Tag: <span>depression</span>

Tag: depression

Sometimes it’s a stay-up-until-1:00-a.m.-making-a-collage kind of depression. I had an old magazine lying around with an ad for neck cream. It said, “You’re only as young as your neck.”

I mean, yeah? My neck is the same age as the rest of me.

The connection between chocolate and depression in real life:

“I’ve had mild, pervasive depression for two weeks, but since science says this 85% dark chocolate bar can raise my serotonin, I’m waiting for a barely perceptible lightening of my mood.”

The connection between chocolate and depression in Harry Potter:

“A dementor gave me depression so hard my soul almost ripped out of my body, but I ate a chocolate bar that’s been sitting in this guy’s jacket, and now I’m a thousand times better.”

“Checklist,” a blackout poem

What I like about blackout poetry is that it’s sort of an inverted version of pinhole cipher, where a hidden message is concealed in printed matter by pinholes under the words of the real message. I used to make pinhole ciphers on discarded newspapers in cafeterias and coffee shops, just in case someone noticed.

checklist
“Checklist. Smile smile smile smile. Imagine the lie.”

If I had nine lives, I’d use one of them to be a spy who retires and opens a coffee shop.  Preferably, the spy part would be in the early half of the twentieth century, before analogue cryptography was completely outmoded.

With blackout poetry, I can just sort of pretend that someone sent me a secret message and pick out whatever words or syllables interest me.

I didn’t have any particular plan when I did this one, but it’s clear to me that this poem explains how I deal with a lot of social niceties, particularly being asked how I’m doing when I’m not doing well, but I don’t want to say so. Smile, smile, find some sort of lie, and try not to sigh depressively.

Not that I would put on such a charade at my spy coffee shop. I like to think I foster an atmosphere of erudite grumpiness.