On the merits of depression

Fine. Take your over-priced medications, go to your therapy sessions, fight the "good" fight against this natural reaction you are having to your environment. Curse its name. Wallow in self pity. Shut yourself up in your dark basement and binge drink until you believe you've filled the empty pit with lack-luster liquid love.

But after the fact take stock in all of the things that your complete lack of motivation prevented you from doing. Your depression is likely a reaction all of the crazy and stupid things you have to deal with day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, yes I'm going to say it.. decade after decade. Your system is essentially shutting down due to an overload of idiocy. We all have a stupidity tank. This tank fills up over time and needs to be emptied. Some people find it easy to empty this and are able to manage their day-to-day activities without a serious change in affect or functionality. Others need to shut down for a bit to open the sluices and drain the bile they've managed to collect from the near endless barrage of lunacy in which our society seems to revel.

If this shut off valve did not engage, it is likely that we would launch into other means of dealing with this stupidity. Like manically driving down the free-way, in the wrong direction, at twice the speed limit. Or stocking up at our local Cabella's and visiting our place of gainful employ and explaining how we really feel about the lay-offs, decrease in benefits, increased work hours and day-to-day cluelessness of the powers that be. These are not things that we should be doing, by-the-way. And the fact that it's a near impossible chore to right yourself out of bed in the morning is a gift of the highest magnitude.

Instead of diving into a dismal funk of perpetual inertia we would be hysterically approaching the Cretins as we pass them on the street and rendering unto the Cretin what is truly the Cretins. Which usually would entail a rather scathing dressing down most likely followed by brutal, yet somehow completed deserved beating down. Sadly the justice system hasn't quite caught up to our superior and sophisticated sense of justice to account for such things. Which means that without fail, we would find ourselves in lock-up, yet again, for this complete and utter misunderstanding. Which is, of course, where we deserve to be. Because we aren't really sophisticated or superior. We are actually devolving to the level of the Cretin. And again, what prevents us from having the energy to devolve? That's right, a right good bout of ye olde-fashioned abject gloom.

So thank you gloom. From the bottom of the bottomless despairing pit that is my blackened shrivelled heart.