And something is cracking/I don’t know where/Ice on the sidewalk, brittle branches in the air…

(Funny to be quoting my fellow Barnard alum Suzanne Vega, of whom I’ve never been an unequivocal fan, and odd not to include the next, more positive stanza, but I’m not there yet.) This will be the first in a series of posts on this topic, I think, because my energy is at an unusually low ebb even for me (and let’s just say that my normal energy level is somewhere between that of a hermit crab and a three-toed sloth), so I don’t have the mental or physical stamina to write much. That’s because I’ve been in the grip of a truly crushing, deep black depression off and (mostly) on for the past couple of weeks.

And it’s not triggered by anything in particular, which makes it worse in some ways. Yeah, school got pretty stressful at the end of the semester (and I still have a paper to finish–looking like I’ll be taking an incomplete there). And yeah, the constant, sickening feeling that my job is demeaning and insulting to me gets worse at times, including recently. And sure, coming back from seeing beloved family all too briefly over Thanksgiving made me homesick and made me feel my mom’s absence–which I feel every minute of every day, don’t get me wrong–more acutely than usual.

It would be great if I could blame it on the holidays, but I never get the holiday blues; I love this time of year, everything about it except the homesickness maybe, and December is always one of my favorite months. And in any case, these are the sort of blues that I can usually ride out, and they’re nothing I haven’t coped with before. The medication I take–one of those ubiquitous SSRI types of questionable efficacy (mostly I notice that they’re helping only if I quit taking them for a while and start to feel worse all of a sudden)–usually helps with this sort of blah feeling too.

But not this time, and I’m actually scaring myself a little, because it’s been so long since I’ve felt like this. I had a brief bout of absolute nonfunctioning terribleness in about 1992, which sent me to a shrink because I was convinced that I had some sort of generalized anxiety disorder. (This was before panic attacks became all the rage, and I knew I didn’t have those anyway; it was more that I’d be sitting on the bus on my way home from work and suddenly know–not just think or fear, but know–that the house had blown up from a gas leak or a burglar had gotten in and killed the cats or that my then-husband had been in a terrible car wreck.) The shrink I saw was caught up in the beginnings of the “fuck therapy, here are your meds, check back next season” trend in psychiatry, and I was only able to see him every few weeks, but he still did his absolute best to be a real therapist, as well as putting me on Prozac (which helped tremendously for years, and then quit working at all). He was a wonderful guy. After listening to me calmly, and keeping me calm, through our first “intake” session, he asked me just before I left, “Do you feel safe?” I lost it at that point, because it was exactly the right question to ask, and because I didn’t feel safe. I didn’t think I was going to give myself a haircut (to use my favorite euphemism) or anything–I had already tried that, at age 20, which is a story for another day–but I didn’t feel safe. I felt terrified, safe only if I was under the covers, preferably with all the pets nearby.

I’m at that stage again, but if I think about it, I’ve only had brief breaks from being at that stage; it’s just worse now. I can’t seem to connect or concentrate or care about much of anything (unless it’s four-legged and purrs). This first happened to me when I was almost 16 and discovered Nick Drake. I won’t say that Nick Drake caused my depression, certainly; for one thing, in retrospect, I can see that I had symptoms as early as age 5, and besides, in some ways, the catalytic effect that his depressive but not depressing music had on me back then was probably a good thing, because it brought to the fore some awful stuff that had been festering inside me and would only have gotten worse had it stayed buried longer. But I often used the phrase “Nick Drake depression” back then so my friends would understand that I was describing a particular kind of bleak, black hopelessness that I’ve felt only a handful of times in my life (as opposed to the chronic but somehow low-level depression that is my constant companion and keeps me, has always kept me, from living anything really resembling an actual life). It’s been a long time since I’ve even thought of the phrase “Nick Drake depression,” and now I’m right in the midst of one, and I don’t, honestly, know what to do.

That Suzanne Vega song is called “Cracking,” and I tend to think of it/sing it when I’m coming out of a depressive phase, because the next line goes: The sun is blinding/Dizzy golden, dancing green/Through the park in the afternoon/Wondering where the hell I have been. There’s a Lori Carson song, “Where It Goes,” that covers much of the same ground, but the album of the same name, from which it comes, is still so much the story of my recent life that I don’t think I can even post about it yet…and again, I’m not at the positive point at which the song resolves yet. Not even close.

