Two Mental Health Tips to Help You Through the Covidemic

Hi! Don't be shy—come on in! 

Welcome back to Disaster Burger! Yeah, sorry about that, door's a little sticky.

Belly up to the counter! Okay, that's a little too close, huggy boy? Take a couple baby steps back and adjust that sporty gaiter you've got going on. Yep, you're gonna want to tuck the old schnoz in there, too. Oh, hey, here's a little rhyme to help you remember: 

My mask is like undies, 

That go on my snout. 

I'll look like a flasher, 

If something sticks out.

Cool, thanks for hiding the hambone. there. Anyway, let me tell you about our new specials; the menu's expanded quite a bit since the last time you came in. 

First of all, we've got a Western Wildfire Smoke Burger—It's a half-pound of extra-porous ground chuck meat. We left a tubful of it out on the sidewalk last week for an hour or so, giving it a nice gravelly crunch that exfoliates the uvula when swallowed. Served with filthy fries or grits with grainy, green gravy.

There's the Vaccine-by-Novemburger—Our slogan for this masterpiece is, you might get a little hot and plaguey, but he promised it would be readily maybe. Whatever that means, it comes with Mitch McNuggets, specially sourced from chinless chickens.

We've got the Double Deck DeVoswich, made only by people off the street with zero cooking experience. Served with Ben Carsunchips (I know, that one's a reach).

And finally, there's the Supreme Court Burger—Actually, you know what? Forget this one. Why order something that's missing its best ingredient? 

Okay, enough of the parodies, even though humor does tend to serve as one of my go-to coping mechanisms. 

The reality is, there's no making light of the most turbulent era I can remember, this indefinitely prolonged moment of suffering and uncertainty. While the pandemic and social unrest alone have caused tectonic societal shifts, so much other stuff is piling on top of it—the upcoming election, the real, undeniable consequences of climate change—okay, just say it with me: "This suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks!" 

It just does. And it's not going away, not tomorrow, not next week or even next month. 

How many mornings have I awoken 17 to 23 minutes prior to my alarm going off and begun ticking off one reason after another as to why I shouldn't get up that day? More than a few. Hell, that's why they call it a laptop, right? My employers wouldn't have lent me one had they not expected the computer to perform its intended duty all propped up in my bed.

I've mentioned before that I'm prone to depression, that it's as big an ingredient of my genetic recipe as high arches and meatless Irish lips. Fortunately, thanks to a generous dose of counseling, I've come to understand that wallowing the day away in a dark room is worse than fruitless, it's harmful. 

Self-talk is crucial, and it can determine the course of a day. Let's say that, in the midst of one of my early-morning mental roundtables, I decide to take an approach of gratitude, to examine the big picture and my place of relative comfort in relation to those who've come before me.

I could think no further than my own grandfather, who immigrated from Ireland as a young man. He quickly found work but lost a leg in a wagon accident. Even so, he and met and married my grandma, uprooting them both to set up a homestead in a remote area of North Dakota (actually, isn't the whole state kind of remote?). They went on to have seven children, enduring the deaths of two. He labored tirelessly on their arid strip of land, supplementing his hardscrabble farm bounty by working as a janitor in the tiny town where they'd settled.

How inspirational can one guy's story be, right? Shouldn't my inner self be saying, "Wow, I've never dealt with a single one of those challenges, let alone all of them. I'm going to get my ass out of bed, go for a bike ride and rejoice in my overabundance of good fortune"? 

Yes, absolutely I should. Unfortunately, my inner roundtable host (let's call him Merv) is more likely to proclaim, "Oh, no, you're not going anywhere, Sparky. Instead, you're going to lie in bed for another couple of hours and flog yourself for being a mollycoddled cheese curd of a man who couldn't hold your grandfather's goat milk bucket. Now go get yourself some Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey and come back to bed." 

Appreciating one's station in life should exclude self-degradation and shaming, which is why I'm currently in the process of interviewing new roundtable hosts. 

Another area of self-care I'm employing is to curtail my participation in social media. How healthy can it really be to linger on Facebook for half an hour just to stalk an argument between two politically polarized "friends." I can still taste the lemony vitriol coursing through my gullet with each tone-deaf comment spewed by the fascist, then regaling in the righteous, yet predictable, talking points rattled off by his commie adversary. 

Things usually get personal in no time, with the leftie exploiting the rightie's spelling and grammar errors. Stating that he'd seized the their-there-they're gauntlet by third grade, the pinko continues to lambast the nazi's habit of capitalizing every third word. Inevitably, the never-masker feels his back against the wall and responds with offensive slurs uttered in judgment of the socialist's sexual orientation or undiagnosed mental disability. 

Social media still has its place for me now, but it's on a lighter footing; posts to this blog will still run through my Facebook group. I love the brilliant photos of Instagram and pithy snippets of Twitter. But ruminating all day on some anti-vaxxer meme that I stumbled across is not good for me. These sites are minefields of toxic, non-productive debates, and while the participants might switch up, the fight never ends. And because of that, I'll be happily, healthily walking away from that lifestyle.

Oh, by the way, before you go, I need to remind you to come by Disaster Burger in six weeks, right around the first week of November. We're hoping to add a new special called the Trump Loses in a Fucking Landslide Burger. 

Stay safe.

