This Masquerade

I'm sequestered here in my office (wow, can you believe I've got my own office?!) while Carmen continues to work on her sermon for tomorrow. Good thing the clock is falling back tonight, because it's midnight. That extra hour will come in handy. Anyway, I've got, I don't know, maybe a thousand of my all time favorite songs on my computer, and headphones so I don't disturb any sermonics.

George Benson is playing - one of my top ten favorites - and once again I was gobsmacked (one of Neal Stephenson's favorite words) by a song, written by Leon Russell, I first heard by The Carpenters in the early seventies, and done very differently by Benson on his "Breezin'" album in '76. It always makes me melancholy because it was the (Carpenters) song that forced me to realize that my first love with the girl who used to live next door was - stick a fork in it - done. The line "Thoughts of leaving disappear every time I see your eyes" was the lullapalooza, because that was the thing I couldn't reconcile with the "Searching but not finding understanding anywhere" part of the situation. Being lost in a masquerade is a hard thing to face up to, but I did it and I ended it. That was the trigger for the deepest, blackest depression ever, spiraling down from April 1974 to Christmas Day 1976. Coming out of it was nothing short of miraculous. I was lying in bed, tired after working all day, and a strange feeling came over me. I didn't recognize it for a long while, but slowly it dawned on me that...I felt good! That hadn't happened in a long long time, like ten years. If I was going to make up a story to explain it, I'd say it was "This Masquerade" by Benson on the radio that snapped my head around that late December.

I consider myself something of an authority on depression. My brother was plagued with it for fifty years or so, and spent that whole time blaming our parents. I came to realize that it's a chemical thing more than anything, and the best way to fight it is to let it come and go. I spent ten years clinging to it, making it worse by succumbing to it and eating a lot of crap.

Anyway, when I hear that song it reminds me of lost love and a whole lot of lost time. I've enjoyed my life so much during the past thirty years, it makes me sad to remember the many long years of making myself miserable. I won't do that again.