outside-in

I suffer from depression. I've been on medication for about a two and a half years. It helped a lot but it stopped working about Christmas time. I felt like crying all the time. After a couple months my therapist Black-eyed Susan decided something had to be done. She talked to my doctor and he prescribed a different anti-depressant. But that caused another problem, a problem of a personal nature often associated with the use of anti-depressants by men. So we tried something else, and then when tried yet another prescription. It worked.

By then it was late June. April and May had been the driest ever recorded in California. I was feeling pretty good, but got upset one day and decided to get away for a while. By myself. I jumped in the car and drove up in to the mountains to the small resort community where I lived and worked for many years. It was a nice warm sunny day when I left but by the the time I got up there, a rise in elevation of three thousand feet, the sky was overcast and a light rain began to fall. I got wet. And there was lightening. Lots of lightening.

Lots and lots of lightening. All over northern California. Nearly 8000 lighting strikes over northern California the weekend of the 20th. But very little rain. So there was lots of lightening hitting the ground, extremely dry vegetation and no rain. The result was lots of wild fires. Somewhere around 800 wild fires. Most of them small and in remote areas of the forest. Which made them hard to put out. Some of them were in the high country where there is little fuel so they spread slowly or not at all. Some of the fires lower down spread quickly and have become a threat to homes and communities.

Then the air got thick with smoke. The light of the sun grew dim. Breathing was difficult, the air had a foul smell. It was warm and very humid. The haze cast an evil shadow over the world and everyone felt it.

My mental state had just cleared, I was optimistic for the the first time in months.

It felt as if my depression had sliped out of my mind and into the very air around me. What had been a personal internal perception slipped out became a part of the environment and was now affecting the whole society.

And they say the water contains prescription medications.

OWL

July 4, 2008