Compassion Fatigue

"Everything Happens to Me," by Chet Baker

No complaints here, I'm no prima donna. I've been around, eighteen time zones, I can shoot the shit in three languages, I know how the world works, I read the papers. Shit, I read books! That's where you get the real deal. I've had it easy. Easy enough. It's all relative. I mean, look around! I, and probably you too, have had it pretty fucking easy. But no one gets out of these blues alive. And nothing is really as it seems on first glance.

So I'm sitting here in my tropical paradise with the front of my shirt stained with tears, listening to sad songs on YouTube, because it's happening again. It's like the hippies used to say: wherever you go, there you are! You can escape the police; you can escape from your vindictive government; maybe you can even escape from your pissed-off Korean ex-girl friend; but you can't escape from yourself. Even after a perfect day, and a blissful night of eight or nine hours of peaceful sleep and delightful dreams, you wake up in the morning and, boom! There you are. It's you. Oh, bloody hell.

After being born with certain genetic predispositions, and a certain temperament that we can never alter, we slowly build a personality according to our experiences, and before too long we have bound ourselves with the impenetrable knot of our lives. It wouldn't be so bad, except for the fact that other people are tied up in the whole mess by you. Wives, children, girlfriends, ex-wives and ex-girlfriends, friends and former friends. You may not care about yourself, but anyone who had a heart cares about those interconnected others. Whether they deserve your consideration or not, they get it.

Here is a terrible secret that I have discovered about life on earth: you can be a wonderful, cheerful companion for 99.8% of the time that you spend with people who love you, but if you lose your shit and act like a crazy man for the other point-two percent of the time, it all comes to nothing. It might happen fast, or it may take several decades, but that losing your shit part will drive people away. Suddenly, it's like the other 99.8% of your loving devotion has been forgotten.

You know how I feel about depression. No one who is not depressed has any idea what it feels like to the sufferer. No non-sufferer who observes the typical behaviors possesses any metrics with which to judge them. Some day, and the day will come, the sufferer will be cut out, or frozen out, or simply tolerated, as though he were a naughty dog. The dog metaphor is particularly apt at my age. The dog and I will be dead soon. No need to rush things.

Should I have done better? That starts to sound like an English lesson: should, would, or could? I would love to have done better, if I could have, but now I should just stop typing. It's not like anyone cares.