My dear friends,

I have had some wine.

Actually, that does not begin to encompass the facts. Let me back up and punt:

I have been coming down with a cold due to stress and exhaustion.

I gave a hypnotherapy session yesterday.

I recieved a hypnotherapy session yesterday.

They were past life regressions and intense on both accounts.

I sneezed through the entirity of the one I gave.

I nearly slept through the one I received due to aforementioned stress/exhaustion cold.

Then I drove to a Thai restaurant – twice – to get dinner (twice because they made the first curry with beef instead of chicken as requested, so I had to go get the replacement.)

I am a very good friend.

I have wonderful, dear, sweet, beautiful, gorgeous, amazing friends in return. For all the laments of my life, I have been very deeply blessed with amazing friendships since my early girlhood. Thank you, sweet angels. You know who you are…

I got up at 7am.

I did some favors for some friends (I am,  as mentioned, a very good friend) like researching DUI attorneys and finding an excellent hypnotherapist in your area and deciding which proposed haircut I think will best suit you.

I ate some eggs.

I went and saw my own attorney, a fact which evokes both a financial squeal (think “Deliverance”) and a general need for quietness about my own personal such and such and impulses to keep, well, most anything personal under wraps. This super sucks from a blogging perspective.

I went to my storage space and labeled a bunch of shit for shipping and carried it out to the car and loaded it in and drove it to the post office and carried it out again and lifted it up onto the desk for the lady to measure…only to learn they will not ship anything in a box you got from the liquor store.

Wha….????

Seriously….wha….???

What kind of Nazi bullshit is this?

So what if the box says “Cuervo” when the contents are some jeans?

Well, so what is that the U.S. Fucking Postal Service cares, apparently. Quite a bit, in fact.

Well, F@ck you, Hitler Postal Service Postmaster General. F*CK YOU.

My god, I love this animal.

I bought some paper tape, and I am going to cover words like “Three Olives” and ” Captain Morgan” and I hope you enjoy shipping the same damn boxes you made me shlep back and forth like an idiot today. I realize you will never read this or feel bad or realize how redonculous your rules are, but I still feel better. So suck on that.

Anyway, then I loaded a rented Toyota Camry within an inch of it’s life.

Then I drove five hours.

Then I had some wine (circle back to the top of this post at this point, if you’re so inclined.)

Times have been tough, my friends. Perhaps you’ve intuited that. I apologize for my silence. I have a general policy of only speaking when I have something useful to say, and the last few weeks have been goddamned hard.

However, they have not been without highlights. Speaking of which, if this was the 80s, I would probably call in to my local radio station and dedicate a song to Dozer, my dog, who is currently sleeping on the floor. His tongue is hanging out of his mouth and touching the carpet and his little (euphemism: they’re big) feet are twitching as he dreams about whatever the heck dogs dream about.

Now, the sarcastic part of me would like to make that song I dedicate be “Who Let the Dogs Out,” but that would be insincere.

Nope, for better or worse, during this – a truly tough little period in my own life – I must call it like it is. And what it is is that there have been more days than not that that ridiculous, hairy, happy, and unconditionally loving beast have made my life worth living. Thus, I would like to send out and dedicate the following tune of gratitude (released during the year of my birth, as it were).

Enjoy, dear friends.

I can only wish that no matter what the universe is serving up to you right now (and never lose faith that it is all unfolding as it should), that you have your own little island paradise and/or island in the storm to whom this song could be sung.

I saw this headline and – sight unseen (who has time to read such things???) – figured I could make a reasonable contribution in that regard. So here ya go.

Don’t say these at your own risk.

This is what a PET scan for depression looks like. Wild.

1. Snap out of it. I was depressed once, and then I snapped out of it. It’s easy.

2. Life’s a bitch and then you die.

3. Suck it up.

3. We’re all f*cked anyway.

4. Stop complaining. There are lots of people who have it worse than you.

5. “Am I in your will?” and/or “Can I have that when you’re dead?”

6. You did this to yourself. (i.e. “You made this bed and now you have to lie in it.”)

7. Quit whining.

8. I think you’re faking this ‘depression’ thing for pity. It’s nothing but ‘me, me, me: whine, whine, whine’ with you.

9. Even if you do kill yourself, I bet Hell isn’t as bad as they say.

10. What? Were you talking?

Irrelevant but absolutely true story: Once upon a time, in a galaxy not all that far away (okay, it was in this galaxy), I had a falling out with a boyfriend on a city street. He got mad and stormed away or I got sad and stopped walking, but either way, I found myself standing there alone on a busy sidewalk, late at night, and on the verge of tears.

As I waited there hoping he’d come back, (but realizing I didn’t see him anywhere), I imagine I tried to figure out what I’d do if I really was stranded on my own. As the tears began to fall, a homeless man came up to me. He was an older black guy in typically ragged clothing; skinny and shaky and shifty-eyed.

“How are you tonight, darling?” he asked me, probably hoping to bum a few bucks.

I thought of a few different answers to the question, and then decided to go with the truth. In a choked-up voice I told him, “I’m not doing that well, actually.”

He opened his mouth to say something, and then stopped. Considering me for a second, his eyes softened, and he said, “Do you want to talk about it?”

And the craziest thing is that he said it with real sincerity and as though he were truly concerned for my well-being. His voice had a gentle kindness, the way a concerned friend’s might. Feeling like a world-class basket case lately and unsure of which direction to go as a mounting feeling of “this is your LIFE, dammit. Your LIFE” grips me nearly daily, I’ve thought about that homeless guy more than once in recent weeks.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I kind of do.