Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

El Niño has struck. Mission Valley looks like the Mekong Delta. Rain sluices through the branches and leaves of the chinaberry tree outside my window, and my next-door neighbor’s camper resounds like muted, distant gunfire with pellet-like raindrops on its tarp and metal surface.

Even as I begin this sentence, I ask myself, why bother?

Well, for one, it is my job to produce work for publication at regular intervals. I need the job, and it’s usually enjoyable, more or less. Often I love it. But when this glintless fog of enervation settles over me as it does at unpredictable times, the operative phrase about any and every task or endeavor is just that: Why bother?

If this helps just one person out there, I really could not care less at the moment.

Before I begin to whine in earnest about “mild depression,” let me make it clear that I am not talking about the horror of severe, clinical depression.

When William Styron wrote of his encounter with “...a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self — to the mediating intellect—as to verge close to being beyond description,” in his book Darkness Visible, he was not writing about me. No. What that poor bastard went through makes my “mild” or (I hate this phrase one shrink used on me) “wet depression” almost comical — if it weren’t so subtly debilitating. I’ll tell you what I mean.

I consulted a psychiatrist in 1990 for what I could only describe as a kind of “teary incontinence.” In other words, I could not control when I would break down in short fits of weeping—sometimes it would occur at the most inappropriate and even light moments. I knew I was turning into my Uncle George. “The blubbering Dago,” my brothers and I called him.

On Sunday afternoon visits to my Italian relatives, George would already be plastered by three o’clock. He would pass out shortly after dinner and sometimes in the middle of it, but not before wailing, “Oh, if your father Bobby was alive, your sideburns would kill him!” Or to my mother, “God bless you, Mary Jane! You done the best you could wit’ da eight of ’em. It ain’t your goddamned fault. Johnny, get me another V.O., for Chrissakes.” All the while sobbing. It was as if the man were at a perpetual wake. In a sense he was.

Forward to 1990. I was tending bar and would have to duck out past the service end, into the men’s room, and pray for an unoccupied stall where I could place my hands over my face, let my shoulders rise and fall, and stifle the weird sounds that would squeak from my larynx. It would last about two minutes, but it happened several times a day. I heard a lot of jokes from the regulars about my bladder.

The shrink told me it was natural, that I was grieving. I had just been dumped by my girlfriend I told him I didn’t think that was it. I wasn’t even thinking about her when these embarrassing episodes would overtake me. Besides, I was more pissed off at her than heartbroken, I thought, but what did I know? That was when the Freudian mentioned the word “melancholia.” It was better than “wet depression,” but it sounded like something you could only catch from a bored English fop during the Regency period whose falcon got hepatitis from a fieldmouse and died.

Melancholia: “...a functional mental disease characterised [sic] by gloomy thoughtfulness, ill-grounded fears, and general depression of mind.” This from the Oxford English Dictionary. The earliest date of its usage is 1693, although Styron places it as early as 1303. At any rate, it was not a word I expected to hear from a doctor in 1990. I was prescribed Prozac.

Enough has been written about Prozac. It works, mostly, but it’s also expensive and the question dangles: do you have to take the stuff for the rest of your life? I’ve made many trips down to Tijuana for the cheaper, British-made Nuzac. It’s the same thing. After a while, however, the “Why Bother?” factor takes over and gives way to what I can only call the Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman Factor.

Stay with me.

My work habits are something like this: I go to bed pretty early these days, wake up anywhere from 2:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m., read or watch a late movie to avoid thoughts of bills, the IRS, middle age, mortality, tumors, and regrets about parenthood.

It goes this way, usually: I ruined my life, possibly my son’s, I don’t know. At 4:00 a.m. I am devastated, electrified, so completely and negatively charged by — as Joseph Wambaugh once put it — the gargoyles perched on the chest like buzzards. The blood-sugar level drops in the middle of the night after too much whiskey, and my eyes are pried open to see more than an otherwise decent man is asked to see in the daytime. There is no answer but prayer. And that is no answer at all. It is a bet situation. Is God there? A disingenuous enough question. Is He really interested in my shit as opposed to the people in Tijuana whose lives are destroyed, rained out like a baseball game, muddied out by the caprice of global warming? Or, say, a recent gunshot victim in the emergency room while I’m trying to get the Lord online? Come on, 6,000,000 Jews, systematically slaughtered during the War? Please!

Then there’s this crap: Should I be in jail? Have I done anything on earth that justifies my existence? You string words together, you moron, like some brain-burned case on Venice Beach with beads, shells, and curios. I am old. There is little left of value to say, nothing really to offer. Where is the vodka? There is none. Do I have any Xanax? No.

It is 5:00 a.m.

