The medication has kicked in and Sir Churchill's Black Dog of depression has lifted its leg and piddled at last. But not before I ran a nice case of fever and chills for a day and managed to lose another Saturday to the sleep monster. Woke up bright and refreshed, albeit cold, Sunday morning and regained some of my lost spirit. Just glad the fever and the depression both broke.
I think Churchill acquired his Black Dog from the French, as in bete noir. Of course spell check doesn't like French but literally that means the black beast, which could stand for anything, including piddling on it's handler's leg. Churchill was plagued by depression yet saw England through her darkest hours. Yalta and the post-war disintegration of the world landscape may have been his blue period. Old men making old mistakes gave us the present disintegration of the world. They successfully divided the Middle East into arbitrary entities which are just now seeking their own destiny. Yes, trace it back to the two world wars and the need for an oil oligarchy and a general plutocracy and you have the miasma that is today's world.
This, too, is what happens when bullshit meets education in a lost soul. My dad, Harold, would say "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". So I gathered great big clumps of it, reading voraciously and studying history and I may never get farther along that having a little knowledge. I think what he may have meant to say was all knowledge is dangerous. Use it wisely.
When I was in graduate school we would have drunken dialogues with each other, the male students trying to overwhelm the female students in a very sexist environment. That I could hold my own amidst the sexism, some antisemitism, and my own disintegration due to drugs and booze was nothing short of amazing and that I was able to last as long as I ultimately did. Thanks to a very good therapist I was able to hold things together enough to learn about myself, verbalize a lost childhood and a diminishing adulthood that was measured in ounces. She told me I was "intrinsically likeable" amidst the rubble of relationships. Leaving graduate school short of the ultimate prize I embarked on blue collar work and pumped gas for almost three years, too afraid of academia to go back to MSU and seek employment. Thanks to the wife of a good grad school buddy who managed to stay in touch will me, in spite of my bete noir, I came to the MSU Library. The rest is history, histrionics and bullshit. But here I be. Another buddy from grad school, who made it through all the hoops, recently had a stroke and in a long term rehab in Chicago. I have been avoiding calling him. I need to make that call.
But my own bete noir over the house is in abeyance right now. Obey the abeyance. Yes, imagine me happy.
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