Humans have a knack (and a need) for creating narrative structures to illustrate their understanding of the world. Which is why, despite the fact that a person’s impression of their own mental health is perhaps the ultimate subjective experience, I’ve been groping for an applicable metaphor to illustrate the way my brain has been working. After lots of aimless pondering, I think I’ve finally hit on one.

Imagine that in your hands you have a bowl. In that bowl is a pile of nondescript iceberg lettuce, the kind that combines the crunch of wet cardboard with the taste of a damp dishtowel. If you nudge back one of the leaves, there’s a little dollop of Thousand Island dressing that came out of a packet you found under your car seat. It’s a pale, baby aspirin orange, with flecks of some anonymous seasoning that will be completely undetectable to your taste buds. That bowl is the nadir, the bottom of the barrel, the worst of all possible salads. It will keep you alive, but you’re not entirely sure it’s worth the trouble to eat it.

The obvious solution is to get a better salad, right? There are all kinds of ingredients that would improve your experience. Rich greens, fresh veggies, savory proteins, an endless variety of dressings. (I bet you didn’t know that many kinds of crouton even existed.) Clearly that’s what everyone else is enjoying. They’re into their salads in a way that, if there was such a thing as a state legislature in this metaphor, would swiftly be made illegal. You should throw that bowl over your shoulder and go join them in a revelatory salad experience.

What depression does is tell you that you can’t. There isn’t enough salad for you, you don’t deserve it, and anyway you’d probably just spill it all over yourself. Those other people with their different, better salads? They clearly possess some ability or worth that you lack, otherwise you’d have a great salad too. Depression says that you’ve got a perfectly serviceable salad right there, and no amount of effort or desire on your part is going to result in any improvement.

On good days, you recognize that this isn’t true. Sure, nobody is going to just hand you a better salad, but you can get your hands on some veggies, and you’re capable enough to make them into something tasty. You might try a combination that doesn’t work so well, but that doesn’t mean you won’t hit on something fantastic if you try again.

On other days, you’re convinced that your shitty diner salad is all you’ll ever have. You might as well eat it, and stop thinking about improving the experience in any way. Not only will you fail if you try, but you’ll probably end up losing your lousy lettuce in the process, and then you won’t have anything at all.

The salad represents pretty much anything you can think of. Your job, your relationship, your living situation, your health, your stress level, any of the things in your life that you might consider working on, but which require some effort (and some hope) to really change. It represents fun, creativity, productivity, any activity that you might find enjoyable or fulfilling. No matter how bad or good your actual situation is, depression will make you feel like growing or improving or finding fulfillment is completely beyond your ability.

Everybody gets down and discouraged on occasion, but depression takes that feeling and makes it chronic. Feeling hopeful and capable becomes a fleeting experience. If this resonates with your experience, you’re not alone. I don’t have any great coping strategies at this point. If I come up with something, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, if having someone to talk to would help, I am happy to listen, with no judgment. Thanks for reading.

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If there’s a topic you’d like to suggest, you can email OMGDSM@suburbanpanic.com, share it on social media with the hashtag #OMGDSM, or use our handy suggestion form.

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Thanks to all of the guests who shared their perspective:

• The co-founders of Art Week Des Moines: David Safris, President of Visionary Services and Liz Adelman, partner at the AdelmanDean Group
  
• Art Week organizers Liz Lidgett and Monica Langin
• Photographer Kristian Day, producer of the Interrobang Film Festival
• Stephen King, Executive Director of Des Moines Arts Festival
• Mat Greiner, Executive Director of Chicken Tractor
• Artist Rachel Buse curator of the Art Beacon calendar
• Artist and Chicken Tractor grantee Rob Stephens
• Artist Brent Holland
• ISU Professor and Artist Alex Braidwood

If there’s a topic you’d like to suggest, you can email OMGDSM@suburbanpanic.com, share it on social media with the hashtag #OMGDSM, or use our handy suggestion form.

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If there’s a topic you’d like to suggest, you can email OMGDSM@suburbanpanic.com, share it on social media with the hashtag #OMGDSM, or use our handy suggestion form.

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The taste of terrible-tasting things.

Q) What (aside from being liquids that exist on a bewilderingly wide continuum of pricing) do tea, coffee, beer and wine all have in common?

A) They’re all drinks that evolved as delivery systems for mind-altering chemicals. By various trials and errors, our ancestors figured out that treating particular plants with specific combinations of heat and water and microorganisms resulted in miraculous concoctions that could affect your energy level in pleasant ways, take your mind off your grinding subsistence poverty for a fleeting moment, and maybe help you avoid the waterborne illnesses that came along with lots of people living (and shitting) in close proximity to their source of drinking water.

They’re also all drinks that objectively taste bad. Alcohol and caffeine and their byproducts aren’t naturally palatable. They’re bitter or sour or some combination thereof, and we have to talk ourselves into actually liking them.

