It was … not the best night of sleep I’ve ever had. I got into bed around midnight, and almost immediately kept waking up, coughing and gasping for breath, as my sinuses poured phlegm and something that can best be compared to a non-Newtonian fluid down my throat while I slept.

Around 3, I got out of bed and walked out of the room, so I wouldn’t wake up Anne, and loudly cleared my throat. I unsuccessfully tried to blow my nose, drank some water to soothe my scratchy throat, and got back into bed. It felt like I’d been asleep for second when Anne woke me up.

“You’re snoring really bad,” she said, kindly, “can you do something about it?”

“I’ve been trying, but I’ll try again,” I said. I dragged myself out of bed and repeated the ritual. I got back into bed and fell back asleep.

“Dude, you’re still snoring,” Anne said, again, after what felt like seconds. Again.

“Do you think you could go into your office and sleep on the guest bed, so we can both sleep?” She asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

I walked through the empty and dark house. I squinted at the clock on our microwave which I thought displayed a blurry 5am, or maybe 6am. I looked out the window and saw the suggestion of a sunrise, still far beneath the Eastern horizon.

I got into the very cold guest bed in my office, fell asleep, and actually stayed that way until about 10am.

Working (or not working, as the case has been for weeks and weeks of Depression) from home has its benefits.

I made a coffee and started some oatmeal. While they brewed and cooked, I walked over to my couch and snuggled my dogs.

When my coffee was ready (inverted Aeropress, for those keeping score) I filled my mug and sat down at my desk to do the 21st century version of reading the newspaper.

Jesus, the news is terrible. There’s the ongoing dumpster fire in DC, but we lost Luke Perry and Keith Flint, just a week after we lost Brody. We get it, universe. We are in the worst timeline. You’ve made your fucking point, already. I mean, you make your fucking point several times a day, but you’re really being a shit about it right now.

This timeline. I swear to god.

Since September, I’ve been in the worst depressive episode I have ever had in my life. There’s a difference between feeling depressed and having depression that is often so subtle, to someone who isn’t living inside of the host organism, it is a difference without distinction. But it’s real and it’s significant to me. Since September of last year, I’ve been overwhelmed by grief, loss, sadness, and sorrow. These stacked themselves up in a trenchcoat like Vincent Adultman and brought paralyzing depression (different from Depression) into my life. It’s been so overwhelming, I haven’t been able to relax and explore the creative part of my brain that produces stories, so I can write them down. When I’ve opened the door to what I think is the creative room in my mental house, so I can work on rewrites and revisions to the novel I expected would be with an editor by now, all I’ve been able to find is grief and sadness and loss and depression.

But thanks to literal months of therapy, working with a professional who is trained to get me through grief and loss, I have finally started to come out of the depression. I can finally think about my narrative character, Liam’s, story,about how I want to work on it for him (and my agent and eventual publisher). I can finally let my guard down without being overwhelmed by sadness. I feel like I can finally open a door into the 1983 I created, find it, instead of a giant room filled with unclaimed emotional baggage, and complete the story that lives there.

So I finished my coffee, closed the tabs on my browser, and opened the most recent copy of my manuscript.

Four … gosh, almost five … hours later, I still haven’t done anything except sneeze and cough, and curse the trees and flowers who are fucking in my neighborhood right now.

But I don’t feel worthless or useless or any of the hurtful, destructive self-image things that were imposed on me at such a young age, and so consistently reinforced throughout my adult life, they were like the air I breathe: invisible, always there, and fundamental to my existence.

You know that essay This is Water? I feel like I recently became aware of the water, and it forced me to reexamine my entire life, all 46 years of it. I’m healing. It’s hard. It’s painful. It’s frustrating. But I’m doing it, one day at a time, and every little bit of progress is meaningful.

I want to get into Liam’s story and do the work that I know needs to be done, but my inner child, so hurt and abandoned by the people who should have cared for and protected him, needs the things he never got, and I’m doing my best to be the person I need in the world. I have to take care of him, because he is real, before I can take care of Liam, who is not. But their stories are intertwined in ways that I’m only partially aware of, even though I’m the author of one of them and the subject of the other. And that’s what makes working on both of them so hard, right now.

