Some of my friends have expressed concern over the fact that I haven't blogged in more than two months.
Seriously. Two people have.
God bless both of you, and all of you others too.
My last post, Surfing In The Rain, was about depression.
Well, I'm still working with it. It's an "autumn" thing, although I have always loved autumn. When it gets me, it usually gets me in autumn. You?
Ernest Hemingway was appalled when his erstwhile friend Scott Fitzgerald aired his dirty laundry in The Crack-Up, a chronicle of his, Fitzgerald's, breakdown.
Hemingway thought that this was extremely unmanly. You didn't air your personal problems. You kept them to yourself. Then you killed yourself, as Hemingway did.
Thank God the post-World War II generations have been easier on themselves than the generation born before 1914. My father was born in 1914, and he suffered in silence from depression for many years before death finally delivered him from it.
At the very end of the film Papillon (1973), Steve McQueen, who has been a prisoner on Devil's Island for many years, finally manages to escape by flinging himself into the sea along with a handmade raft. Just before the credits roll, Papillon (McQueen) hollers out his final line. Bobbing in the ocean, clinging to his raft, waiting for the tide to take him to the mainland, he shouts, "I'm still here, you bastards!"
He escapes.
She escapes. They escape. We escape.
We're still here.
