Last week I was pretty depressed.  I didn’t really want to do much of anything.  I laid around the house, played video games, felt like garbage most of the time.  One thing I have learned is that when I am feeling that way it can be beneficial to pick up one of my many languishing projects and attempt to make some sort of progress on it.  This can mean taking a half-build model car and painting a few pieces, or soldering some bits on to a circuit board for a guitar pedal that I never finished making, or maybe performing a small repair on something.  Whatever IT is, I have found that performing some small task that feels like progress can be like blowing a little air on last nights embers when the fire feels like it’s mostly burned out.  When I’m really low I don’t even want to do that much but if I make myself take the first step, I tend to fall forward to the next step.

This particular week I have been distracting myself from my depressing internal monologue by browsing guitars online. I have several guitars.  I do not need another guitar.  I do not, however, have a Fender Jazzmaster and I nearly convinced myself that I don’t need another guitar, but I do need a Jazzmaster.  Blowing hundreds of dollars on a guitar might distract me a bit further but I am well aware that it won’t actually get me out of my funk.  In my experience, “retail therapy” is an illusion created by capitalism.

No, I didn’t buy a Jazzmaster but I DID remind myself that I have a clone of a Rickenbacker 350 down in the basement that is about 90% complete.  I built the thing but I never painted it or installed the electronics and hardware.  What if, instead of buying a guitar, I brought the “Ryanbacker” one step closer to life?  So, that’s what I did.  I took it out, took stock of what needed to happen next, did a few woodworking and masking tape things to it, and ordered some paint for it from StewMac.  Once I had gotten as far as I could with that I was in the mood to do something else.   I owed my grandma a letter so I sat down at my typewriter and wrote it.  In the letter I mentioned a song I recently recorded so I decided I should burn a CD for her with a few tunes, including that one.  I logged on to the studio computer and before I knew it I was cataloging some old session files and had made some new reference mixes of some old tapes.  And so it went, all day, one thing followed from the one before and instead of going to bed with another day of nothingness, I went to bed feeling pretty OK with how the day went.  It carried over to Sunday.  I woke up in the morning and decided that drawing sounded like an enjoyable thing to do and I drew a picture of Buckley because he happened to be right there, modeling for me.  When I was going through old tapes on the studio computer I discovered a couple of demos for songs I had written/recorded in the late 90’s that I had no recollection of.  One of them was going through my head much of the day and when I woke up this morning it was still there along with a few new musical ideas.  I’ve been pretty starved for musical ideas for quite a while.  So that was nice.

The point of all this is that I had to give myself the initial push off the couch but once I was doing stuff, other stuff just followed, and none of it was life changing but it was all better than another day sitting and being depressed.  I collected together some drawings, paintings, and other things I have made into some albums on Facebook just to remind myself of what I can do when I just DO something and it all helped drag me a couple of degrees further out of the dumps.

When the Ryanbacker paint gets here, I’ll paint it.  I did another drawing this morning before work, this time a pencil sketch self-portrait.  I intend to pick some project today and make it go forward a bit, but I don’t know what it will be.  I’m not particularly in the mood to do any particular thing, but that’s not the point.  Doing the thing will help me be in the mood to do another thing, etc, etc.  That’s the point.  I will forget this again and again and I will remember it again and again until I die, but, it will never stop being true.