Thinking about my trip to New York, and the long train ride there and back, lonely, watching the landscape flash past in the darkness, brought this song to mind…

Kathy, I’m lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I’m empty and I’m aching and I don’t know why
Countin’ the cars on the New Jersey turnpike
They’ve all come to look for America, all come to look for America…

In New York, with Phil. I'm the one with glasses. (Photo by Angela Rockstroh)

Looking back at the “good memories” I’ve already posted, and the ones I plan to write, it’s striking how interwoven the subjects are, and how personal. In previous years I’ve posted some personal stuff, some entertainment stuff. But this year, the topics all fit together, bright shards from the broken window that was my 2011.

Day 1 I wrote about the electroconvulsive therapy I underwent as part of my ongoing battle with chronic depression. Day 2 I wrote about the music of the lovely and amazing Brandi Carlile, because her songs helped me cope during the dark times (as well as delighting and moving me even when I was doing well). Those posts are further related via the romantic break-up I suffered just before opting for the electroshock, a romance that was born and died while I listened to Brandi’s songs.

Today, I’m writing about a trip to New York City to visit friends. In memory, and at the time, that trip was bittersweet, because the original plan was for my sweetheart to visit me for several days here in Atlanta, then I’d accompany her on her train trip back to Philly for a brief visit, after which I’d continue on to NYC.

By the time of the trip, my sweetie was my sweetie no longer, and wouldn’t give me the time of day. The tedious loneliness of hundreds of miles of Amtrak travel were magnified as I thought of how the trip might have been with her at my side. While the train stopped in Philadelphia, I thought of tweeting “I tracked my heart to Philadelphia, then lost the trail forever.” But the thought seemed pathetic, so I didn’t. Right call, I think.

Then, while talking about her with my friends one day while walking through a New York City park, I realized the street musicians we’d just passed were playing “I Just Saw A Face,” the Beatles song which, covered by Brandi Carlile, was the tune I most identified with the start of that love.

Oh, synchronicity, how you can fuck with a guy.

See how everything is intertwined?

All of which is a long way of getting around to the fact that, even though I didn’t get to spend lots of time with the woman I loved, or actually any time at all with her, the trip was a hell of a lot of fun.

The folks I stayed with were Phil Rockstroh, a writer friend I have known a very long time, and his charming wife, Angie. They were incredible hosts, gracious and generous, and I loved exploring the city. I’d visited when I was about five I think, and then spent a weekend there back in the mid-nineties, doing a promotion for White Wolf Games, my employer at the time, but naturally recalled little from the first visit, and hadn’t had much time to explore during the second. Oh, and I’ve played a good amount of Grand Theft Auto IV, which does a pretty darn good job of capturing the place (though the food’s nowhere near as good in the game).

The highlights of the trip were a walk with Phil and Angie from one end of the incredible High Line park to the other, then on along the river a good ways, and a similar excursion across the Brooklyn Bridge into Brooklyn itself; a night of drunkenness with writer Ross Isaacs, an old friend from the White Wolf days, which culminated in inexplicably drinking lots of booze for free at a bar I’m pretty sure was run by the Russian mob; and a trip to the Museum of Modern Art, where I got to see “Starry Night” in person, and was absolutely electrified by the huge Jackson Pollock they have. There was a long, casual evening of walking all over the place in search of good music, where we kept attracting random fellow travelers, saw a dog peeing while doing a handstand, and almost got caught in a street fight with some drugged lunatics. And lots of good food.

And there was another interesting bit of synchronicity. I had just started getting to know the second woman I spent a lot of time with last year, and we were texting and talking quite a bit, which added a lot of enjoyment to my explorations.  Earlier, I’d teased  her with the thought of us showering together in a waterfall. Now she was also on vacation and had just texted a photo of a small waterfall she’d come across, referencing the tease, when I looked up, on a busy NYC street, and saw a small park between the buildings with a lovely waterfall. Though hers was in the mountains and mine in the heart of a major metropolis, mine was bigger and more suited to erotic ablutions (aside from its public location). I ignored the sign saying photos weren’t allowed and texted a pic back to her.

