Fluoxetine

Looking through my backlog, it appears I have three unpublished posts on this blog which I am certain I’ll never go back and read: “On Depression, pt. 8: Lonely People”, “On Religion, pt. 3: What is a cult?”, and “On Depression, pt. 8: Fluoxetine.”

Actually, that’s a good title. Or at least, as good as any.

When I started this blog 9 years ago, I was driven. By mania, perhaps, but driven nonetheless. Obviously, there were very good reasons for that being the case. Nonetheless, I wrote so much, so furiously; from the time I woke up, to the time I went to sleep, write, write, write. I try to put myself in that person’s head today, but they have become a stranger to me. God, what I would give to be able to channel that same energy now.

It seems the best I can manage anymore is a journal entry every 9 months or so about how I am going to start writing again soon, I can feel it. How I’ve worked through the flavor of the day, and now I can return to what I am certain is the most correct use of my time. How excited I am to begin, how many wonderful and important and tragic things I have to say, how many ways I’ll be able to say them! And then it hits me, as if for the first time, every single time. I am tired. I am so tired. How can I get myself up from my chair, from my couch, from my bed, when I know that my Pyrrhic reward for doing so is to think? Vile.

I will be turning 36 soon, in this year of 20 and 26. I started this blog around the time of my 27th birthday. I believe most of my subsequent posts over the following years were also made around the time of my birthday. For my 35th birthday, I took some pills and drank some vodka and wine. And now my 36th approaches, and I know I feel about the same now as I have all the birthdays I can remember. I like to think that aging doesn’t bother me, but as Ronald Wilson Regan once said in the most brazen display of naked double-think I know of: “my heart and my best intentions tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me that it’s not.”

I bought a typewriter recently to try and break me out of my funk. A red Olivetti Lettera 31, made in Yugoslavia. It’s gorgeous, lightweight, and beautifully engineered. However, I knew nearly nothing about typewriters when I bought it, and it was only when I got it home that I realized the carriage was short a ball bearing. I’m close to figuring it out, and once I do, I’m sure I’ll be an overnight Hemingway.

How is one to write amidst all this worry? Is that the shadow cast by age: that the older one gets, the more frightened? Things felt somewhat bleak in 2017, but nothing like they do now in ’26. My world was relatively stable, even if I was terribly miserable with my place in it. These days, I could not be happier with who I am, but the earth feels like it could slip out from under me at any given moment. How gauche would it be to bring dear Pyrrhus into this a second time? God, what a conceited sentence.

As I sit here in my grandfather’s recliner, I do feel my mind trying to stir a bit. What a rare and delicious feeling. “This is so wonderful!” I find myself thinking. “I’ve done it! This will become a regular thing again. How exciting!” Tragically, this is inevitably followed by “Why haven’t I been doing this already?” Tragic, because “Why haven’t I…?” questions seldom meet with happy answers if asked in good faith.

I am horrified by all that surrounds me. How can I not be! And through it all–the war, the purges, the crackdowns, the genocide–through it all, I must work. I must work, and when I do not work, I must worry about work. Worry about the hours, the slivers of time. How many hours until I have to wake up for work?

Oh shit. It’s less than eight. I have to go. I have to work.

I’m sure tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow, I will have time.