my careless contagion

The opening line of Simon and Garfunkel's Sound of Silence comes to me often. Hello, darkness, my old friend ... This old song no doubt means many things to many people. And that opening line means something to me as well. It means, "Here we go again."  It's hard to fully express what it means to be prone to depression. Looking back on my four decades of life, I see a lot of prominent themes. But the thick vein of depression runs through it all. I don't know when it took hold, but it's been there as long as I can remember. It is an old friend of the worst kind.  I don't want to be depressed. I don't choose this. I don't want to waste endless days simply wishing I could climb out of whatever funk I'm in. All the people who have come and gone in my life I certainly can't blame for this. I'm depressed, no matter who is in my life. Sure, certain circumstances haven't helped. And alcohol just made the whole thing worse. How I...

This is going to come off as a dumbass post, I'm sure of it. I'll give it a shot, though. My idea, though it may sound antithetic, is that saying no to something is actually saying yes to a whole lot of other things. One of those books that affected me as a young man was Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. It's a book primarily for boys, I think, but it has some universal lessons. One of those lessons is letting go.  The young boy in the story wanted to teach his hounds how to hunt raccoons. But he needed a coon pelt to do that. How do you get a coon pelt if your dogs don't know how to hunt coons? A raccoon trap was the answer — a hole bored into wood with a shiny trinket in the bottom. The hole had to be large enough to admit the raccoon's little hand yet small enough to hold it once it grasped the trinket and made a fist. I experience the same thing when I make a fist in a Mason jar. It's not fair, of course, for the raccoon, as they love shiny t...