Good morning, good morning. Not at my best today. Well, actually. Too early to tell. But I sure wasn’t at my best yesterday.

Trigger warning: lotta talk about depression without any of my usual obligatory ending-on-a-hopeful-note antics. Just pretty much sardonically bleak throughout.

It is an open question what the true purpose is for even more shit going suddenly wrong when you’re depressed. The scientist would say that more shit doesn’t go wrong when you’re depressed. You just feel like it does, statistics, etc. But the scientists can take a knee for the moment.

The true reason is one of two possibilities:

That the universe is piling shit on.

Or the universe is trying to snap you out of it.

Was the universe piling one on when it sabotaged my alarm last night, caused me to oversleep, and have my daughter wake me up? Or was it trying to snap me out of it?

Really could go either way.

A few weeks ago I received a Paris 1942 record in the mail — Moe Tucker’s 1992 collaboration with Sun City Girls, recently re-released on the excellent Superior Viaduct. Great record. Only problem is, it came in one of those sleeves with the adjesive closing the sleeve. I fucking hate those. Because they always risk getting stuck to the sleeve and messing up the finish. Except this time it got stuck to the actual record, got adhesive all over the record. And nothing would get this adhesive off.

So eventually I tried Goo Gone. And, reader, the Goo Gone took the adhesive off, oh it sure did.

But it also took the grooves right off the record.

There’s a paradox at the core of depression. It is so boring to be in, spiraling in despair, nothing brings much joy. But at the same time the mechanics of it are somewhat interesting, and often I can climb my way out of it by thinking about those mechanics.

The author John Green seems to be going through a bout of seasonal (?) depression in tandem to mine this year, if his Youtube videos are any indication. He talks about how we are bundles of cells yearning for homeostasis and it is very hard for trillions of cells to ever achieve perfect homeostasis, so of course we are aways somewhat out of sorts.

In every video where he acknowledges his depression, he repeats this like a mantra. It is clear it gives him joy, and it helps him talk about it with others without that fear. The fear loquacious, convincing depressives have that by unpacking their depression through their art, they are encouraging it in others.

Rather than Green’s biological perspective, I take a more chemistry-addled view, a symptom of our pharmacological times. But I, too, am often worried about convincing people to be depressed. Such a weird fear, but it’s there. And my work-around is to focus on the mechanics of depression, the experience of it, not the very convincing bleak thoughts I am actually having about the world around me.

And it is still somewhat helpful to remind yourself that the depression exists despite you, aside from you, it is not you.

It started Monday where I suddenly, midway through the day, got that feeling I used to get when I was flying home from New York, back to my wife and North Carolina. I would be hung over, and I would feel terrible. Not just physically terrible, but emotionally terrible. And, more accurately, I would feel immense guilt. Like I did not just have a nice night out at Tom and Jerry’s with a couple of friends, but that I had somehow ruined my entire life, my relationship, while in New York for the night.

It was weird enough when this would happen after a nice night out with friends, it was even more strange for it to happen randomly in the middle of a Monday at home.

By yesterday it was in full swing, and everything more or less sucked. Emma, being a good wife, offered to talk about it, but, as ever, when you’re in it, what is there to talk about? You could give them a litany of the external manifestations of your depression — the things your brain is chewing on right in that moment. But they are symptoms, at best. They are not the cause.

Or maybe they are these days, I don’t know. I remember a good twenty, thirty years ago I was listening to NPR like a good proto-liberal and there was some Historian or Psychiatrist or something on talking about depression, the (then) current “spread” of depression through the western world, the debates our beloved media was having then about whether or not it was real, like they are doing now with autism or being trans. Media’s both-sidesing isn’t new. Anyway, this woman — I don’t remember her name, this was before New York infected me and I paid attention to the names of journalists and interviewees. Anyway, she said that people always asked her “if depression is real, why weren’t the slaves depressed?”

And she’s like: “are you kidding me? When life is that bad, everyone is depressed. Literally everything we know medically about slaves supports this conclusion.” (If this is wrong, don’t at me, it was 30 years ago).

And, I can’t help but wonder if that is going on now. I mean, I’m not equating the world of today with slavery, I am not saying my lot is theirs. I am wondering if the universal environment in which we find ourselves is so conducive to mental illness it is becoming pervasive. I am trying to not be an old curmudgeon here but… this age is sick? It is making us all crazy?