Depression isn't logical, but it's real.

I haven't posted anything for a while. Today, though, in the wake of yet another notable suicide, I feel compelled to share something that's... well... about as personal as it gets.

I didn't know Chester Bennington. I didn't know Chris Cornell or Kurt Cobain either, so I can't fathom the anguish their deaths inflicted on family and friends who did know and love them. Even so, their music provided such joy for so many, including this random fan in the upper left corner of the country, each of their losses packed quite a wallop. It's a sensation that approximates the dull ache of a gut punch, one that diminishes over time but never completely dissipates.

On the surface it's puzzling, bordering even on the absurd, that these gifted artists in their creative primes would choose to end their lives at their own hands. Such acts of self-destruction, to the outside observer, defy logic. These men seemingly had it all: loving families, adoring fans, wealth, fame and unfathomable talent. Further, we're taught that our very existence has always hinged on the strongest of human instincts—survival.

Yet still it happens time and again, to rich and poor, to famous and anonymous.

I suffer from depression. I'm sure I've had it my whole life, but I really wasn't conscious of it until my twenties, when I finally was able to label my emotions with a modicum of maturity. The thing is, it really does fly in the face of reason for those who haven't experienced it, so it's very difficult to convey in words. But I'll give it a try.

Depression comes on slowly, like a thick, damp fog rolling in from the horizon. Once it hits shore, you're enveloped in it. The world transforms to tinted shades of dull brown sepia. Ordinary tasks seem insurmountable, especially when the alarm clock signals the promise of a day filled with them. You tell yourself to snap out of it, but you know that's foolish. Minutes, sometimes hours, creep along on the brink of tears. Respites of emotional optimism surface in uneven intervals, yet the certainty of despair is never far away. In simpler terms, depression is toxic combination of helplessness and hopelessness.

Have I ever considered suicide? No, but that doesn't mean that at various times I didn't believe life was pointless. I'd try to count my blessings—my wife and daughters, a comfortable life in a beautiful part of the world, a career I loved—but the fog wasn't about to lift by sheer force of will.

Finally, I got help. Depression isn't curable, but it is manageable. It's not a weakness or a character flaw, but it's a condition that requires continued care and vigilance, and it only took me 55 years to begin figuring out how to deal with it:

1) Don't ignore it. Healthy distractions can be useful short-term tools, but try hard to not gloss it over. You might not like how it manifests itself due to your inattention.

2) Don't self-medicate. You might alter your consciousness after four IPAs, but trust me, things will be that much worse in the morning, when you wake up depressed, dehydrated and craving three breakfast burritos.

3) Talk to someone, anyone. It's so much better than keeping it bottled up, and when another person is aware of your situation, you're more likely to seek professional help. It's like having a workout partner.

4) If you're uncomfortable talking about it, write down your thoughts and feelings in a journal. You'll be amazed how much it helps.

5) Talk to your doctor. He or she can provide a wealth of options, both pharmaceutical and not.

6) If you aren't prone to depression, pay attention to friends and loved ones who present symptoms of it—lethargy, moodiness, loss of appetite, increase in appetite, sleeplessness, oversleeping—just things that aren't typical of the person you thought you knew so well.

I'm not a psychiatrist, psychologist or social worker, but I know enough about depression to understand that I should withhold judgment about people who take their own lives. Their struggle is real and it defies logic, which is why it's up to all of us to help prevent it.

Thanks for listening.

Don't like Mondays? Hmmm.

Nothing conjures up that negative, blue side of our dispositions like a Monday. It's been immortalized in song over the years, and not in a good way. The Bangles sang that it's Just Another Manic Monday, while in Monday, Monday, the Mamas and the Papas summed up the mood in a tone so melancholy that we all should steer clear of sharp objects, bridges and bottles of valium while listening to it.

And who can forget I Don't Like Mondays, the Boomtown Rats' true ballad of a 16-year-old girl who shot randomly into an elementary schoolyard across the street from her house, killing two and wounding eight. When asked why she'd committed such a horrific act, she replied, "I just did it for the fun of it. I don't like Mondays." Apparently.

Our Monday morning today in Seattle is the epitome of a blue Monday: a dank, rainy follow-up to a brilliant pair of 70-degree weekend days. Since today is perfect fodder for that damp blanket of bum-outedness, I'm going to attempt to spin this whole most-depressing-day thing on its ear. So, here we go.

Since I'm an average American guy, my life span is expected to be 75.2 years, or 27,448 days. Doesn't seem like that many days, does it? If we truly despise each and every Monday of our lives, that eliminates 3,921 days, or 10.75 years, from our lives. That would put my "quality" lifespan at 64.5 years. Whoa.

Taken to the extreme, let's assume, as Loverboy once said, that everybody's Workin' for the Weekend. This would imply that our quality lifespan now consists only of Fridays, Saturdays, and most of Sundays (Sunday nights are part of the work week, in my opinion.) Now, a guy my age would enjoy himself only 3/7 of the time, which is a mere 11,763 days, or 32.2 years.

Talk about depressing. I don't know about you, but 32 years of quality time doesn't quite cut if for me. So come on. Let's grab this Monday, and every other day of the week, by the horns. If we don't, we're allowing ourselves the lifespan of someone who grabbed the woolly mammoth by the horns.