One of the wisest people I have come to know (at a great distance, mind you) is Stephen Fry. And unlike yours truly, he seems to get wiser and wiser as he ages. Here is a very brief video clip where he is discussing depressive episodes. Very brief, but what a lot there is in these few words.
It’s out of your control … it’s real … and it will pass. Golden.
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Actually, I should probably quit this post right here. Certainly there is nothing that I could add that is in anyway more useful or profound than what Mr. Fry has already said. So, hey … what if I just add a few more things that he has said?
If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather. Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.
The short answer to that is ‘no.’ The long answer is ‘fuck no.’
Sometimes there just isn’t enough vomit in the world.
People sometimes accuse me of knowing a lot. “Stephen,” they say, accusingly, “you know a lot.” This is a bit like telling a person who has a few grains of sand clinging to him that he owns much sand. When you consider the vast amount of sand there is in the world such a person is, to all intents and purposes, sandless. We are all sandless. We are all ignorant. There are beaches and deserts and dunes of knowledge whose existance we have never even guessed at, let alone visited.
The above quotes were intended to provide a transition to the usual poppycock that I put out. I hope that it was helpful, but in any case, here comes the poppycock.
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Sunday is the annual beginning of the official kvetching season, as otherwise sensible people begin to complain about the switch to daylight savings time. The cries of “Let’s abolish it!” and “I hate the change!” “It makes me nauseous!” ring throughout the land. I did an unofficial survey last year and got these results:
- 92% don’t want the time to be fiddled with but left alone forever
- 5% would like the time to change randomly every four weeks just for the hell of it (it must be mentioned that these folks were interviewed through the bars of their exercise yard)
- 3% couldn’t be roused from their stupors to comment
At any rate, here it comes once again. Fortunately our home contains a number of clocks that will change on their own, but there are five that don’t and must be fiddled with. Computers and phones take care of themselves. Our car now takes care of itself. So it’s just those five.
Oh, and then there are the cats, whose ideas of feeding time are based on the position of the sun rather than economics. Hard to argue with them. Sensible creatures, they.
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Saw our first robin this past week. First since they disappeared last November. These guys are always welcome as an early sign of the weather changing.
Not sure why, but some years they never really leave, and we can see them on our river walks all winter. That wasn’t the case this year, however, so seeing that lone returnee made my day.
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In response to no requests at all, I thought I’d bring you up to date on the community of Pea Green, Colorado. Well, there really isn’t one. A community, that is. What remains at the corner on the highway is a Community Hall, an abandoned store, and a schoolhouse that is now a private residence.
Justin had come across a reference to this place in his readings and forwarded a link to us. So when Saturday morning dawned especially dreary, rainy, and just plain dank, Robin and I went for a drive to find it, and collected a few photos while we were there. Apparently there are occasional bluegrass concerts in the Community Hall, but the store is one of those places where the owners simply walked away one day. Allegedly it comes to life twice a year for “antique” sales, but it was certainly moribund on this particular day.
So here are all the photographs of Pea Green, Colorado that you may ever need.
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Little Home In The Valley 