Good lord. I've updated. Then updated again and again and again and again. And here I am again. But I've no one to talk to and I need to talk to someone.

Two items.

1. Dan, my drunk brother, called me today. Dan has never in his life called me. Strange, no? Particularly considering I just wrote about him here only yesterday. I didn't answer the phone at the time--too much in the grip of the beast. I wept. I read. I took a long nap. I called him back. Just off the phone with him now. He was, as per his whole current existence, completely wasted. Slurring words, not a little paranoid, and a bit obnoxious. But he was also witty and wise and fun to talk to. I'm still unsure why he called. He said, simply, it was high time he did. I have to agree. Suddenly my own melodrama seems almost in its proper perspective. Not quite yet though.

2. From my reading: Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one's self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself.

So writes Andrew Solomon in The Noonday Demon. On nearly every page I find something to cause me to weep. A poem by Jane Kenyon or Emily Dickinson; the story of Phaly Nuon, a woman who lived through Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge and began an orphanage and a treatment center for depressed Cambodian woman (of whom there are many); metaphor; wisdom won through the long journey to the other side of the sun (where the lion and the lamb reside). So. Read it if you're of a mind.