Japan's Obsession with Perfect Fruit

Giving fruit as a gift is a common custom in Japan. But this fruit is not your normal greengrocers’ produce, complete with bumps, bruises and blemishes. The pick of the crop is grown with exquisite care and attention to detail - and commands an eye-watering price when it comes to market.

Classical music plays softly over the speakers in the Senbikiya shop in central Tokyo. The uniformed members of staff are politely attentive, ushering the customers to chairs and crouching down beside them to take their orders.

The ceilings are high, the fittings elegant, the lighting tasteful and the displays are beautiful. But this is not some designer handbag emporium or high-end jewellery store. Senbikiya is a greengrocers.

Ushio Oshima is showing us around. He is a sixth-generation member of the shop’s founding family. The business began back in the 19th century, piling fruit high and selling it cheap.

Gift of gratitude

That was until the wife of the second-generation owner astutely realised the real money was to be made by inverting the business model. Now Senbikiya must surely be the most expensive fruit shop in the world.

There are apples, the size of a child’s head, with evenly red, blemish-free skin on sale for 2,100 yen, or $25 (£15.80). That’s each, not for a bag. Senbikiya Queen Strawberries come in boxes of twelve perfectly matched fruits at 6,825 yen, $83 (£52.40). Even on a slow day they sell 50 boxes.

Then there are the melons, each perfect, of course, and topped with identical T-shaped green stalks. They’re 34,650 yen, or $419 (£264.50), for three.

“We specialise in gift-giving, fruits as gifts,” says Mr Oshima. “So it really needs to look good. The appearance is a very important part of it. Then there’s the service. The combination is what you pay for.”

Japan has two gift-giving seasons a year, one in summer and one in winter. Family members exchange presents but the tradition goes well beyond that. People offer presents to express gratitude, such as to their bosses. Companies often send gifts to customers and business partners.

Senbikiya has carved out a niche for itself at the very top of the market. For the Japanese it is similar to Issey Miyake’s status among fashion lovers, or Rolls Royce to car aficionados. But the desire for fruit perfection goes well beyond that.

by Roland Buerk, BBC |  Read more:
Photo: Alfie Goodrich

Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young

Excerpted from an essay by David Foster Wallace

Television’s greatest appeal is that it is engaging without being at all demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. It’s the same in all low art that has as goal continued attention and patronage: it’s appealing precisely because it’s at once fun and easy. And the entrenchment of a culture built on Appeal helps explain a dark and curious thing: at a time when there are more decent and good and very good serious fiction writers at work in America than ever before, an American public enjoying unprecedented literacy and disposable income spends the vast bulk of its reading time and book dollar on fiction that is, by any fair standard, trash. Trash fiction is, by design and appeal, most like televised narrative: engaging without being demanding. But trash, in terms of both quality and popularity, is a much more sinister phenomenon. For while television has from its beginnings been openly motivated by—has been about—considerations of mass appeal and L.C.D. and profit, our own history is chock full of evidence that readers and societies may properly expect important, lasting contributions from a narrative art that under- stands itself as being about considerations more important than popularity and balance sheets. Entertainers can divert and engage and maybe even console; only artists can transfigure. Today’s trash writers are entertainers working artists’ turf. This in itself is nothing new. But television aesthetics, and television-like economics, have clearly made their unprecedented popularity and reward possible. And there seems to me to be a real danger that not only the forms but the norms of televised art will begin to supplant the standards of all narrative art. This would be a disaster.

by David Foster Wallace |  Read more: (PDF)

h/t: YMFY

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by Matthew David Brozik, McSweeney's |  Read more:

The Love Competition

The Love Competition is an unusual hybrid of a short documentary film and scientific study.

Brent Hoff, a filmmaker and editor of the video magazine Wholphin, teamed up with Stanford University’s Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging to investigate the neurochemical nature of love, with a competitive twist.

The beauty of the film, and the study, lies in how sincerely the research subjects tackle the task at hand. They share the stories of their greatest loves in amazingly heartfelt on-camera interviews.

From a 10-year-old kid to a couple that has been happily married for over 50 years, everyone describes love (or lack of it) differently.