Good friends, good time, good memories. Definitely one of the best parts of last year.

Thank you, Phil, Angie, and Ross for showing me your magnificent city.

A lot of folks don’t know Brandi Carlile, which is a shame. I’ve been listening to her for a few years now, featuring her music here several times. She’s a wonderful talent. This year, no other artist was there for me as much as she was, in good times and in bad.

Early in the year, her live cover of The Beatles’ “I Just Saw A Face” perfectly captured the wonder and joy I felt when I looked at the woman I loved…

Then, when that romance crumbled to ash, Brandi was there…

Her lyrics and her passionate, gorgeous voice echoed the pain I was feeling, while their beauty gave me something to hold on to…

Later, when circumstances forced me to lose touch with another beloved friend (I’ll be blogging cryptically about her soon), once again I found myself playing Brandi’s songs as the soundtrack to my life…

Brandi helped me survive a really rough year, full of loss and despair. Hopefully the next time she gets to Atlanta, I’ll manage to get to the show. But there’s no question I’ll keep buying her stuff, and playing the hell out of it. You should too.

Thank you, Brandi.

Yeah, I know. Electroshock therapy? A good memory?

Yep.

I’ve struggled greatly, for years, with chronic, terrible depression, and I’ve done therapy and all sorts of self help and multifarious concoctions of antidepressant meds, but nothing actually worked to any significant degree. I finally got desperate and started looking into electroshock, or as it’s known these days, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

During my research, I had the incredible misfortune of finding out about a newer, kinder and gentler, sort of brain zapping using magnets. This is called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and it was allegedly less traumatic and in general a lot easier than ECT. The problem was, it was still expensive, and unlike ECT, which has been an accepted and effective treatment for years, it wasn’t covered by insurance.

But I was assured by the shrink offering the treatment (Dr. Brian Teliho in Atlanta) that I had a good 80% chance or so of getting at least most of my expenses reimbursed, so I decided to take the chance. I went through a several weeks long course of treatment and spent $9000. It was the worst money I’ve ever spent. I got no benefits from the process whatsoever, the good doctor did absolutely no follow-up with me, and, naturally, my insurance flat out refused to pay anything at all back.

This made me even more depressed. (If you’re curious about TMS, please check out my post about the experience in which I went into a lot more detail).

Electroshock seemed inevitable. But I put it off until I had my heart absolutely shattered by someone I loved and then figured “What the fuck?”

I blogged about the whole experience at length last year (you can find the posts among those listed in the “Depression” topic in the sidebar). I saw definite benefits, and few downsides, though it did seem to temporarily throw my emotional self control to the winds, which had unfortunate fallout in my personal life. But afterward, I became a much better me, almost a younger me, but more focused and capable than I ever actually had been when I was younger.

Most of that has unfortunately worn off, and I’m back to the old struggle. But in at least two ways I still benefit enough to be happy I did it. The first is that the insomnia I had been suffering for months, which was just getting worse and worse (I’d go weeks at a time on three or four hours of sleep a night), went away and has not returned. This alone is worth the money (which, thanks to insurance, was a hell of a lot less than I wasted on TMS) because the lack of good sleep was making me very unhealthy and driving me crazy.

The second is that the migraines I’d suffered for years, often two or three times a month, have mostly fled as well. I have had a headache here or there, bad enough to consider a migraine, which lasted two to four days…but they haven’t been as agonizing as those I had been having.

Also, in memory, the weeks I spent going in, several times a week, to be stabbed with IV’s, rolled around on a gurney, and brain-blasted with electricity, seem almost like a vacation. It was a regimen of hope, time spent trying to swim up from the darkness. It was a nurturing ritual, when in my life I overall have no one to nurture me. And the repeated temporary death of anesthesia brought a certain peace to my soul…

The past few years, I’ve started each new year with a few posts about “Good Memories” from the previous year, things that I enjoyed or that had special meaning to me. So far, this year I haven’t done that. (To see earlier good memories, just click on the “Good Memories” category in the sidebar.)