But, in an effort to be the person I need in the world, I will close with something I’ve been telling my kids since they were small: everything worth doing is hard. Don’t give up just because it’s hard, because it’s supposed to be hard.

This is hard. This is challenging. This is painful. This is water.

Back in the old days, before social media destroyed the world and blogs were a relatively new thing, we would do these posts that were a lot of random things, instead of one main thing. We’d usually do this when a lot of time had passed since our previous post, and we just needed an excuse to add something new. Social media kind of took that away, because now we just toss a link or a picture or something silly onto Tumblr or Shitter or Facebook or whatever.

But I cling to the Old Ways, from the Before Times, when Everything Was Better (even though it really wasn’t), so here’s a bunch of stuff that I have posted in other places since my last post here.

Last night, I got my highest ever high score on Mr. Do!: 251,000. That’s 100K higher than what was my highest score for over a year.

If you haven’t watched Big Mouth on Netflix, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s maybe the most honest, frank, truthful and hilarious look at puberty, ever. I wrote a little bit about it on my Facebook.

I spent much of the last 18 or so months writing a novel about being 12, so I feel like I have a pretty good handle on how kids that age talk and feel (or at least, how I remember feeling when I was 12). At some point about 10 months ago, I came across the Netflix series BIG MOUTH, and I instantly fell in love with it. It’s an absolutely hilarious look at how weird and hormonal we are around 12 and 13 years-old, and it gets so much right about what we are like at that age. I just love it.

But as much as it gets right about the kids, I’ve always felt that the adults in the show were kind of cartoonish, which seemed kind of odd to me … until I realized last night that the adults are all portrayed THE WAY THE KIDS SEE THEM. So the parents are totally lame and embarrassing (Nick’s dad), always screaming about everything (Andrew’s dad), and trying too hard to be one of their friends (Coach Steve). [gif of Andrew and Jesse’s heads exploding]

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this isn’t intentional, but it feels like it is, and it would surprise me if it wasn’t, because everything else in the show, especially how frankly it deals with how hormonal and irrational we are at that age, is pitch perfect and grounded in reality.

I’m about 2/3 through season 2, and I’m doing everything I can to not binge it, because I don’t want to make my wait for season 3 any longer than is has to be.

Oh, hey, and speaking of season 3 … I’ll work for scale, if anyone at Netflix is interested.

Also on my Facebook:

I just realized that when I see a post on Reddit that is some version of “My idiot parents can’t figure out this meme” or “When your parents are so dumb they _______” I am likely looking at a post made by a teenager, whose parents are my age. (I’m 46).

I also realized that, until about ten minutes ago, I have always created a mental image of Boomers when I hear “my parents” because that’s *my* version of parents.

Getting old is weird, man.

My friend, Andrew, sent me this, because he just gets me:

Speaking of Bob Ross, Anne and I got a private Bob Ross painting lesson, and we both leveled up pretty substantially. I post all my Bob Ross paintings on my Instagram, but here’s a link to all the photos I took when we were learning. We both had so much fun, and as soon as I make meaningful progress on my novel revisions and rewrites, I’m going to try out my new skills and see how well I can use them.

They should make a sushi roll that’s squid, with every other fish in the bar wrapped around it. They’d call it Calamari Damacy.

My friend, Brad, is writing and hosting a new True Crime podcast that I think you’re going to love, especially if you are a fan of Serial, Heaven’s Gate, or Making a Murderer. Check out Murder, Etc.

TL;DR Wikipedia is one of my favorite new Instagram follows.

Mike Doughty is currently on tour, performing the entire first Soul Coughing album, Ruby Vroom. I’m seriously considering going full Deadhead for this tour.

Did I ever mention that I have an account at Goodreads?

I may as well round up my social medias:

• Tumblr
• Counter.Social
• Instagram
• Facebook

Nazi punks fuck off.

I’m sure there’s other stuff that I’m forgetting, but that’s something we would say at the end of these posts back in the early 2000s, so there ya go. If you got this far, feel free to use comments in this post to AMA, and I’ll do my best to answer your questions.