I had a good week last week, but got very depressed on Monday. And what set me off was the dumbest thing:




[Just one, though.]

Now, my dad spent a good chunk of my childhood, like the father in Squid And the Whale, driving around Park Slope, Brooklyn looking for parking spaces. He had all this sage ancient wisdom about it, too, like he would recognize a certain car in front of him and know where that car would turn at the next avenue to go to his presumptive parking spot, so therefore he could make this other turn, loop around, and beat him to the spot he knew he wasn't going for.

I always thought it a little silly.

Well, now--strange days--I have a car. I see that it's not silly at all. In Brooklyn, a parking ticket is $45 and a double-parking ticket is $115. In Manhattan it's like one order of magnitude higher. I've heard that UPS has a $20M yearly budget just for paying parking tickets in NYC.

$2000000 budget
/ $300 avg. ticket (a little high, maybe, but Murphy's Law)
= 66667 tickets

(That seems way to small. They have to get at least 1000 tickets a day, with the number of trucks out there. That would be, given 250 workdays a year,

1000 trucks
* 250 workdays
= 250000 tickets
* $300 / ticket
= 75,000,000

So a 75M budget would be more appropriate. Just FYI. UPS.)

Anyway, I saw this ticket and I was just like, fuck. Here I am having to pay this goddamn thing...... (mumble mumble)... I hate myself and I want to kill everyone!

How'd that happen? The logical steps in my brain were "here's this ticket --> I have to pay a bunch of other crap too ($4108.23) --> my sources of income are inconsistent --> one big source of inconsistent income is writing books --> the current book I am writing SUCKS --> I hate myself and want to kill everyone."

But really nothing changed when I got the parking ticket. It's not like the parking ticket was for $75M. It was just $45, and I'm so cheap, I eat breakfast at the library and I'm pissed that the platter (eggs, toast, meat, and home fries!) just went from $2.50 to $3.00.

That got me thinking about depression triggers.

The things that are generally listed as depression triggers are fairly inane:

• Death in the family - obvious


• Financial setbacks - obvious


• Substance abuse - obvious

But I learned about an unexpected one from The Noonday Demon--

.

--which was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist (2001) and is generally accepted as the definitive layman's text on depression.

The author, Andrew Solomon, writes from experience.


[I like this picture, I think he looks like Kafka]

Solomon went through some REALLY bad shit--like at one point he was having unprotected anonymous sex with men in London to try and get AIDS so he could die without killing himself. What fascinated me is that two of his major episodes were caused by physical trauma: first he had kidney stones, and then he got a dislocated shoulder.

(By the way, how much salt do you need to eat to get kidney stones? I eat a lot of salt. Like I put two packets of salt on McDonald's fries when I eat them. And potato chips? I'm addicted to THESE goddamn things:



Are kidney stones inevitable for me? I hear that peeing them out is the worst possible pain a man can experience.)

It's not as if Solomon got hurt, got a bunch of medical bills, and then got depressed. Or as if he got convinced that he could never recover. A physical injury literally tripped his brain into a breakdown. That's how his chemistry works. He told the doctors that he previously had a severe episode brought on by kidney stones and he needed morphine RIGHT NOW, they told him to chill, and lo and behold, he went down again.

That's something I never would have thought of as a trigger. I personally would--I know this sounds sick, and I'm probably cursing myself here--but I would welcome a mild hospital stay when I'm down. The lack of responsibility! They give you drugs, food, if anybody calls you--"Sorry, man, I'm in the hospital." Definitely wouldn't trigger anything for me. I come out and get a parking ticket--THERE'S where the trouble begins.



[the parking ticket that caught Son of Sam]


I know that I'm not the only person who has been set off by something as ridiculous as a ticket. Anybody else?




Anyway, happy ending to this one. The other day, this amazing thing happened to refute the ticket problem:

ALL OF THE PARKING RULES IN PARK SLOPE ARE SUSPENDED FOR THE WHOLE SUMMER!!



Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! That means I can park anywhere I want and NEVER get any tickets!!!!! Until September. I hate doing multiple exclamation points, but seriously. It's times like this that I wish I could do the Bill Hicks maniacal laugh: