Oh what a beautiful morning freewrite

Sigh, I’d like to think everything‘s going my way, like in the song, but sometimes it all feels so hard, so futile. Last night I slam-dunked the book on women’s depression. I didn’t seem to fit the major categories, but I answered six of the 10 warning signposts, which, according to the author, puts me in the definitely depressed camp. Let’s see: am I in the major league or the minor league? 

With self-help books, the bases are always loading, and it’s always spring training camp at the box office—as we are a nation that legislate happiness for all—indivisible, even. We are so preoccupied with our own petty unhappinesses, it’s a national pastime. There is an entire section dedicated to self-help in the bookstore. Instead of being positive, we are perennially positive that something must be wrong, and we’re on the verge of either going into, or coming out of depression. We are all hanging 10 on the stasis shelf of unhappiness. Personally, I view it as an indulgence of extreme self narcissism. 

And then I thought of how we live in such uncertain times—ever since 9/11, our collective perception has changed, to say that of the middle ages milieu, or should I say, mayhem as 3/4 of Europe died of the plague, and if not the plague, then the crusades polished them off. It’s a wonder that we were able to re-populate and replace ourselves as it were. Obviously, the survivors did not live a monastic life, they were like the newly introduced rabbits, populating themselves to kingdom come. After all, someone had to fill the churches of Christendom, lest the infidels sweep across the steppes in the footsteps of Genghis Khan. 

Today Neil asked one of his students to play Maria in West Side Story, the Juliet scene, and she said oh no, not me I am too cold. She was the niece of the president of Afghanistan, and she said if that scene were to happen in my country, if some Romeo snuck into my courtyard, I would’ve been beheaded. She said so matter-of-factly, that she could no longer react. She felt nothing at all no depression, no reprehension or horror as she views us as the infidel in this country, where happiness and justice are legislated for all, but not from within the war zone.

6/4/2004 Writers’ Group