The past few days have found me wrestling with monsters. Big questions, I mean. Important things to me that maybe don’t add up to much for others but mean a lot to myself. The battles have exhausted me, landed me in bed during daylight hours when I ought to be up doing things. I’ve found myself swiftly dropped out of a single decent moment into a different one so varied in vibe and scope and intensity that it almost seems unreal.
Depression is a strange animal. It doesn’t make a lot of sense when it is happening. And if you haven’t had your ass pummeled by it in the past then chances are that you might not even recognize it in retrospect. But lucky for me, I have been attacked. I have been cornered. I have been gut-punched and nearly destroyed by sadness so deep so often that I have become somewhat familiar with the thing if I’m being honest. To me, falling into deep depression is familiar now. Which scares the fuck out of me.
Why am I this guy?
Why have I continued to be one of those people who, despite all of the therapy and the meds, despite all of the long cool chugs from the modern self-help wells, keeps finding myself jacked up against the wall by forces dark, unforgiving, and inexplicable? The answer, even if there was one, is moot. Blues are, like anything else, shapeshifting all the time. What stands to reason today as a fundamentally sound reasoning for why a grown man might be drowning in a childlike pain today often slips into some other disguise tomorrow. Lucky enough to live through it multiple times, a victim of depression moves outwardly towards a bully light that teases with shafts of afternoon promise only to slip them all back into his dungeon pockets when good feelings seem imminent.
I don’t blame the force itself, either. The purpose of the existence of something as wickedly odd and strangely poetic as mental illness (or ‘mental health issues’, if you will) is not something that a mere mortal can ever pinpoint or explain. Those that attempt to paint even the roughest portrait of merely the essence of the thing are bound to look an ass when the work is done. String words together all you want. Hum your melodies and then lay down the tracks. Put on your eyeliner, stand in your foggy big stage lights. Try to make this blackness appeal to others so that they buy it in droves, it’s quite possible if you are good at playing the game. But in the end, you really don’t offer much up.
You Marilyn Manson fuckface.
I rip my own veins out of my arms to get away from all that.
Most people that I have known are hellbent on being liked or at least being accepted in some sort of group. This allows for a lot of things in life, chiefly: it can get you paid and get you laid. And that is really the dynamic duo at the core of existing in reality anymore. It has been for a long long time too. You need to get off so you don’t lose your goddamn mind all backed up like a sewer drain. And you need to make money so that you don’t fall away from being able to pay for the basics of survival like food, shelter, travel, iPhone, iPad, Spotify, Hulu Premium, and all that. What happens for most of us is that we consolidate our humanness, our pure natural potential for some kind of soulful growth and fantastical consciousness, into a uniquely well-defined box that we picked out off the rack. It’s the box that seems to suit us best and it allows us to define ourselves very very distinctly (so we think) by breaking us down into categories such as where we went to college/ what sports teams we root for/ what bands or artists we listen to/ where we live/ if we are married or single/ if we have kids or not/ on and on and on until you are never done deciding who the hell you are in a dizzying array of incessant choices being spit into your vantage by the godawful tornado of control called freedom or good life or happiness or whatever else the fuck they call it today with new terms being born every few seconds.
I’m not selling you anything here.
Well, except maybe a Thunder Pie subscription and then possibly some of my tangible art when I post that for sale. And also I guess I’m kind of selling you on this company Substack too, even though I don’t know much about them because they don’t give a fat rat’s titty about me even though I generate some loot for them. It ain’t enough to blip on their radar though. Isn’t that funny? You are helping out big corporate just by helping out little writer man because I like to staple myself to the sides of cunty giants barreling across the cultural landscape the same as you do, even when we have no idea what the fuck is going on!
Of course we don’t.
We were born with the intellect of a potato, dude.
And time will tell, I swear, that we only get dumber from that moment on.
So what about me? Where do I fall in the end? Do I want to be liked? Loved? Adored? If so, how much am I willing to pay to feel that?
