On Wednesday, I took myself and my newfound, much-cherished improved mindset out for a walk with my camera. I took the Nikon Z50 with an old DX zoom lens mounted with the FTZ adapter. I also took an old 105mm f/2.8 Lester A. Dine macro lens; that way, if things looked stale, I could kill some time with some manual focus handheld macro shots.
Yet another unneeded brief message from the President and CEO of thesoiledchamois.net, and Soiled Chamois Enterprises, Inc.™
Dear Reader,
The following lengthy post deals with my ongoing search for inner peace and self-love (not code for masturbation). There is talk of mental health and depression. I am CLEARLY not a doctor, just a putz with a blog and 50 years and counting of personal experiences dealing with some depression-type shit.
I’ve waffled back and forth on whether it’s in my best interest to post something like this or not, but given the stuff I’ve already written about myself and/or my hatred of the orange buffoon that had been in the White House for four years, I think I’ll be alright. If a potential employer sees this and is offended, you’re not the sort I would want to be associated with anyway.
And if the Google machine somehow pointed you here because you were looking for immediate help, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or visit suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
— Management
Last week was another “lost week” for me; every bitterly cold gray day seemed exactly like the one before, and I couldn’t seem to find the point to anything or figure out what the hell I’ve done with my life. I could easily bore you (again) with the finer details of just how horrible that feels, but instead, I will just say that come Friday morning, I finally felt the urge to lace up my boots and head out into the sunny (SUN!!!) 9˚ morning for a hike with my camera.
Looking back through my January posts over the years, I have talked ad naseum about my loathing of January, so I will just say, a mid-Michigan January for someone dealing with depression is like throwing a drowning man a dead carp. Sure, it might be funny for a second, but the dude drowns, and you’re out your best dead carp.
Anybody that has hung around this blog for more than a few seconds knows that I don’t have the sort of personality that celebrates a New Year. Or anything else for that matter, at least not without one eye looking at the half-empty glass about to fall onto the floor and break. And this year was my best year yet of non-celebrating: a few beers, some TV watchin’, food eatin’, and in bed by nine while Wifey fumed and mentally cursed me and my worsening attitude in the living room below.
We all have fond holiday memories, at least that’s what marketing departments around the world tell us, so it must be true.
Here are a few of mine; whether they are fond memories is up to you. At this point in my life, I just laugh, shake my head, and mutter some 21st century swear words I find more fitting than Ebenezer’s “Bah Humbug!”
Ah, the weekend. So many plans, so much to get out and do. Um, not so much.
The weekend started off with B going to visit a friend and coming home with a head cold, which led to me getting a head cold, which in turn led Wifey to get a head cold, and led all of us (OK, just me) to say “fuck it” and not do anything all weekend.
Somewhere between miles 1 and 434 of my drive home from Pennsylvania last week, I made the executive decision to start writing and posting here more frequently. And I did!
Then I didn’t.
I’ve spent the last few weeks months grappling with a level of holiday-induced anxiety that I’ve not experienced in some time, mostly because this was the first holiday since I-don’t-know-when that I wasn’t on some form of antidepressant. All that anxiety finally came to its anti-climactic conclusion on Thanksgiving (Thursday to the rest of the world) when I unveiled the newer, fatter, older, even more, unsuccessful version of myself to my family for the first time since Christmas Eve 2019.
Imagine playing a Hindenburg disaster-level shit show over and over again in your head for months, only to have the reality be a flaccid leftover birthday balloon found behind the couch. That, my friends, is my anxiety in a nutshell.
My post COVID creep back into the world started on Wednesday with a short “Last Day of Quarantine” solo hike in the woods of the Sylvan Preserve. Then, I made it official on Thursday when I returned to the cold, sagging, well-milked bosom of society with a trip to Meijer to buy groceries. It was all very anti-climatic and soon forgotten.