#green slime

The algae-filled pool is a beautifully literal piece of symbolism, isn't it. A metaphor made real, for everyone to look at and laugh and point.

From there, though, the conversation nearly always goes in the direction of how bad everything is, and how it's inevitably going to get worse. Everyone I talk to wants to wallow in misery all the time. I've gotten extremely wary and gun-shy about talking to practically everybody, at this point. I never know which secret word or phrase is going to trigger a sudden deluge of grievances, which I'm expected to absorb and validate, and then follow up with some kind of reassurance or cheering-up routine. And then the person I'm talking to feels better. Hooray.

Does anyone remember the Nickelodeon show where kids got buckets of green slime dumped over their heads? They knew it was going to happen. They knew they were standing in the spot under the bucket. We never actually had cable when I was a kid, so I only ever saw the show a couple of times, and I don't know all the specifics. Was there a particular word that triggered the slime? Or did the magic word change from one episode to the next?

I know that any conversation I get sucked into is likely to suddenly dump a bucket of green slime all over me. I know that I'm going to have to spend the rest of the day, or the next several days, metaphorically cleaning myself off, scraping gunk out of my hair, my eyes, my nose. I'm going to have to put in all the extra time and work it takes to recover from a sudden brain-dousing in cold foul goop.

I'm so tired. I'm so incredibly depressed, for all the same reasons the people around me are perpetually in need of a receptacle for their mental garbage juice. Plus some more individual reasons of my own, because we all have those in addition to the larger-scale crap going on in the world. I know how to be depressed; I've been depressed for most of my life, and I mostly have methods for dealing with it. But none of them are working anymore, because I'm too overwhelmed.