Depression strikes at strange times. I’m sitting here—I’ve noticed I do a lot of sitting since I moved to Seattle. I sit in my car for too many hours, at home, at the office, on the bed. Ninety percent of what I do involves sitting, and that sucks—thinking about how horrible I feel, how nobody in the world can feel as bad as I do, especially since the world doesn’t exist outside of my depressed self. I have little explanation for my state. Rarely do emotional states have explanations. It could have been something as simple as reading an e-mail this morning, or the drive, a bad breakfast, anything can set it off, and when it does, like now, it’s downhill from here. Nothing to see, please get your butt out of the aisle, and move along.

Distractions are difficult to find at work, particularly after I’ve surfed as much surf as there is out there to surf. I have rung and dripped dry the internet, and found nothing of value. Isn’t that how the world works? Nothing new, the same words repeated endlessly, mindlessly. These are happy thoughts for you. My day is rather empty. I planned to get a haircut, but the thoughts involved in making that plan a reality is too much for me to think about. Instead, I’ll sit here and wear out my tired fingers saying nothing in so many words.

For the record, since this is what this is, I felt much better at the end of the day. I had a long, interesting discussion on office politics with a colleague, and that lightened my mood. The caffeine helped, and by the time I left the office at around 7pm, with my disposition much improved, I felt better and less depressed. The following story and notes was pieced together throughout the day as my mood varied, and finished off after dinner, where I am now, sitting on my couch, in the childless position, typing away.

Notes: The story goes nowhere and gets nowhere. It’s a vignette about a writer, a passenger, and a pen. Here’s the original.

Traveling Pen

The writer glowers at the pen knowing it betrayed him. He attempts to finish the thought by pressing hard enough to make a ballpoint indentation on the paper, but no good. It couldn’t have failed at a worse time. “Inspiration oozed like black gold from my cramping hand as I busily scratched words in golden glitter across the small lines of my journal until this,” the writer writes aloud. His hand shakes uncontrollably as he holds the pen, desperate to write down his thoughts, which to his mind’s ear are clever and original and, a word he uses often but this time believes, publishable. The words escape and he never finds them. Don’t tell him, but the world doesn’t miss his words.

The writer picks up the pen, admiring its smooth texture and its black, clickable top with two holes on one side through which the white part peeks. Brown lettering marks the name of the drug, “Premarin Vaginal Cream in a nonliquifying base” in the medical speak that appeals to the Latin or medical student (but, surprisingly, not the spelling national champion since medical words, particularly the names of chemicals and drugs, are not tested in the competition even though medical conditions, which are found in most dictionaries, are). Next to the name in parenthetical, on the off chance that you might confuse the scientific jargon for informative words, is printed “(conjugated estrogens),” the two words in most people’s vocabulary but their meanings when placed together as foreign as a Japanese train station to a Westerner. The writer glances over the dosage, "0.625 mg/g," subscripted in black ink next to the parenthetical, never caring enough about mathematics or chemistry to understand its significance. He clicks the pen one last time and leaves it in the train’s seat pocket, believing, perhaps rightly or wrongly, that the pen deserves this transgression for the disservice it had done to him.

The writer imagines the passenger who finds the pen in the pocket. The passenger—the writer assumes it wasn’t found first by the train’s custodian, a younger man, he imagines, who collects the knickknacks he finds emptying out the train’s pockets and crannies, and displays them prominently in his apartment, like trophies from a safari hunt—finds the pen, and because he wants to start an intense NY Times crossword puzzle—and the passenger describes it as intense to himself, thinking of the Sunday edition, not the easy weekday one—and thinks what a lucky day because even though he bought the paper and planned, after finishing the politics, circuits, and local section, in that order—and he disregards the fact that the circuits section is a Thursday section and the Sunday crossword is a Sunday section since he sometimes gets confused by the days of the week, and, more frequently, the sections that correlate to the days of the week—he forgets to bring a pen.

The passenger gives an excited growl as he uses the pen’s point to skim the clues for an easy one. After finding the clue, “former NYC airplane building,” he excitedly counts the spaces in eight down and sees immediately that the answer has five, which matches the number of letters of the answer running, somewhat repetitively, through his head. The passenger tries to write a P in eight down and realizes much to his great chagrin that the ink does not run through the ballpoint. He manhandles the pen, and tries again, sure that the combination of clicking, shaking, and squeezing like trying to get juice from an orange or water from a rock in the biblical sense, will start the flow. The writer shakes his head at the thought, knowing, even without trying, that this wouldn’t happen, and it doesn’t.

The passenger scribbles circles at the top of the paper, pushing harder with an occasionally shake, until he rips the newspapers, now satisfied that the pen is dry and his thoughts of finishing the Sunday crossword thwarted, even though he accepts, down in the dank hemispheres of his psyche, which his ego buries after waking most mornings, that there are things stopping him from completing the puzzle that are more powerful than pens that don’t write. The passenger abandons the pen and puzzle to better people.

The writer sees this in his mind’s eye, scrutinizing the effects it has on the passenger and the pen, and leaves it for the passenger, knowing that if nothing else, the passenger’s story of the pen will be something he may share with others to brighten their days. The train lands and stops in the writer’s town, and he makes a mental note: need new pen for ideas, the brilliant type, which he forgets, the note, almost immediately as he wrestles with his luggage and notebooks.

***

Even after the editing, I don’t think I’ve changed much or made it into a story, but at least I can say I tried. And trying is half the battle (G.I. Joe), or is it, do or do not, there is no try (Yoda). Who knows, and, more importantly (I don’t know why I keep putting this asides, like “more importantly,” or “at least,” I don’t think they add much value, and they break the flow. Grammatically they seem correct, but stylistically there must be something wrong with the), who cares?

Throw me any comments about the vignette. I know it’s not much, but I want to polish it before I put it up in the stories section.