DEPRESSED!

I have been trying to analyze the sources of my depression today.

1. It's too cold. We have only had one day above freezing this month. Even inside it's cold. If you turn up the heat to the point where you're comfortable, NYSEG (New York state electric & Gas, which has a monopoly) will destroy your budget. Humans are apparently 80% water, and when you feel that you are about to freeze, it's menacing.

2. Obama won. Now the conservatives are the counterculture. Obama even wrote Beatnik poems in his youth. When I was younger, I used to think that if everyone was a Beatnik, the world would be better. Then, just after I change over, they finally get a Beatnik president who's admitted to smoking dope, and trying cocaine, and who thinks love will change the world.

Four years of Sermon on the Mount type thinking is going to hinkmeister my pinkmeister.

3. I'm reading Barry Miles' book The Beat Hotel, which is about the hotel in Paris where Corso and Burroughs and Ginsberg lived. There are so many depressing details, such as when Burroughs shoots his wife in the forehead apparently because he was depressed about his boyfriend. Even more depressing are the descriptions of bookstores in Paris, and cheap places to eat and read the books. I miss that. And I am baffled by the Beats. Ginsberg says that there is a great big love zone that everyone can tap into, and he doesn't believe in possessive love. Or anything possessive. He shares stuff, and wants to visit the Soviet Union in the 1950s, when Stalin was still in control! The only guy I like better after reading this book is Kerouac. "Kerouac .... was sympathetic to the American far-right and a great supporter of Senator McCarthy. He saw existentialism as a communist plot" (60). That cheered me a little, but in the aggregate, not enough. It's a combination of MISSING PARIS, which I loved, and also, some kind of envy that these guys lived such cool albeit demented lives, but also, wondering what this means, since I couldn't have stood any of their lives for two minutes, and I feel doubly estranged.

4. Delaware County New York does have a Bohemian milieu, but it's spread over hundreds of square miles. There's a good bookstore run by a green couple. And if you go in there, it feels human. The woman is an Episcoplian minister. The man is an atheist. They get along fine. and out back behind the store is an enormous mural which mixes English bohemia of the last five hundred years with local Bohemian characters. My friend Gary Mayer painted it. My child Tristan is in the lower right hand side, stealing a wallet in a Dickensian image (he's stealing the wallet from an overstuffed factory owner with a tophat). Tristan doesn't know why he was pressed into this image, since he says he's never stolen anything, and would never do that. I tried to explain Charles Dickens to him, and the orphans who operated a crime ring in the days when it was thought that "property is theft," so it's ok to steal back.

"What is property?" He asked.

"Legitimate earnings, or trade," I answered, "At least in the main."

"What is legitimate?" He asked.

This went on for twenty minutes, as I tried to get him to think about baseball cards, and how he feels when his little brother appropriates them, until his mother said that there was food on the table.

5. I'm in a trough between writing projects. I just finished a young adult novel, and sent out twenty queries to agents yesterday. I thought it would be snapped up, but so far all the responding agents (two) have said try me again later, I'm swamped. I cannot stand the sales part of writing. I want to be able to work, and sales is not my line of work, but someone has to do this job, and it's either me or no one. I find it amazing that the Beats were so good at this aspect of writing. They hung out in the right circles, and constantly made contacts, and worked at it, even though it was grotesque, and they suffered. Ginsberg was especially effective in this line of the writing business. He kept a sharp eye on the main chance, and never wavered. He never had a family. His family was his gang of poets and novelists.

6. I have had a sore throat for about a week. I thought I had slept it off, but last night it was a little cold in my room, and it came back. It's just the tiniest sore throat, but I am overly sensitive when it comes to illness and pain.

7. Driving in the snow on the rural roads of Delaware County one sees the barren landscape abbreviated only by a barn here and there, and an odd cow or two. The local farmers are turning to a kind of boutique farming where alpacas and llamas, Muskoxen, and exotic varieties of goat and cow are replacing normal American Holsteins. I saw two cows the other day which resembled what I thought were a species of Musk Oxen from the Himalayas. I feel disoriented by the odd shapes, and the strange hairdos, of some of these bovine and equestrian alternatives. If you go on tiny rural roads seldom visited, you are likely to see whole herds of strange buffalo, with a miniature zebra trying to stay warm by staying in the herd. Emus, and other exotic fowl, litter the landscape with ultra-exoticism. The sheep is no longer in the meadow, the cow is no longer in the barn.

What will I do about this feeling of malaise? I will continue to try to function. My daughter has a three-page report due this week. It's her choice of topic. I'm interested to see what she writes. My son has a good friend and he's practicing basketball with him in the College's Bubble. I'm also slogging through a book on algebra. I have another book on geometry lined up. I want to read Whitehead's book on mathematics, and am thinking about Wittgenstein's Remarks on Mathematics. Frege's Introduction to Mathematics is over my head at present. I am also doing an exercise DVD by a brutal body sculptress named Gillian. Twenty minutes in a concentration camp of aerobic murderousness. It's called a Thirty Day Shred.

All the sensible "local" mammals are sleeping under the duvet of snow. The woodchuck is curled up in his den, dreaming of summer cucumbers. The deer must be above ground, but I never see them.

What are good ways to enjoy the winter? Does anybody actually prefer winter?