Bleeding...

...not physically, you understand. Even though I feel as if I've been drained of what General Jack D. Ripper called "our precious bodily fluids." And I didn't enjoy it, either. I simply feel drained.

For the first time in two weeks, I actually finished an article. Hooray for me, right? Wrong. I did it without a having a single word register in my head. At the moment, I couldn't tell you what I wrote, or if it's in any known language.

I'll find out tomorrow, when I do that last edit before shipping it off. Then, I get to start in on another.

Sometimes, like an avalanche, I can build up a kind of verbal momentum, and crank out several stories in a short time. I hope this is one of those times.

Most of the time, I'm not like this. I. Am. Not. Like. This.

Depression was, until a couple of years ago, a mild irritant, no more aggravating than a flea bite. The cure was never more than a few days away. No longer; I suspect my current malaise will be measured in weeks, if not months.

It'd damn well better be over by the end of the month. My plans have been changed for me: instead of going to Las Vegas, where all that would have been expected of me was to party at night and nod understandingly at various presentations during the day (something I have learned to do over the years), I have to go to humid Daytona Beach, Florida, and actually perform. Don't know if I'm up to it. Right now, I guarantee I couldn't do it.

But I have a couple of weeks to get my mind right.

And the money would help. I can milk two or three articles out of the trip.

This is what my life has come down to: I work, hope I get paid in a reasonably timely fashion, and get seriously crazed if I don't have more work assigned than I want to do.

As Frank Zappa once asked: "does this kind of life look interesting to you?"

I'm here to tell you, Jim,* it's not interesting.

I could work very damn hard if I saw a goal ahead. I don't. The freekin' New York Times killed my fantasy of moving to Whitefish, Montana with an article about the rich bastards who are buying up the area -- the Times seems to think it's good to transfer ownership of the land from those evil loggers to the nouveaux riche dot-com and Wall Street paper-shufflers, but I see it as a way to push the residents into rented housing, from which they work -- at coolie wages -- to keep the zillionaires happy and well-fed. But the Times knows it can't offend its Limousine Liberal base, and I don't care who the hell I offend.

Not entirely true. There are one or two people I would hate to offend.

But the dreams are gone. Or at least buried so deeply that I dare not think of them.

In case you haven't noticed, the Black Fog is still very much here. And I am, once again, holding myself back from vomiting up a bunch of stuff that I consider absolutely true and relevant to my depressed state.

All my fantasies are as dead as the Dodo. It's not nice to have a life without dreams and goals.

Who needs "precious bodily fluids" when no one else wants them?

* Had to include "Jim," for the sake of my "fan".