I’m supposed to be recording today, but I’m totally not of the right headspace. Which is weird since YrFriends is all about the little sadness songs. I wasn’t like, a huge fan of the poor guy but he made us all laugh in a very pure, unembittered way, and I think in these times of instant global sharing you have to be a pretty unempathic rock of a human or a parents-banned-tv hippy to not feel like the world is a slightly darker place than it was yesterday.
And I’m not surprised he suffered depression either; to be able to give that much happy you kinda have to understand how low sad can take you.
I remember being taught about Drugs at school, specifically, about how they controlled yr feelings, could make you paranoid and useless. I remember telling sir that if I ever took drugs, every time I thought I saw a dude with a knife behind the curtains I’d remind myself it was fine, I was just on drugs. He sighed angrily and explained that wouldn’t work, that Drugs would override logic. -I’ve seen the dope-wards in the hospital, Berrow, and they’re not pleasant.
Well, I’ve seen knife-curtain dude. I’ve seen nightbuses leave trails of stars, I’ve seen bad shit in the woods, I’ve done stupid and crazy and sometime wonderful things and once played a show where my pedal board shrank so much it disappeared between the gaps in the tread of the soles of my shoes, and none of those times did I think this stuff wasn’t a direct result of taking Drugs.
I wish we were taught about depression at school. About how sometime there are awful and insidious thoughts inside us that you can’t just logic away, like, shit guys, it’s fine I just remembered that I’m depressed.
There’s so much stuff on my timeline that resembles the post-hollyoaks PSA: Does this celebrity death affect you? Don’t kill yrself! Talk to someone instead!
Wow thanks I totally hadn’t thought of that. I mean, it’s genuinely lovely that everyone’s copy pasting helpline numbers and there’s a willingness to talk openly about this shit that pure just wasn’t there a few years ago. But like everything else on social media, it’s trite and easy and dangerously superficial. These people are poking the curtain to show there’s no knife guy there, stupid, but there is and he just offed someone with more friends and healthcare options than most of us. That’s a fucking scary thought that Cheer Up M8 isn’t going to fix no matter how loudly you shout it.
So repost yr chain mail if you must, between the ones about the dying animals and the war horrors, but know that yr putting nothing into the world, yr depressed friends heads, that isn’t already there a thousand times over. It’s a touchingly humane gesture, but that’s all. It’s sad how interact used to mean -go have a conversation with someone else and now means -click; it gives us that safe righteous glow of helping improve the world without us having to go do anything inconvenient.
Cos this isn’t the diabetes that killed my dad or the cancer that killed my brother or any of them trad. maladies that rip holes in all our lives; it’s something we can actually and practically help with every day. And we don’t really need to stigmatise fellow humans with barrages of social concience bombs to do it, we can just accept it’s a thing. Go educate ourselves. Go be a friend, go be a better friend. Just know that by consciously trying to be a more empathic person, taking more care of the lives being lived around you right now, yr helping people way more than telling them they can talk about it (to either you or a special charity hotline) via a smug watchmen quote that just gave you the feels on twitter k thx.
(Proceeds to upload comic scan onto tumblr, ragequits)