And so I find myself, these days, unable to take quite as much comfort as I have been for the last decade or so, in chemical explanations of my depression. It’s that much harder to simply say “oh whatever, your brain is playing tricks on you, just ignore it.”

Because my brain is not playing tricks on me! The president did just casually tweet out a war crime yesterday, the president did just unabashedly, publicly, say shit worse than what took down Nixon — and that was unearthed against Nixon’s wishes. His chief of staff did just say a bunch of shit that should bring down everyone, but nothing will happen because everyone already knew all of it. His supporters already knew he was a psychopath, his detractors already knew. Someone just told the truth, a truth we all knew, so why would anything bad actually happen from it?

But, then, everything cannot suck that much, can it? Is it really a sign of the end times that, like, automakers are earnestly, eagerly pursuing Who Killed the Electric Car 2, Republicans in Congress are tanking people’s health care, they are pouting that they’re only blocking green energy, we’re not actively thwarting it?

And shit all of that was just a Tuesday.

So, like, yeah I can list to my wife “things that are upsetting,” but my wife, not currently in the throes of a depression, will be somewhat confused because was yesterday really any worse than any other day this year?

But I gotta tell you. If I had a vape in the house, I sure would have been back on that thing faster than you can say Jack Smith.

Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!

We are listening to a punk band called Monsterwatch. They are manic and noisy and I like them very much and I sure wish my studio was done so I could sit there and play very loud guitar very badly. This band rules, this song is called “My Life is Dumb,” and man, I feel it. Let’s Google ‘em. This album is called The Head, which is okay, but their last album, their only other album, is called Noise You Will Never Care About and that is an excellent album title. I can get behind that. Hrm except maybe that is a different Monsterwatch because their Bandcamp says The Head is their debut album. Mysterious.

Anyway, they are from Seattle and they are playing Oakland tomorrow and LA Friday. You should go. Oh man and they’re playing the Hope and Anchor in Brighton, UK in March. Maybe I’ll go. Manic punk shows are amazing when you’re depressed. Wear all black, stand in the back, hold your elbow with your other hand, look down. Don’t move.

Maybe cry.

We have 11 hours left in this “To Investigate” playlist. After today, I have two more days of work this year. That’s less than four hours a day of music clean-out. We can make it.

I wish people would read more. I think it was Jamelle Bouie, some fellow Bluesky addict, talking about how we are all wasting our time on Bluesky if we were serious about our work our art effecting political change. That the only real place to make an impact anymore was in video, vertical video, algorithmic video, Youtube, TikTok, Podcasts maybe Instagram Stories. No one reads on the Internet anymore, etc. etc. Of course he’s not quite right, but also he is totally right. Bluesky is a waste of time if you want to be heard, he says.

But I am not writing to be heard anymore, really. And, of course, I’m not even writing on Bluesky. I am writing in an even more obscure place, and then just putting a link on Bluesky, nothing else.

So, you know. Makes me really appreciate you people.

This graph came out yesterday, but I made some adjustments to it:

It occurred to me the other day that I am always still thinking about my judgement day. Like literally I picture St Pete at the Pearly Gates. Part of me fantasizes about this because I wish desperately that at the end of your life there was a little scoring phase, like in a Civ game, where you can ask some agent or bot or saint or diety a bunch of ultra-pedantic questions like “how many hugs did I give” and “how many pens did I lose” and more profound ones like “did I make a difference” and you would get some real, honest-to-god answers. I want this so much. I would ask them if Jane dropped anything out of the truck on December 17, 2025 as she was getting out to go to school or if that was my imagination. I would ask them if I made the right call in renouncing ambition. I would ask them how many orgasms I had, how many turkey sandwiches I ate.

I want that so badly.

But it also occurred to me that no, no you also view this quite traditionally. You don’t actually believe you will encounter St. Pete at the Pearly Gates, but you live your life as if you will, you feel in your bones there will be a judgement, that life is a test, that you so desperately want to pass. You wriggle uncomfortably at the question of whether your good deeds are motivated by this. That is not a question you like at all. As if this was’t the foundation of a perfectly normal religion: be good because you will be judged in the afterlife.

