``Chuck, you've just said nearly the worst thing you can say to anyone who suffers from depression....'' Carrol
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Carrol, wake up. You've known me for years on this list. Dennis just wrote a note of thanks and posted it. Two days ago I wrote a long post to him and then didn't send it EXACTLY because I decided it would be a bad idea and could be taken the wrong way. So Dennis says thanks for the notes of concern. So I think hell, he isn't hung up on how other people sympathize with his struggles, I'll post something of support for him. Long and short of it.
Anyway my climbing partner for twenty years had clinical depression, and I decided a long time ago that really the worst reaction to him was to try and handle him with kid gloves---or treat him like he was someone with clinical depression. And yes we had a few pushing matchs. We got down to screaming and yelling and throwing equipment around on a god damned ledge a couple of hundred feet off the valley floor.
Screw your clinical depression asshole, you`re fucking me with all that shit too, you know...
Things like that.
I tell him to rapple first, because I don't trust his ass anymore. He goes down to the next ledge. I follow and pull the rope through, set up the next one and we do it all over again except the yelling. Back on the ground, he stomps off to his car to pout and leaves me to pack the ropes and equipment and drag it all back, which I do. Then he drives back to the Lodge parking lot like a manic and we sulk separately for hours. I find somebody in the lot I know who lives in the Bay Area and hitch a ride back, afraid the motherfucker would kill both of us in a car accident, on purpose.
He did eventually almost kill himself in highway traffic accident in Utah about five years ago. When I first saw him he was in diapers and had brain damage, couldn't talk or make any sense and didn't know who I was. His brain injury began to heal and within a few months I could take him to the climbing gym and this time I did trust him to belay me---although that was pretty scary forty or fifty feet up, my life hanging in the hands of a retard on neurontin.
Anyway, Carrol chill. Some of this stuff is more like slap stick comedy than a greek tragedy. I know what clinical depression is, but I'll be damned if I am going to worship it. I've been surrounded most of my life with it in my mother, probably my father--but they were both too drunk most of the time to know for sure---my first step father, and then maybe my ex-wife and for sure my climbing partner.
As a possible alternate explanation (gallows humor alert) for my divorce, I could say my ex-wife hated me because I wouldn't worship her darkness, so she found a fellow depressant to marry instead of me. Now whenever I see them, both dower as hell no matter how nice a day, I chatter away with brightness just to piss them off.
Chuck
I hope Dennis enjoyed this post more than the last one.