You know, given the mania for all-things-Twilight this past few years, you’d think that sales of ELO’s “Time” album would’ve picked up at some point…

Would the Palindrome be the arena in which Michael and Sarah duke it out for supremacy?

…

Among the items you should give thanks for today, perhaps, you might include, “I don’t live inside of Karel’s mind.” Heh.

I wonder: Why do we devote two days of the year to talking about a half-horse, half-bovine creature?

You know… the equine ox.

(As George Carlin quipped, “These are the thoughts that kept me out of the really good schools.”)

It occurred to me, recently, that there’s no such thing as “beating” depression. Not in the “I’m done, will never have to face it again” sense, let alone the “It’s gone until something else big comes along” sense. It’s a new fight every single day. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. And it doesn’t get a whole lot easier no matter how many days in a row I might win.

I can’t give up, though. The alternative is that I turn into a complete hermit wallowing in self-pity for the rest of my life. Unacceptable So… I keep at it. I’m managing fairly well lately, all things being equal.

And I haven’t turned to pharmaceuticals (prescription or otherwise) to keep me going. This gives me some pleasure and satisfaction, not that I look down on those who really do need the prescription chemicals to maintain balance. For me, it’s just that I don’t want to end up following in a particular set of footsteps…

Do you remember what it was like when you were excited by something?

I wish I could, lately. It seems like everything I try to do either blows up in my face or sputters to a halt. The anime forum? It’s limping along, with maybe five or six posters (counting myself) contributing during any given month. The webcomic? About 30 visitors every Monday and Thursday, sometimes one or two will comment, and now that I’ve run out my backlog of story and joke ideas it’s going to be a challenge, indeed, to keep it rolling. Writing? Hah. (Double hah, even.) Journalling? Yeah, you can see how many times I’ve posted in the last few months, eh? Music? I don’t have the budget to seek out new material anymore. Movies? I rarely set foot in a theater, and it’s not like I can afford DVDs very often either. Photography? Other than the comic, not so much.

I don’t know if I’m just getting old (which is silly, I’m not even 40 yet) or if life plus work equals being too worn out to do or care much. I’m not happy, though. But what can I do about it? Solutions all require time and energy that I lack.

I’m tired of being tired.

Here’s a taste of how my mind works:

There’s a cardboard sign bent partway around a streetsign-pole at the end of our street. It’s for a garage sale, but the way it’s bent it reads “RAGE ALE” from most legible angles. What’s also odd is that there’s another sign at the corner of the block on the way to work, similarly bent, also thus advertising a RAGE ALE.

So. As I leave home, I pass the first sign at the end of the block. As I approach work, I pass the other sign at the start of the block. This is a strange sort of symmetry in my morning.

The world is weird. And this is the sort of thing which my old superstitious mind would interpret as a Sign Of Some Portent. Now I just think it’s silly… and wonder if anyone’s trademarked the name Rage Ale, because c’mon, we all know somebody who’d drink that.