I don’t understand any of it.
I wanted to feel love from inside of the thing, you know? The family kind. The strength of blood. The raw power of bonds born up out of true organic shared experience. I was raised up to believe that stupid shit like being in a hardscrabble rock-n-roll band with someone or having beautiful children with someone or even falling out of someone’s hot mess puss once upon a time long ago would more or less guarantee that there would be intricate connections/ tightly bound leatherish straps that held certain things together/ things that mattered/ things that counted/ things that could not dissolve because neither half of the connected cliffs would ever let them do so.
But I found out differently. Even when it seems as if things might be okay, they are not okay. Almost everyone you know and trust, they all have a point in the back of their minds where they will cut you loose without asking you what’s wrong? There is a kind of person out there who utilizes love in order to strengthen their own resolve to survive.
Do you know the kind of person I’m talking about? If you do, then you might get why I’m depressed to the point of laying in bed on sun-kissed September afternoons. But if you don’t…and I’m guessing you don’t (because you are lucky and blind or just lucky so far)…then you probably like to roll your eyes at me and think to yourself: I liked him better when he just shut up and played the guitar..
I see where you are coming from.
But fuck you.
I am not going away.
I am going to tell my story over time so that my kids understand that I was stronger than anyone. Crushed more than anyone. Fought harder to live than anyone. And died, when I died, standing taller and prouder than any of the ones who burned the bridges and then blamed me for the fire.
You know what I like? I like a good murder doc and some green olives with those red shits in the middle and a mushroom pizza and my Arle by my side. And some red ass wine too. I like having that red wine in the evening and if you are one of those people who doesn’t drink the wine or the alcohol anymore, well, we are no longer on the same ship, I guess. Doesn’t matter to me if it doesn’t matter to you. But I like the red wine and you have to understand that if you are going to understand me and my story.
Many times, I have tried to quit drinking for reasons I have never been too clear on. I have been able to maintain a healthy relationship with the wine (or the beer back int the day), so maybe the reasons for quitting it in the first place were ridiculous. Sometimes well-meaning people will reach out to me, or just put it all out there publicly on the social media, telling me that I ought to walk away from the wine if I want the depression to subside. I get where they are coming from but I also kind of laugh at their approach to my front porch too. I mean, motherfuckers don’t know me. People who quit drinking do that because they feel compelled to either save themselves from a bad bad storm or because they are not happy with their true selves and they are fishing for ways to show the world that they are good again.
I don’t know about you but I’m both of those things at once and pretty much 24/7 at times. And truth is: I still would rather sip at the Chianti or the Rioja come TV time than some seltzer water or whatever. Maybe that puts me on the Hemingway side of the tracks too, I don’t know. But if it does, it sure as hell has nothing to do with someone else advising me what I need to do.
My recollections of people across my life stabbing at sobriety are crystal clear. None succeeded for long. They eventually fell away from the clouds and back to the planet and when they did they were angry and thirsty and more wicked than before. I watched them drink from 3 in the afternoon until 3 in the morning. They cursed at me and blamed me for their misfortunes. Some went to the grave that way, swearing it wasn’t them/ it was me.
It was you, son, he said. You walked away from all this and now you are a lousy piece of shit.
He said this over the beeping of the heart monitor, from down under the tubes spread like cobwebs across his frail and slipping shell.
It was you, bro. It was you, man. It was you Serge. We quit drinking and then we drank again and then everything blew up and it had to be because of you since you were the one who kept looking at us like you didn’t buy any of it. Like you somehow knew that it wasn’t even just the booze, but it was the devil. The devil in our spirits. The badness in our ribs.
Christ, almighty.
Just leave me alone. Me and Arle. Our pizza and our murder docs. It’s a wonder we haven’t drank the whole goddamn town dry by now, you bastards.
To read the rest of this essay and more from Serge Bielanko, subscribe to his Substack feed HERE.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