For some, their time in the fMRI scanner has a transformative effect. In the end, of course, it isn’t really about winning anyway.

h/t GS

Two Tesla Coils, "Sweet Home Alabama"

Because why not, here are two Tesla coils covering Lynyrd Skynyrd's classic rock standard. Will the two Tesla coils remain together as a musical duo, or will one decide to experience the larger acclaim of solo stardom while the other descends into a harrowing maelstrom of addiction and debauchery? Only time will tell. [Via]

h/t: The Awl

Living With Your Wanderlust

So you want to go away! Let’s talk about it. Do you have your list? You know, your list, the list of countries you want to visit ranked in order of desire. I keep mine handy at all times. Right now it goes: Mongolia, Egypt, India, Iceland, Greece, the Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Argentina, New Zealand, Antarctica, Thailand, Finland, everywhere else in the history of everything ever. (Antarctica is a recent addition.)

While I’m still gathering experience in the sphere of actually going away, I am considered a master in wanting-to-go. Fourteen years in suburban New Jersey allowed me the time to cultivate such skills as map collecting, airplane doodling, and fantasy packing, which is when you imagine fitting your life into one piece of carry-on luggage and walking out of this town for good. You know that game, right? I sat in Geometry class, inked in the margins of my notebook, and made strict rules for my suitcase. No more than two pairs of shoes. One lightweight jacket. One ready camera.

Recently, a friend wrote me an email that included the line “I do really want to be on my own for a bit in a new place.” “I feel like I need more independence and to get away from the crazy awesome but intense and co-dependent support network I have here so that I can figure out what I am doing with my life,” she said. I responded immediately and in all caps, like this: “AHHHHHH.” Only more and more H’s could express how fully I agree with her. The thing is, I’m away right now. I’m away yet I still want to go.

Like I said, I don’t have much experience in this. After high school, I enrolled in a college 20 miles away from my hometown. After college, I moved five neighborhoods south of campus. Every few weekends I took a bus back to my parents’ house to eat roast chicken and then lie in a post-dinner haze in front of their fireplace. In a short lifetime, I’ve managed to find some of the most incredible friends in the world, who forgave me years of suburban rage, indulged my cravings for Ethiopian food, and organized slumber parties around the movie Jumanji. Life was perfect and whole.

Still, I checked airfarewatchdog.com on my lunch breaks.

Still, I flung myself against my boyfriend’s futon and whined, “I’ve never been anywhere. Not anywhere!” as he patted my back.

Still, after a while, I left.

I only moved six months ago, so time isn’t on my side — but if we’re awarding points for distance, then listen up: I’m in Kamchatka. Oh, you didn’t watch that PBS nature documentary? Or you don’t know this place from the board game Risk, because you don’t play Risk, because you’re not my dad? Kamchatka is a volcanic peninsula on the far eastern edge of Russia. It holds titles like “highest recorded density of brown bears on Earth,” “only geyser field in Eurasia,” and “longest occupier of the top spot on my places-to-go list.” It’s a fantasy suspended on the end of the world.

At the end of August, I finally packed my suitcase, extorted promises from the boy I love to wait for my eventual return, and flew 20 hours away from home to this distant, hissing, beautiful land. Here, I rent a brown and yellow two-bedroom apartment that comes complete with a cat. And aren’t I happy? Didn’t I dream of this? A master of wanting, didn’t I fantasize about this exact existence for three years before my plane took off for Russia? (Yes, yes, yes.) Why, then, do I sit in my bedroom in Kamchatka, watch movies about Kamchatka on my computer, and long to travel to the place I already am? Why do I ride the public bus here and start shaking with the sudden awful desire to flee?

Wanting to go is a hard habit to break.

by Julia Philips, The Hairpin |  Read more:

Charlie Haden Quartet West feat. Norah Jones

via:

Adel Kassem. No Title 01. Acrylics on canvas, 100 x 100 cm.
via:

Pot Activists vs. Pot Activists

Every 53 minutes, someone in Washington State gets arrested for pot. That could be a thing of the past before the year is out. Initiative 502, on the November ballot, is the whole shebang: legalization, taxation, and regulation of marijuana. We're not just talking about making pot possession punishable by, say, a $100 fine, like Massachusetts did in 2008. Instead, I-502 would remove all penalties for adults 21 and older who possess up to an ounce of marijuana. It would also license pot agriculture, allow trucks to drive around distributing pot like beer, and permit stores to sell pot over the counter.