I go back to sleep and wake up between 7:00 and 8:00. I work with the television flickering soundlessly in the background, occasionally turning the sound up to catch news or gape in amazement at the particular American wonderfulness that is Regis and Kathie Lee. By ten o’clock I’m ready to break for an hour. This is when Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman comes on.

I have no cable. I get three channels. It is Dr. Quinn or two talk shows featuring genetically challenged glandular cases with names like Bob Lee Luther or Lewanda Dubonnet Du Jour.

Dr. Quinn has become a morning routine I am trying to break by reading stark poetry during that hour (that doesn’t work either, but more on that later).

After watching three or four episodes of Dr. Quinn, I noticed my eyes would swell with tears, get misty; I’d choke up at what is essentially a ridiculous show. Now, this would happen every time I watched the program, over a period of weeks, and I began to ask myself, “What the hell is wrong with you? Do you need more Prozac? What are you depressed about now? Is it really because Jane Seymour might lose her homestead? I don’t think so.”

It may seem as if I’m spending too much time on an inane television show in syndication, but I’m getting to a point. I analyzed what the phenomenon could be. My girlfriend hadn’t dumped me. I have tax problems, sure, and it’s true I’ve been thwarted for several years from getting a book deal, obviously the fault of cretins, incompetents, and editors of gnat-like vision who refuse to recognize my genius — but a lot of writers have similar problems, and mine are no worse.

The mini-crying jag lasts no more than a few moments during the show and ends with me laughing my ass off at myself. Here I am, moved consistently by a show with no credibility: General Custer appears years after he was killed in 1876? Actor James Cromwell shows up in Colorado Springs as Walt Whitman long after that poet suffered a debilitating stroke in 1873? A macho, romantic mountain man with a side-kick wolf that wags its tail? (Wolves do not wag their tails.)

One theory I held briefly was that I needed to flush melancholy emotions through me on a daily basis. That is, taking a morning leak in a different but equally essential way. Holly Hunter did that in Broadcast News. The character set aside several minutes in the morning before work to bawl uncontrollably. Then she recovered and went to work as a tough TV producer. Simple expedience, get it out of the way; she wasn’t crying about anything in particular. I thought that was a great brushstroke of characterization.

It has only been in recent weeks that I’ve figured out the Dr. Quinn Factor. It’s the soundtrack. The music, well-done by William Olvis, is cinematic, more suited to epic, sprawling, tragic generational sagas on the big screen than television at its most mediocre. The key here (no pun intended) is that almost every bar is written in a slow minor scale (except for rare, short-lived passages), one that summons loss and regret, hope and struggle, long buried and fossilized emotions. The mood flows undetected through the unconscious like an underground stream eroding the rational landscape. Dr. Quinn could reduce my six foot, broad-shouldered Uncle George to a quivering mass of operatic Italian angst. All via the music combined with Jane Seymour’s one-note acting: that look of pious concern we all wish we got from our mothers.

It is no accident, I think, that Charter Hospital is one of the sponsors of the morning rerun. They’re appealing to depressives, alcoholics, and drug addicts, presumably out of work. You know, “Do you feel helpless? Hopeless? Even worthless? I thought depression was my fault until I came to Charter....”

When that cataract glaze of apathy clamps down on me, I will spend two to three days (by then it usually passes) in a tattered bathrobe, producing a page or two a day, eating bits of Spam cut up into macaroni and cheese, drinking vodka and orange juice, reading William Carlos Williams because there is no sentiment in his work. Williams will write about a young sycamore tree (“Young Sycamore”), for example:

I must tell you

this young tree

whose round and firm trunk

between the wet

pavement and the gutter (where water is trickling) rises

bodily

into the air with

one undulant

thrust half its height and then

dividing and waning

sending out young branches

on all sides —

hung with cocoons

it thins

till nothing is left of it

but two

eccentric knotted

twigs

bending forward

hornlike at the top

Why does this kill me? The sycamore tree is not a metaphor for love, lost youth, yearning, ambition — not even life affirmation (although, it does have that inadvertent effect)—nothing! And Williams would have been the first to agree, I believe. Yet the beauty here is undeniable, the sentiment high-octane compared to Joyce Kilmer’s “I think that I shall never see / a poem lovely as a tree.” I can drink beer and eat pretzels reading Kilmer (if I really have to — read Kilmer, I mean), but Williams can cause me to dribble Spam and noodles down my chin while my face contorts into a mask of tragedy. So what is this?

Loss.

Past loss, potential loss, ineluctable loss. One day, when you notice the cut-out shape against the sky, between the pavement and the gutter, of a sycamore hung with cocoons, it may be the last time you ever see it. Possibly it will be the first time as well, as a child possibly, never to see it the same way again. Either way, it’s a killer.