I have given a lot of thought to doing it, and have a handful of posts in mind, but motivation has been lacking. Last year was largely painful for me, and there aren’t many things that stand out as particularly “good.” And so far this year my depression has its claws in my back and when I try to move forward it just digs in deeper.

Still, the act of writing the posts, of writing at all, is a kick in the nuts to Demon Depression, and I am starting to make some headway again (he typed, hearing the rhythmic sloosh of laundry washing in the next room). So in the next week or two, I plan to get on with it.

I also plan to get back to blogging more in general again. I’ve been in a slump for a while, for a lot of reasons (many of them bad memories), and I know the world needs my wisdoms.

Last night, Stevie Nicks’s cover of “Not Fade Away” cycled up on my musical playlist and my son and I were bop-bop-bop bop-bopping around the Byrdcave, having fun. I told him it was a Buddy Holly song, so that sent us looking for Holly tunes, then we expanded out and started listening to some other early rock and roll greats.

It was only after I started playing it that I remembered how I used to sing the Elegants’ “Little Star” to him as a lullaby when he was a baby, probably the only lullaby I ever sang to him other than Springsteen’s “Pony Boy.”

Happy Holidays to everyone, whatever their faith or lack thereof. Let’s be nice to each other out there, okay?

I’ve been having a bit of fun, joking around about the wave of Veterans’ Day posts that we see every year on this day, and I know not everyone appreciates the humor. I get that, and I’m sympathetic. But I don’t apologize.

I’m a veteran. I’ve had blood on my hands. I’ve lost friends. And to me, though I realize how sincere most people are, Veterans’ Day is a day of jingoism and platitudes, particularly in a time when we send our soldiers to die in wars we do not need to fight, and when we don’t take care of them when they come home.

Yes, we should honor the soldiers who are fighting and dying in our name, but we should do that by making sure they are doing so ONLY when necessary, otherwise we are wasting their efforts and their lives. Honor them by doing all you can to bring them home. Let their spouses curl up with them every night, their parents be able to sleep in peace, and their children grow up with fathers and mothers.

Yes, we should honor the veterans who have fought in our name when ordered, whether misused by their leaders or not. And to do that best, we should make sure they are given the medical and psychological attention they need when they’re back home, and we should make sure they’re given the benefits they’ve been promised (the VA screwed me out of over 80% of my College Fund, and I’m not alone), we should make sure their homes haven’t been stolen by bankers, and we should do all we can to help them find security in our lousy economy.

So yeah, wave the flag if you want to, tell everyone how important it is to honor our warriors, but if that’s the extent of it, it’s meaningless. If you want to thank me for my service, do something that’s going to help those who need help because they volunteered.

Some days, no matter the sunshine or time with friends or shards of productivity, I still mostly feel the corpse waiting in my skin, the creaking bones of my soul. It’s been a year of loss.

Halloween/Samhain has always been my favorite holiday. To celebrate, here’s Springsteen channeling the raging ghost of Howlin’ Wolf with a perfect Halloween song…

For the interested, here are some posts from back in my blog somewheres related to Halloweeny goodness…

5 Classic Horror Flicks to Goose Your Bumps

…for those who might like to watch something scary and good, I figured I’d throw you a few bones. Collect ‘em all and you can build a skeleton.

These are just five classics, not my all time favorites or anything with that much thought behind it, not in any particular order. All of them are first rate.

5 New Classic Horror Flicks You Might Have Missed

Some more contemporary works that many people haven’t seen, and everybody who loves a good scare needs to.

Saturday Night With Cthulhu

Sebastian’s Voodoo (A Great Short Film)

A wonderful short animated film by UCLA student Joaquin Baldwin. It’s visually amazing, and the story is very moving.