earthlink's webmail is not working today. so i am out of touch.

thinking - out of touch with what? email has become a daily habit for me, an integral part of the day,butit can also feel like a chore - oh i have to check my email. much of my life can feel like chores, the mind spins it so. this chore-life is a key component of what i would call depression. melancholia is just - for me, today - a so-softer way to put it, melancholia seems to me a cult of sadnes, or just the xperience of it, its such a lovely sounding word. depression is a down, nasty, unattractive beast. it really captures the low, cornered, wounded/dying dig-yr-won-grave-and-piss-on-it-too "stuck" energy of habitual, negative, reinforcing patterns. making life a series of chores is a sure-fire way to get depressed and stay there (there are always more chores).

the depressed person often looks and acts like a slave, or prisoner, like someone whose agency has been taken away. a less flamboyant zombie, or the drudges of dystopia without the distant big boss organzing the whole thing - no, the big boss is some hidden raging voice calling the shots and cracking the whip, and they are just the mule with the big cart attached, pulling uphill.

i'm thinking about all this because i am realizing how lucky i am today, and how a good portion of that "luck" (which, no, i don't exactly believe in, but the word's not all wrong - when used carefully to talk about the edges of what we can claim authorship/partnership of/in - where causal patterns or karma become difficult to discern rationally - but some sensible undercurrent, somehow unameable and often vague, is perceived at work - how is he always so lucky in bizness?) I owe to having money. Here's the record:

-by the age of 16 any good shrink would have noted that i was suffering from moderate depression.
-by the age of 21 any good shrink would have upped the ante to severe depression, with attendant (and i lack the terminology, ego disintegration (losing one's shit) to the point where holding down a job had become impossible.
-this moderate to severe shit kept on coming from 1997 to 2001, relapsed for good stretches of the next two yrs (MFA at Naropa) and climbed the charts once more 2003-04.
-during those 7 years, I was employed for perhaps 18 months.

I should addd to this "and my wife didnt leave me". How on earth was I able to live during/thru this? Money. But I dont know if it is "luck" or no. Without that money (an inheritance), the situation would have been different from the get go. But I am thinking about Henry Darger today, about homeless people, the mentally ill, alcoholics, etc., people with desperate need for healing and care, and how, in our culture of created scarcity, there is no money for this. How can someone have a chance to heal their traumas and wounds if they are starving and must prostitute themselves into any available job? The severaly depressed tend not to interview well, and the young ones havent had the chance to acquire any skills, let alone confidence. Money saw me thru - it didnt heal me, but it kept me alive. And when I finally woke up and wanted to live differently, it has been - in a very real measure - the judicious use of money which has helped create the space for me to heal. It involves other people, and other people have to live, and in this same system, that means they hve to be paid, which means money.

I spent years dissing money as a necessary evil. Now I see how it can be a medicine also. Like so many other things, it is our abuse of it that creates its maliciousness.

So today, with very little adornment, I am thinking how unfair our economy and political world our - how unfair that I am writing you this today because I have the money to do so, and others do not, making escaping from difficult, even unbearably repressive conditions and limited horizons, that much harder to do.