Speaking of ADH, yes, I totally forgot to write what I was going to write for my melancholia titled post–but on the plus side it does mean I’m giving myself the freedom to free write–so here we go. Melancholy is an easy emotion for me. I thought maybe because I’d battled a severe depression in my late teens and twenties, but no, that wasn’t it. I verged on melancholy a lot as a child. In fact, the last time I remember being happy–that is no worries, no melancholy, no anxiety–is when I was six or possibly seven. I’ve wondered sometimes if it’s genetic. My mother is pre-disposed to depression, seeing the negative in things. And I think back to stories of her mother, who apparently also suffered boughts (sp?). So maybe it is genetic. But what if it’s not? What if my grandmothers melancholy was brought on when she found her first fiance hanging from the rafter of a barn becuase his family didn’t approve of him marrying an outback Aussie girl with a stutter? And maybe that environmentally based blues were passed on to my mother as part of child rearing. And then onto me? I often find myself set with such conundrums and being someone who won’t settle on an answer simply because I might feel better, I must settle for a lifetime of not knowing.

And that is okay.

On that note I put a challenge before myself. The challenge was this: look at the time on my phone. Choose the last digit of the time. Translate that into a year I went to school. If it was 1, try again (so it wouldn’t coincide with a irrelevant year). Then think about the grade I was in at the time and choose a memory that makes me feel the blues.

So I’m going to back you back to 1996 or 1997, when I was in the 7th grade (always easy to remember what grade I was in, for obvious reasons). I’m sitting in my social studies class and my teacher is talking about how the movie theatre was so packed for Crocodile Dundee that people were sitting on the floors in order to watch it. Me, I’d never heard of the film before, but any chance to see a “real” Australian in the cinema, was something I was up for, after all, they were “my” people. And soon, in a matter of weeks, I too would be in a theatre and returning back to school to exclaim to my peers, “That’s not a knife,” I might say pulling a pencile out of my binder, “This is a knife!”.

And that’s it. I’m back walking the hallways of the Middle School buliding. I’m in art class designing my parts of the murals which now adorn those very same hallways and judging everyone who wasn’t into realism (ruining my goddamn mural). There I am in the library, finger pecking at the Apple II keyboard Mrs. Pearl always let me play on when I should have been out on the playground with the other kids. I’m reading through the first couple books of the Wizard of Oz series and getting bored by their redundancy by book three. I’m in the band room (another place I hid away from my peers) wondering where my best friend Tao is only to remember he stopped hanging around me because I wasn’t “popular” enough.

Queue in the John Lee Hooker music.

Now to be clear, I don’t get depressed like I used to. Maybe, sometimes, it’s why I sleep in, but that’s always happening when I’m dreaming and my new dreamscape doesn’t in the least resemble that of my late teens and twenties. But I can pull that feeling up in a heart beat. And 90% of the time, it’s not so bad. It makes me ponder the meaning (and meaninglessness) of life. It reminds me that what’s happening now will some day be a memory worth giving me the blues, worth writing about here (God knows I probably will!). It’s reason for me to remember my connection to every living being on the planet: human, animal, lizard, insect, and lizard, all the way down to single celled organisms (I almost included viruses but I don’t given how they are, in a very real sense, no more complex than a very complex non-AI based computer algorithm.

And so it goes, and so it goes. And the women come and go, speaking of Michaelangelo.

This has been another broadcast from the aslynn broadcasting system.

…asm…