Let's Call It A Hiatus...

...it sounds fancier than what has really kept me away from this place for so long which is that I've been buried under the demands of daily life while at the same time finding myself in a Funk.

Yes, that's a capital "F" you see there and it's a much-warranted one if you ask me--not that you can really trust the judgement of a person in a capital-F Funk since the funkiness tends to distort your perception when you're deep in the Funk. The thing about capital-F Funks is that some people completely understand the difference between a capital-F Funk and a regular run-of-the-mill down-in-the-dumps kind of funk and some people truly don't.

At a family gathering, in response to a question about why I hadn't been better about keeping in touch for the past year or so,* I said, "Don't take it personally, I've just been in a Funk**, a deep, dark Funk."

To which the person replied, "That happens to me sometimes, but then I realize I'm still alive and I just get over it."

And another person listening from across the room said, "That happens to me sometimes and I just take Prozac until it goes away. Want a Prozac?"

It's clear to see that one of these people gets it--even though I wasn't going to accept her generously offered Prozac--and one of these people doesn't. And when you're in a capital-F Funk, the advice of the people who don't get it rubs against the soft parts of your soul like someone rubbing Ajax on your forehead.***

While I suffer from the lower-case-f funk from time to time, as many of us do, the colossal capital-F Funk has plagued me much less often, but has hung around a lot longer when it arrives. Sometimes it is precipitated by life events--in this case primarily a housing situation that would make shacking up in one of the anterooms of Hell sound rather appealing--and sometimes it just comes upon me and makes everything in my life seem infinitely worse than it actually is. Sometimes I have taken whatever pharmaceutical remedies were thought useful by my nurse practitioner and felt a gradual easing of the Funk, but the results I got from the pharmaceuticals were rarely worth the cost of the side effects I suffered--and sometimes I have just ridden it out until it began to gradually lessen of its own accord. Sometimes the easing came about as a direct result of a positive change in external circumstances and sometimes the easing came about as the more mysterious result of rediscovering inner reserves of tolerance and strength with which to better face the circumstances.

At the moment, I remain pretty firmly in the grip of the current Funk but it occurred to me this morning that not writing on my blog and not writing in my notebooks and not making more of an effort, is certainly not helping anything.

So here I am--Funky as all get-out--but making an effort.

*This is not intended to imply that in non-Funk times I am all that good at keeping in touch. For most of the past ten years, I've been kind of crappy at it. Funk has made it go from half-assed sporadic contact to no self-initiated contact at all. I do still try to respond appropriately when someone contacts me, but I have not reached out in any direction since being overcome by the Funk.

**Capital-F implied.

***Ah, who the hell am I kidding, while under the spell of the funk, just about any advice is annoying as crap.