National Day of Action: Don't Buy ExxonMobil: Corporate Culprits: Global Warming & Energy: Greenpeace USA

Well it's a cold cold dark dark day in Minnesota.  Terrible plane crash broke everybody's hearts.  And so it means a lot to us that you came to our show... so glad that you came, and all these wonderful musicians here.  Not here to do a eulogy or make a memorial.  The guy already has a city named after him, this one right here that we're in, so what else can you do?  <applause>   So we're just going to do our show, just do our show, with a heavy heart which makes it all the more important to do it. 

Garrison Keillor, introducing 'A Prarie Home Companion' on October 26, 2002, in St. Paul, Minnesota

Can I tell you that I cried tonight, listening to this? 

Last winter's depression never quite lifted.  Spring came and I observed it through a glass; a silent film of sun, life, and fear. 

(I know you don't want to hear any of this.  But then again, it is only a blog.  Besides, if I was going to write without whining, I should have begun twenty-five years ago.)

By mid-July it was clear that this season's depression ice cap would never entirely recede and I reduced my plans for joy to a somewhat cooler, more brief event that I hoped would occur in late summer.  But when that time arrived, the familiar glaciers that had never given up sight of me, were already advancing.  I pretended until October there would be joy. 

How does it happen at the end?  When all is said (and written) and done, do our lives become enough because that's all they were?  Does anything and everything constitute an adequate response to the challenge we accepted by coming to life?  If so, what happens to what could have been?  What happens to the achievements unattained, the magnificent machinations of human heart and mind that were splintered beneath depression's dumbing ice and cold?  And are these unfinished hopes proof for the logician that something more must come; an afterlife?  Reincarnation?  A chance to finish? 

(I know this is all just tedious, rhetorical BS.  But then again, it's all I have.)

I have lost some weight.  For many months I have been host to a ferociously itchy rash.  Night sweats, once rare and negligible, have become frequent and extreme.  A long awaited illness is afoot, I fear that nevermore will the landscape of my health be flat and even.  I fear that I am upon the flanks of my last mountain.