is due to tiny, little, itty bitty chemical imbalances in my brain. AND IT IS TREATABLE, once you figure out it is nothing more than a disease. No different than diabetes, or arthritis, or toenail fungus except that for some reason it seems to be much more embarrassing to say, “I am clinically depressed and suicidal” than “I have toenail fungus and it is yucky.” It shouldn’t be.  Toenail fungus is pretty yucky.   We need to dispel the stigma of “I’m crazy as a bedbug” and treat the illness.

These thoughts were triggered by a phone call. A friend told me of suicide. I didn’t know the man; I know the family he left behind and can only imagine the pain they are going through. The unanswered questions, “Why?”, “Why didn’t I see it coming?”, “What did I do wrong?”

Suicide was not an easy way out for them. Suicide was not due to an incurable and painful illness like cancer. It was due to an incurable and painful illness like clinical depression.  There are no answers to the “Why” and “What” questions.  Quit asking them!

His suicide has me, selfishly, thinking about ME. I worry someday suicide will appear to be the easy way out… I won’t have enough clarity of thought to keep me from pulling the trigger. No there is nothing easy about suicide including the contemplation of suicide.

Before you worry, NO! I do not need to be put on suicide watch…at least yet. I’ll try to let you know and you should be paying attention…not only to me but the people who are close to you.  Don’t be afraid to ask, “Are you okay?”  Your loved one will lie and say “Oh, I’m fine” or “I’m just a little blue,” but you should be looking for lies.

This post is for the people who have not had their clinical depression diagnosed or those who have and still battle it every day. You are not alone and you are not an embarrassment. There are many of us out there, a depressing estimate of one hundred and twenty-nine million worldwide, one out of every ten Americans and even more depressing, eighty percent never receive treatment. I was lucky.

There ARE people you can talk to. If there is no one in your life, try these:

National Suicide Hotline (800) 273-8255

Teen Health and Wellness Suicide Hotline: 800-784-2433

Crisis Call Center: 800-273-8255 or

text ANSWER to 839863

For more statistics  http://www.healthline.com/health/depression/statistics-infographic

If you are interested in reading more “Ravings of a Mad Southerner” or other writings by Don Miller, please use the following link:  https://www.amazon.com/DonMiller/e/B018IT38GM

The image featured is from https://www.docsopinion.com/2018/02/25/depression-symptoms/  and comes from an article entitled 10 Important Symptoms of Depression.  I would suggest you check yourself.

 

Deafening Silence

/ cigarman501 / 2 Comments

 

I’ve been outside three times this morning…and it’s not yet seven-thirty.  The puppies woke me way too early.

I am troubled by the silence…the sounds I don’t hear.  I seem to be drawn to the quiet like a moth to a flame.  Everything is muted, even the vehicles climbing up the grade toward Hendersonville.

I don’t understand the silence and I am a bit disturbed.  Usually, the birds and bees are active by this time, chirping and buzzing.  But nothing is moving…just the toad that keeps trying to find a way into my house and the mosquito he must be chasing.

I don’t really mind the toad and admire his persistence.  I wish he would nab the mosquito. The blind puppy dogs seem to mind, picking up his scent and leading me to his location.  Waiting patiently for their “good dog” treats after I remove the interloper to his normal habitat.   Where is that damn mosquito?

Now I am looking at the bird feeders and they are not attracting any kind of activity…squirrels included.  I squint into the pre-dawn light to see if they were emptied during the night.

Did some spaceship descend from the heavens and abduct my wildlife deciding they didn’t need my toad?  I’ve seen too many end of the world movies.

My murder of crows has been quite active recently but not this morning.  Why I wonder?  Why are gatherings of crows called murders?  As I ponder, I realize I really have seen too many horror movies and am crazy as a loon.

It is as if the very air is absorbing sound.  Not a leaf moving.  The citronella torches I just lit are burning straight up, reaching toward heaven.  The heavily scented smoke defies gravity, swirling neither left or right as it disappears toward space.

It has been hot and dry…for us.  I think that makes us all crazy…wildlife included.  Mid-nineties in the foothills of the Blue Ridge.  Pre-dawn has become after dawn and there is no dew on the grass at all.  We need rain badly and a break from the heat.  It is as if the wildlife has already hunkered down in a cool place for the day.  Maybe that’s why the toad continues to break and enter.

Maybe it just my diminished hearing or my increasingly bad mood.  I find myself anxious and a bit depressed.  Am I depressed because of…or is because of why I am depressed?  I don’t know.  I don’t know if I even make sense.

What I do know is the silence is as oppressive as the building humidity and heat.

According to the local weather guru, there is hope on the horizon.  Rain chances increase late in the week.  Nothing for sure…just like life.  Maybe what rain we do get will wash away the silence…or maybe I should get off my ass and make some noise.

The featured image from https://dahni.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/words-matter/

Please take time to like Don Miller’s facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/cigarman501/?eid=ARB0OtYgbYydIVtqtxaOGKECb-AvbbILtPybDOE835b4sChVMzC7w_vB9jqu161yiZWOmbn134yI6lwT

Or his author’s page at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM