Today has been a fucked up day

Today has been a great day. I've just been feeling it like pop rocks going off in my muscles. It's a great day. The weather is beautiful. It's cool for spring, like I like it. Sometimes it starts raining, but its such a light rain. It sets off the scent of the flowers and makes everything smell like a load of newly washed clothes. The night before I got a lot of work done on a paper. My worked turned out really well and now I've got a great head-start on completing it. I'm graduating in less than two weeks. I had a class and at one point the professor threw a binder clip and inadvertently hit a guy in the forehead with it. We all laughed loud and long. Before that I worked on this story I've been working on for a long time. I finally turned a corner in the story and the writing was flowing. I was really happy with it.

When I got up today I looked at the blogs and I learned that Jay Bennett had died. This really socked me in the gut. The Jay Bennett-era Wilco was my favorite band in the whole world when I was in high school. Being There and Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot were the soundtrack to my late adolescence. After Jay and Wilco parted ways, I bought the first couple albums he put out, with Edward Burch and solo. I enjoyed them and listened to them a lot. In interviews and in the Wilco documentary I found him to be a likable guy. He was intelligent and funny. He was a music whiz.

Luckily in the last six months I haven't been depressed very much very often. But over the years (like, more than half of the 23 I've lived) I've become well acquainted with depression. As such, it is extremely easy for me to distinguish sadness from depression. The difference can be described in a way that is simplistic but accurate. Sadness feels like you have been hollowed out. There is an empty place in your torso...sometimes it's your stomach, sometimes your throat, sometimes chest. Depression feels like lead weights have been sewed into your clothes. You carry the weight and it makes you weary.

I am very sad about the death of Jay Bennett. His music meant a lot to me. My life has been one almost entirely untouched by the loss of people close to me. I don't know whether that has any effect upon the way I react to death of people I do not know personally but are important to me in some way.

There have been a few times during this great, happy, beautiful day that I press pause and remember that Jay Bennett has died and wonder whether I should feel guilty for having such a wonderful day. The answer is probably no, but the question still rankles.

Honestly to someone such as myself who is so well acquainted with depression, the discrete feeling of sadness can be refreshing. It is a reminder of what a healthy emotion feels like. This is what it feels like to feel bad the right way.

Have you thought about the question, would you rather feel bad or feel nothing at all? That's a question depressives sometimes have to consider because a pharmaceutical will effectively stymie the depression while also blunting every other emotion. Anyway, I would rather feel nothing at all than feel depressed. But I would rather feel sad than nothing at all.

All of this is just a way of saying: I'm having a happy day, and it's funny how big a part sadness plays in the happy day.