You've probably had the experience of grief at some time in your life. Someone very close to you is gone, and you feel empty, unable to take much pleasure in anything.

I'd wager you also know how it feels when everything has "gone wrong." Circumstances beyond your control caused you to miss an important meeting and you're concerned about your job. At the same time one of your children is in serious trouble at school. Your garden wall has collapsed into the neighbors' yard and they're mad as hell about it.

If you've had to recover from a major illness, you know what it's like to have no energy and no ambition. You're always tired. The littlest ordinary task seems overwhelming. It's hard to concentrate. You may even wish you could just go to sleep and not wake up.

Now, put all of those together, and multiply it by three or four. That's what major depression is like. Except when it's severe; for that you'd have to multiply by ten.

You can't just "pull yourself together" or just "snap out of it." Continue...

Let's talk about some complaints first, even though complaining is counter to my usual sweet and agreeable nature.

You know about Google maps and Mapquest. I rely on them both from time to time, and usually find them very helpful. But when you need them most is when you're trying to find someplace like my country home, which is out where God left his shoes in Southwest Michigan. Mapquest gives more or less accurate directions, but then on its map indicates that my house is about a half mile away from the actual location. What's actually there is a single-wide mobile home. So far as I know the people who live there are respectable, decent folks, but it's not the 10-room 2-story home I tell visitors to look for.

Google maps also puts my house a half mile away, in the opposite direction. In their infinite wisdom, the people who create these things decided to extend the "street" (actually a gravel road) on which I live several miles beyond the point where it actually dead ends. In their imagination, they run it over some neighboring land, and then, miraculously, up the middle of the river for some distance.

Supposely you can report mistakes to both of these services. Yep. You sure can. You can pray to the ghost of Elvis Presley too. Continue...

Easlier today I posted a message at CaringBridge.org to the family of a man who died of pancreatic family last summer. I'll spare you an accounting of my own philosophical and religious peregrinations. Just accept, please, that I did not easily come to believe as I do now. This is what I wrote:

His time on earth was too short, but there's no doubt he left many wonderful memories for those who knew and loved him.

It takes more than living cells, flesh and blood and bones, neurotransmitters and brain synapses, to make a human being, and according to an astrophysicist I met but whose name escapes me, quantum physics is making it increasingly undeniable that our universe is made up of more than atoms. There's something incredibly powerful, he said, that we can't see or explain, that holds it all together.

Although exposed to many religions, I am no theologian, and hopes of an afterlife are not in vogue in my denomination of my religion. My own thinking and reading and contemplating, however, leads me to the belief that a consciousness, a person, a soul, like Jim, does not perish.

That Incredibly Powerful Something (IPS) could Continue...

School was 9:00 to 4:00, and there were four grades taught in each room. That was only because the district had "consolidated." When I transferred there for the last few weeks of the fifth grade, all eight grades were in one room, one grade for each row of desks, so for slightly more than four years I had the same teacher.

That was the late 40s. The good years, with the war over, new cars available again, the economy booming as never before in spite of a top marginal income tax rate of 90%. But also the bad old days in many ways. Cruel and blatant discrimination for one. When our old warhorse of a teacher, Mrs. Brackman, told of having taught where there were "two little Catholic kids" in her class, it was as though she were speaking of a different species.

I caught hell (she'd have slapped me for saying "hell") for using the word "belly" in front of some girls on the playground. It didn't matter that our agriculture textbooks used the word frequently. Agriculture was a core subject starting in the sixth grade; the curriculum was built on the assumption that a majority of students would stop school after the eighth grade and pursue life on farms. Three miles away, in an actual city, grade school students instead were systematically prepared for high school. Those agriculture textbooks referred to breeding, and even artificial insemination, and calving...real "facts of life" stuff, except that it didn't refer to humans. Mrs. Brackman was incredibly naive if she didn't realize that most of her students had put two and two together by the time they learned to read. We speculated that she'd have a heart attack if she knew what her students were learning in haylofts, Continue...

Good news first.

Roller Derby today is great entertainment, a serious sport with serious rules, but it's a lot more. Most of the derby skaters today, and all the skaters on all the teams in the 98 leagues that are in the Women's Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA) are, as the name suggests, women.

Simply stated, Roller Derby is a phenomenon of women's empowerment. It was women who loved skating that took a second look at the earlier version, born in Chicago during the depression and mostly gone after the 60s. It was women who revived and revised it, kept a lot of the spectacle, and literally wrote the book on how the game was to be played. Continue...

At my age, little cues can trigger a complex of feelings and memories. That's why someday, no longer able to even lift my head, I may cry when one of the angels in my life merely says "good morning, Grandpa!"

This wasn't an angel. It was a replacement battery for a power supply, and this was my second attempt to get the right one from the manufacturer. To be absolutely certain of not missing any valuable identification marks, I peeled back the bar code sticker. There, in yellow letters against the black surface, were the words MADE IN VIETNAM.

Had I attempted to verbalize what went through my mind in the next couple of minutes, any of my fellow psychologists would have labeled it "flight of ideas." Continue...

The first time I remember getting a "tingle" from a woman on the movie screen, she was Hedy Lamarr as Delilah. That shows how damned old I am! My Delilah is a delightful mixed breed dog, named in memory of that bit of self-disovery. In dog years, she's roughly as old as I am.

Like me, she has some age-related limitations. Unlike me, she does not appear to fret over them. Continue...

1: Any promises by pompous politicians to "get tough on crime"; we already pay around $500 per household to keep people behind bars. Let's try getting smart instead of getting tough for a change. 2: Related topic. Hysterical reports about ex-convicts committing nasty crimes. Yep, it happens. People who have no criminal records do nasty things also. I'd love to hear some reports about how many ex-cons are busy doing their jobs, paying their bills, and raising their children. 3: Any more poppycock claims that President Obama isn't an American citizen or that 90% of the people in prison are illegal aliens or climate change is a socialist hoax. 4: Detailed reports of the naughty bedroom frolics of politicians and preachers, followed by tearful proclamations of remorse. Persons of either gender who provide this fodder for unimaginative paparazzi should learn to say "none of your damned business!" or else keep their knees together or zippers up, as the case may be. The voyeurs among us can pay for their fix at the porn shop rather than relying on Fox News. Continue...

Not long ago on this site I told you that Christmas isn't the exclusive property of any religion, in spite of the name, and explained why. Even a sarcastic friend of mine who delusionally believes he's smarter than I am (don't worry, Steve Langer, Ph.D., I'm not going to mention your name) told me it was well researched and well written. But please understand that I still wish all truly devout Christians a joyous and holy experience of this special day. If Christmas is only a secular winter holiday to you, may it be a happy one, and a time to wish for more warmth in your own heart, in your family, in our national life, and in the role of our nation in the world. Continue...