How can I generalize so broadly about drinks that are so widely and faithfully consumed across cultural and socioeconomic divisions? I’ve seen what happens when children sneak a sip of any of them. They make that face that looks like they’re trying to harness the power of sheer regret to squint themselves back in time to the moment before they took that sip, in the vain hope of correcting the first of many unfortunate life choices.

But the real clue is the ridiculously complex set of rules and rituals that have grown up around what constitutes “good” vs. “bad” versions of these things. Sure, your bitter black brew is bitter and black, but did you get the kind that was shat out by an ocelot and roasted by a beardy Brooklynite and brewed in a hand-blown carafe to get just the exact right nuances of bitter and black? Okay, your wine is kind of sour, but can you smell the cud of the cows that ate the berries that grew in the field next door? Sure, your beer tastes likes something that yeast would shit out, but has it been so stuffed with hops that you could almost imagine being reincarnated as an overripe grapefruit? Nothing that was simply, objectively enjoyable would require that kind of stratification.

Friends, I have grown weary of pretending that I give a desiccated rodent’s scrotum about the particular intricacies of these drinks. There are types and tendencies and trends that I favor, but I can no longer feign an energetic devotion to any particular iteration. Let’s stop pretending that any matter of taste separating different versions of them is more sophisticated or enlightened. (If you need a caste system to enjoy your drink, are you really a connoisseur, or are you just looking for an excuse to feel superior?) Instead, I propose that we celebrate the ingenuity and persistence that it took to develop these complex, multi-step procedures, and the original intent behind them: to very slightly fuck up our brains in pleasant and/or useful ways. Cheers.

At this point in the show, a self-professed serial con artist, posing as a music teacher and band leader, has spent weeks deceiving the residents of a small town. He’s sold them uniforms and instruments, and promised to turn dozens of children with zero musical training into a marching band. Before the “professor” can cash in and skip town, a travelling salesman shows up with a case full of anvils, and a ream of evidence that will expose the scam and save the townspeople from being swindled.

This development poses a problem for the script. The writers have worked pretty hard to make the “professor” a sympathetic character. He’s charming and dashing and witty, and his budding relationship with the local librarian has given him a few minor pangs of conscience. Still, it’s really hard to ignore the fact that he’s moments away from pocketing his ill-gotten gains and grabbing the next train out of town, fully intending to pull the same scam at every stop down the line. The guy who shows up to put a stop to that should totally be the hero.

So what do you do when you’ve got less than five minutes of stage time to make it clear that the guy who’s going to save the town turns out to be a bigger scumbag that the guy who’s trying to swindle it? Have him obnoxiously hit on a woman he’s just met on the street. (Insulting her intelligence and giving her a demeaning nickname doesn’t hurt, either.)

The show was written in the 50s, and depicts small town life in the early 20th century, so its treatment of female characters isn’t always stellar. The librarian’s flirtation to distract the salesman, or the number that explicitly compares gossipy women to clucking hens, don’t portray women in the most respectful way. Still, it’s telling that a show that opened on Broadway in 1957 knew that an uninvited advance toward an unfamiliar woman was an effective way to signal creepiness, yet in 2014, we’re still arguing about why the ladies can’t shut up and take a compliment.

Also, I’ll save you the trouble of making this argument: #notalltravellingsalesmen

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If there’s a topic you’d like to suggest, you can email OMGDSM@suburbanpanic.com, share it on social media with the hashtag #OMGDSM, or use our handy suggestion form.

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The last few months of job hunting have been rather unkind to my confidence, and absolutely brutal on my ability to create. Things like writing, drawing, taking pictures, that I used to do regularly (if not frequently enough) have being come vague, sporadic things, more intent than execution. When I don’t have a task to do, I’m distracting myself so I don’t have to think about how deathly afraid I am that I suck.

It’s ridiculous and awful and self-defeating, and it needs to stop.

In the spirit of helping oneself, I’ve decided to jump on the bandwagon with an iteration of the recently ubiquitous “30 Days” concept. Every day for the next 30 days, I’m going to do at least one completely extraneous creative thing. I’m going to give myself a fairly broad definition of “creative.” I might write something here, or for my podcast. I might draw or take a picture, or update my Tumblr of ridiculous business jargon. Hell, maybe I’ll even use the excuse to do something new. The only real rule is that it has to be something that’s otherwise unnecessary. Nothing that pays, nothing that’s assigned to me, nothing that anyone else is relying on me to do. (Cover letters absolutely do not count.) When they’re done, I’ll share them on my social media feeds with the hashtag #30dayscreative.

So follow along, if you’d like. Words of encouragement are always welcome. So are suggestions for things you’d like to see me try. I’ll especially appreciate a boot to the posterior if I fall behind. And as always, thanks for paying attention.

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Thanks to Maximum Ames Records and artists Christopher the Conquered, TWINS and Gloom Balloon for providing the songs in this episode. Thanks to Kelli Lydon for the ragtime piano.

If there’s a topic you’d like to suggest, you can email OMGDSM@suburbanpanic.com, share it on social media with the hashtag #OMGDSM, or use our handy suggestion form.

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