William Styron’s epiphany, his light at the end of his tunnel, was Brahms’s “Alto Rhapsody,” which subtly brought him out of his blackness. In a way, William Olvis’s soundtrack to Dr. Quinn is quite the opposite for me but possibly just as necessary.

My Polish uncle, Ned Kozlowski, once told me when I was seven and crying because I was confined to my room for some reason, “Johnny, you’re gonna be a Dago yer whole life.” These words of gentle consolation proved to be completely on the money. Debilitating sadness, way short of the suicidal (in my case anyway) “blues,” whatever you want to call it, has got to be hereditary.

My mother, after spending days in bed — again, watching television and crying — once tried to knock herself unconscious by hitting herself over the head with an empty wine bottle. She wanted out of those greasy waves of consciousness that broke, not so much surf as sluggish ripples in a dark dream. My father explained to all of us at family meetings — which excluded Mom—that she was going through “the change of life.” He would say this every few weeks over the next ten years.

One of my sisters, to this day, will chain smoke, binge eat, and guzzle Stolichnaya for days at a time in between extraordinary accomplishments as a political activist and a psychiatric nurse. During visits to San Diego, she will daub with Kleenex at glistening eyes and tell me what a wonderful brother I was to her, when this is clearly, at least to me, untrue.

In his Greenwich Village apartment, a younger brother will compose emotionally riveting instrumental piano works, which professors at NYU beg him to transcribe, perform, and record. But he believes they are not good enough. He has given up wine but unplugs his phone for days on end when he will neither play, work, nor eat. When I asked him what was eating him, he answered, “I honestly don’t know. Things aren’t that bad.”

Of the seven siblings I have, the list of accomplishments are impressive and the incidence of hobbling emotional vapor lock numerous. I have come to believe, though I have no degree in this area, that depression is not situational at all. It is chemical, hereditary, non-rational, and random.

Theories abound. I have a right to mine. I believe as one who sits naked in front of the fan during San Diego’s summers with the blinds drawn, cursing the hypomanic weather clowns and bimbos who proclaim, “It’s another hot one, but a beautiful one for the third week in a row! This is why we luuuuuv San Diego!” Meanwhile, I’m reading The Sorrows of Young Werther and praying modestly for a cloud to pass before the sun.

I recall reading a study once in some psych journal about how statistically more mental health might be charted when the subjects of the study live in a climate that reflects their personality and mood. By this reckoning, I should live in Nova Scotia or at least Vancouver. What on earth am I doing here? I feei like one of those British civil servants in the 19th Century:

...Day 601. Still posted to this godforsaken colony. Everyday the sun and heat leaches England from me. The wallah [a native servant] continues to bring whiskey and soda every evening at precisely six, but it is hardly the same as it was in dear and shrouded London. I fear I shall go mad. This aesthetic countryside of palm fronds and sunsets threatens to plunge me into yet another abyss of despair. Surely, this is a sign of my unraveling. I kick the wallahs into life now and then, but the pleasure has thinned....

—Diary of an East India Company Liaison to Her Majesty’s Mercantile Co., Civil Servant Nigel Carruthers, 1856.

El Niño has struck. Mission Valley looks like the Mekong Delta. Rain sluices through the branches and leaves of the chinaberry tree outside my window, and my next-door neighbor’s camper resounds like muted, distant gunfire with pellet-like raindrops on its tarp and metal surface. I should be cackling with perverted happiness. I try rubbing my hands together with glee, and then I notice the drowned nasturtiums my girlfriend planted beneath that tree. They have reclined in wet surrender over a grave-like mound where I buried the Halloween pumpkin we interred in the first week of November. She had carved it and brought it here, set it beneath my window. We called it Punkin’ Head, and subsequently the nasturtium bed became Punkin’ Head’s grave.

I feel the stirrings of inspiration to concoct a children’s story about Punkin’ Head, but I am, for the moment, too moved by the enormity of my talent and a lover’s gift, animated then interred by our imaginations and gone to ground. I cry a little, thinking of my darling carving the pumpkin, and try to frame a simple narrative for young ones, a Halloween story, perhaps. I realize I care nothing for children; however, I could use a Newberry Award, and who more worthy? But before long that small, dreaded voice is discerned. It robs me of my patrician sensitivity, my ingenious inspiration, my artistic sensibilities so sublime I feel I shall, alas, never have the heart to again pinion these pearls upon the page. Mere words, expired butterflies — only really hard and round and white or something.

Quietly accompanied by the rhythm and melody of rain through the chinaberries, I hear the muse whisper, Why bother?