“But February made me shiver
With every paper I’d deliver.
Bad news on the doorstep;
I couldn’t take one more step.
— ‘American Pie,’ Don McLean

Surfing Internet news sites can be overly-depressing.
Any kind of news nowadays is depressing — beware of those bearing glad tidings, they either don’t want to upset you, or they’re lying through their ass.
How could anyone doubt climate change with this story on the home page of the New York Times?
Or this from the UK’s top soldier?
Or this study, which revealed daydreaming makes one unhappy: “A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”
There’s just no escape.

(Illustration found here).

Apparently with no escape, the situation will only worsen — the next couple, if not a few years ahead for the US of A won’t be pretty, which in turn will drag-down the rest of the world as humanity slowly extinct’s itself and all other species living on this piece of rock hurtling toward Mr. and Mrs. Oblivion.
And this just ain’t no piece of rock-n-roll bullshit.

Overall Situational Disheartenment Disorder — OSDD — a distant, nearly-unknown relative to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder — PTSD — and although the vast, vast majority of most OSDD cases are non-violent, some sufferers are known to lock themselves in air-tight rooms and watch “13 going on 30” for hours on end.
And although there’s been absolute-zero actual scientific research done on OSDD, the symptoms, causes/effects are floating in the eyes of humanity’s traffic.
OSDD is in the air, vibrating the eardrums, soaking up the eye-sockets — OSDD is carried by news, news from a neighbor, from a relative, from across town, down south, across the country, across the planet — you get the picture.
A picture painted by a 24/7/365 news cycle on a variety of media — the daydreaming study mentioned above was conducted via iPhone.
Unlike PTSD, OSDD is not after the fact, it comes prior to the fact, and stays way-after.
So any current news from just about any source only reinforces, or at minimum, facilitates disheartenment.

OSDD was strong this weekend, and coupled with a blah weather condition up here in northern California, the desire to write was scotched at every turn — I started three posts yesterday, trashed one and ended up with nothing.
A writer of sadness only when feeling at least nearly happy, I instead took an extra-long nap.

Loudness
— Judy Brown

After bad news, and its pulled-back fist,
flows in a sound that’s not a sound. It’s not
the brain’s tide beating blood in propped
and shored-up workings, not the tapestried
texture of attended silence, the goffering
of quiet air folding and unfolding
in a house where nothing is happening.

After bad news, you tell the seconds,
hungry for the hurrying thunder
that never comes. Instead a chemical fizz
fills the ears, before the descaling. An angel
rides the stirrup and anvil, spurring on the drum,
works like wild weather in wet sheets,
flapping and cracking the body’s flat muscles.

Long after the bad news, when it’s bedded in,
you notice most clearly the mild loudness
of the not-so-old man in the foot tunnel,
drumming and drumming and biting his mouth.
The posed coins in his blue cloth
are tiny, like a cast handful of ear-bones.

And tomorrow is tomorrow is Monday!