You don’t believe this (do you?), know it’s bunk (is it?), but you live your life this way anyway. You will be judged.

And you switched to the second person for this whole section for some reason. Leave that for someone else to unpack.

All this is not to say I want to die I still very much want to live forever. I desperately want to outlive every single one of these fascists. I want to watch the world heal. I know the world will one day heal. I am increasingly convinced I won’t be here to see it, but god damn do I wish I could be. I wish I was so immortal I ended up watching the entire universe slowly fade out of existence. This has not changed. Even if I contemplate doing that, watching everything and everyone I ever loved die, and doing it all while depressed, I would still choose it. I love life so much. My god, man. Life.

Bill sent me a passage from a new book last night, a sorta cultural review trying to make some sort of unifying sense of this miasma of an era that we live in. It had a passage where it mentioned me in passing, called me an “elite” which, yeah, I guess, from a certain POV, back then at least. And a “tech marketer” which, ugh. Sorry. It quoted from an essay I wrote in 2017 back when I still wrote to be read, and yeah, boy, I do not miss that. The essay went far and wide, got me grief from both sides of the issue. I can’t bear to go back and read it but you can if you want.

Upon scanning, I see that they have added a banner ad into the middle of the esay. Seems fitting.

Last night when Bill sent this, I took some comfort that I called it eight years ago on how shitty the internet has become.

But then this morning, I remembered there was a woman, I can’t remember who. I followed her on Twitter for a long time after this encounter but lost her when I decamped. She was an internet activist, seemed perfectly sane, but never seemed to have really gotten much recognition for her efforts. And she very rightfully called me out, saying that “well this was obvious to a lot of us for a long time before this” and fair enough.

I wonder if there was a moment where, like, you were being prescient saying the internet was going to turn to shit, instead of pessimistic. Like… was its eventual failure always there, in the very roots of it? Or did it evolve over time? If you said “this whole thing is going to be a shitshow” to, oh, I don’t know, Vint Cerf and Robert Khan when they developed TCP/IP or to Tim Berners-Lee, when he invented the web: would you have been being a depressing pessimist, without a basis for your argument? Or would you have been being insightful and wise?

When does pessimistic pooh-poohing morph into prescient prediction?

The knee-jerk reaction I could have done when that woman called me out is to say something along those lines: well, back then you were all being paranoid, but now the we have the facts and we are voting garbage (emo reference intentional). It was tempting. But I did not do that.

I remember that exchange vividly, because I remember thinking “wow it sucks to get attention on the internet I do not like this anymore” and also “wow it is very hard to not argue on the internet I have to work real hard at being polite to all these people and listen and not be defensive.” I pulled it off, but it was so hard and I decided I did not want to be in that position again.

Would that other people figured those things out.

Jane’s been great through all of this. She didn’t give me a hug once but she made amends and gave me many hugs afterwards. She snuggled with me and we watched an absurd game about a human giving birth to a goose that gives birth to humans and mates by growing their neck 19 meters it was glorious and insane. She woke me up this morning. She has the Science Fair finals and Gymnastics tongiht and I will be proud of her and… you know, it’s hard when Emma wants me to talk a bit about my moodiness but we both know I probably shouldn’t rant about RFK or Venezuela in front of her.

But she did, last night at the Mexican restaurant, start going on very loudly about how Trump is a bad man and that made me very happy.

The old people around us needed to hear that.

Hrm what do we have for a playlist today. I wish I had a noise and metal one ready that would be fitting. Oo moody and quiet is almost done. Let’s just fill it out with a couple oldies oh yes let’s put that Tear Garden song that came on in the car last night as we were driving to dinner. What a song, what a band, man did the Tear Garden ever tour I would love to see them. I am glad I got to see the Pink Dots again, though. In hindsight, that was a real treat.

Also we need to shout out this Charli XCX John Cale collaboration that is peak-level brilliance on both their parts. Both have a long history of collaboration — Cale’s collaboration with Weyes Blood last year is great. So on the one hand this seems logical. But also, its just perfectly bonkers. A+.

Here’s to you, friend. You guys mean the world to me. Thanks for being there. Hang in there.