Cerebellum Blues

The heart is a lonely hunter, indeed.

That title, save for the ever-so-slightly glib "indeed" at the end, was written by Flannery O'Conner, a writer whose work is not very familiar to me.

AND I WAS AN ENGLISH MAJOR! Oh, the shame.

Anyway, I first heard this title in a writing class I took with of those highly annoying YOU CAN DO IT! type teachers, and over the years, it has stuck with me. I confess, I'm still not totally sure what it's supposed to mean, since I was too lazy to read the book, but for me it has come to signify that the artistic process -- discovering what's in your heart and expressing it -- is something to be done alone. And this has been a hard truth for me to swallow. Because as someone who suffers from depression, being alone is not a great place for me to be. And yet I LOVE writing songs. Cruel, no? To do the thing that matters most to me, I have to endure the thing that hurts me the most. Naturally, this situation has me feeling good, then bad, then good, then bad, then good... you get the picture. So I decided to write a song about it, a song that in the end has become less a song about discovering what's in one's heart, and more a song about living with depression. I'm not sure it's done yet, but here's what I've got so far:

Yo Yo
Written on The Maton (with special thanks to a long-lost friend of mine named Eric Anthon Eff, who wrote a lyric titled "Yo Yo Boy " back in the '80s)

Life pulls me up
Then drops me down
And I don't see any method to the madness

I try to be tough
I try to act like a clown
I try to keep from falling back into sadness

I take long walks
I try to meditate
And I talk and talk
But even drugs can't change my state (of mind)

I am like a yo-yo
Rising and falling
I'm just like a yo-yo
I'm not the one to hold the strings
I am like a yo-yo
Rising and falling
I'm just like a yo-yo
And every day it's the same old thing (for me)

Life gives me hope
Then leaves me twisting in the wind
And I can't see the rhyme or the reason

I try to cope
I try never to give in
But it's just like trying to fight a change of seasons

And I play my guitar
I call a friend
I take a drive in the car
But the ups and downs they never end (for me)

CHORUS

(MIDDLE 8)
And I walk the dog
And I sleep all morning long
Rock me baby
There's something wrong (with me)

Cause I'm like a yo yo (into solo over chorus)

(MIDDLE 8)

(CHORUS TO END)

More thoughts on depression and songwriting.

Since thwacking my head against the bathroom wall and mushing a tiny bit of my cerebellum, I've been under doctor's orders to take antidepressants. I started with Lexapro, then switched to Cymbalta, since there's evidence that Cymbalta can help with damaged nerve pathways, which I seem to have along with my crunched cranial cells. But here's the interesting part: Both drugs have been a boon to my creativity, which is counterintuitive, you know? We all tend to think of great art arising out of great struggle (not that my art is very great), and while I actually believe this to be true, in my case, the antidepressents free my mind from its joyous downward spiral and allow it to actually think about and process some of my hopes and fears. in other words, I can make sense of stuff, and in the process of making sense, my maddeningly embattled brain seems to be willing to give up little nuggets of clarity, little summations that pop out as lines describing an idea, and those lines and ideas become songs. Without the antidepressants, there is never enough calm in my skull to allow such ideas to form and rise to the surface. Has anyone else out there had a similar experience or the complete opposite? Would love to hear about other's experiences, especially within the realm of making music.