Not long ago, I got an iPod. It’s one of the older models, a 10GB one, that I got when the new ones came out and my favorite retailer put their remaining stock of the old ones on sale. (I didn’t actually get mine from that retailer, because all the stores in my area were sold out; I got it from a different retailer, of which I am far less fond.)

And boy howdy, do I love my iPod. I should explain that I’m not usually an early adopter, mostly because I can’t afford to be. I’m tech-savvy, but I’m not enough of a geek or gadget freak to want to spend my meager discretionary income on the newest toys. So I’ve got an inexpensive stereo, an oldish iMac, a very basic cell phone that I bought used on eBay. The only reason I have a DVD player is that my fiancé’s old housemate left his behind. I once bought a PDA (also used, on eBay) but sold it back when I realized that I had no use for it. I do have a digital camera, a relatively nice one, but that’s mainly because, after hearing me drooling and obsessing over it for weeks, my fiancé found one at our local salvage store for a great price and bought it for me. In short, I’m not completely gadget-crazed. I bought the iPod, after having convinced myself I didn’t need one, because it was stupid cheap and seemed like it would be nice to take along on a 7-hour road trip that I’m taking this summer, when I start grad school. I didn’t expect to love it; in fact, I was somewhat afraid that I wouldn’t end up using it much.

But I was wrong. Since the day I got it, I’ve been loading it up with new and favorite records from my collection and other sources. I’ve packed almost two days’ worth of songs onto it so far, and I still haven’t quite filled up 3GB, which is just amazing to me. Sure, it’s just a tiny fraction of my collection on there, but still, being able to walk around with 750 songs on a device that clips to my waistband is just pure bliss.

Maybe inevitably, the iPod has made me spend money. I upgraded to OS X so that I could take advantage of the new iTunes music store (where I haven’t yet started spending money, but I will, I’m sure). I recently started subscribing to eMusic so I could find even more tracks to put on my iPod. I’ve bought accessories and a case for it. All in all, I’ve treated it sort of like a pampered pet.

But I don’t feel too bad about doing so, because the iPod brings me constant joy. I find that I’m listening to music a lot more than I used to, at work, when I travel, and especially in the car. My commute takes about half an hour (it should only take twenty minutes, but thanks to major road construction, it’s gotten longer lately), and since I don’t have a CD player in my car, I used to just listen to NPR when driving. (I do have a Discman that I can hook up to my cassette player, but it always seems like more trouble than it’s worth with a short commute.) But now, I just put the iPod on “shuffle/songs,” and it’s like having my own personal radio station–one that doesn’t have commercials and never plays a sucky song.

I love the “shuffle/songs” setting, because it keeps things interesting. But I’ve discovered that my iPod is somewhat capricious and often seems to have a mind of its own. The other day, for example, I finally put Cheri Knight’s The Northeast Kingdom on the iPod (amazing that it took me this long, considering how much I adore that record). On the way home, the iPod served up “If Wishes Were Horses” from that record, a great song but not one of my very favorites on the album. Still, I was happy to hear it, and sang along. But then the next morning, the same song came up again! Apparently, the iPod likes it better than I do.

And then there’s its Jam fetish. Okay, so maybe I do have a lot of Jam songs loaded on. (I think Uncle Tupelojust eclipsed them as the best represented artists on my iPod, but that’s only because I put all four of the Uncle Tupelo reissues on; so far, all I’ve got for the Jam is the At the BBC boxed set. So far. There’s lots more to come.) But the iPod plays a disproportionate amount of the Jam. I don’t think I’ve ever turned it on for more than five minutes without a Jam song coming on. Not that I’m complaining, of course–I love the Jam, though I wish the iPod didn’t favor their last, somewhat lesser album so heavily. It’s just more evidence that it’s a capricious little creature…er, gadget.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I’ve decided that instead of continuing to bore Bill, the fiancé, with daily tales of what I heard on my iPod, I’m going to blog about it. My hope is that that will prompt me to write about what the various songs mean to me, and what parts of my life they relate to, so that I can then also write about love, life, loss–all the things that made me want to start a blog in the first place. We’ll see.