No state has ever done this. Passing I-502 would put Washington State at the forefront of the national movement to finally end pot prohibition. (The 10,000 annual pot arrests in Washington State are just a sliver of the 853,838 arrests in the United States, where there's one pot bust every 37 seconds.) And if current polling can be believed, I-502 will pass. In January, SurveyUSA found that 51 percent of likely November voters in this state support legalizing and taxing marijuana, while only 41 percent oppose it (8 percent are undecided). A poll two months earlier by the same firm found it passing with 57 percent of the voters. This is also a presidential election year in which a statewide gay-marriage referendum will appear on the ballot, drawing out more of the young, progressive voters who pollsters say are inclined to approve pot legalization.

In nearly all respects—from setting specific new penalties for driving while intoxicated to placing excise taxes at each stage of production—I-502 copies the template we use for alcohol. And unlike other failed pot initiatives that have come before, heralded by pot activists with little money, this campaign has national funding and a credible phalanx of backers. The initiative's sponsor, New Approach Washington, has raised more than $1.1 million thus far and is led by former US Attorney John McKay, Seattle city attorney Pete Holmes, travel icon Rick Steves, and former health department officials and bar association presidents. The campaign is managed by ACLU of Washington's Alison Holcomb, a former marijuana defense attorney, and it has the financing of out-of-state billionaires George Soros and Peter Lewis.

"This has been a reformer's wet dream from 3,000 miles away on K Street," says Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), sitting in his office in Washington, DC. He says that NORML has endorsed dozens of initiatives since it was founded in 1970—most of them failed, of course—but that this initiative's combination of leaders gives it an unprecedented shot at winning. "I have never seen a better assembled public-relations effort, a better group of local community leaders," St. Pierre says.

But there's a hitch.

"Despite all those good things I just said," St. Pierre warns, "the one thing that stands out in Washington is that there wasn't sufficient buy-in from the existing and important grassroots community."

It's true: The groups that traditionally oppose legalization—conservatives and cops—are not the ones leading the campaign to kill I-502. The people leading the campaign to kill I-502 are, paradoxically, other pot activists—specifically, pot activists with ties to the medical marijuana community: dispensary owners, medical marijuana lawyers, medical marijuana patients, medical pot trade magazines, doctors who give medical marijuana authorizations, etc.

by Dominic Holden, The Stranger |  Read more:
Photo: Kelly O

Eels

Eels - Hospital Food from Salemlongo on Vimeo.

eugene wolfberg. Vigilant indifference. Oil on canvas.
via:

The Man Who Broke Atlantic City

Don Johnson won nearly $6 million playing blackjack in one night, single-handedly decimating the monthly revenue of Atlantic City’s Tropicana casino. Not long before that, he’d taken the Borgata for $5 million and Caesars for $4 million. Here’s how he did it.

Don Johnson finds it hard to remember the exact cards. Who could? At the height of his 12-hour blitz of the Tropicana casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, last April, he was playing a hand of blackjack nearly every minute.

Dozens of spectators pressed against the glass of the high-roller pit. Inside, playing at a green-felt table opposite a black-vested dealer, a burly middle-aged man in a red cap and black Oregon State hoodie was wagering $100,000 a hand. Word spreads when the betting is that big. Johnson was on an amazing streak. The towers of chips stacked in front of him formed a colorful miniature skyline. His winning run had been picked up by the casino’s watchful overhead cameras and drawn the close scrutiny of the pit bosses. In just one hand, he remembers, he won $800,000. In a three-hand sequence, he took $1.2 million.

The basics of blackjack are simple. Almost everyone knows them. You play against the house. Two cards are placed faceup before the player, and two more cards, one down, one up, before the dealer. A card’s suit doesn’t matter, only its numerical value—each face card is worth 10, and an ace can be either a one or an 11. The goal is to get to 21, or as close to it as possible without going over. Scanning the cards on the table before him, the player can either stand or keep taking cards in an effort to approach 21. Since the house’s hand has one card facedown, the player can’t know exactly what the hand is, which is what makes this a game.

As Johnson remembers it, the $800,000 hand started with him betting $100,000 and being dealt two eights. If a player is dealt two of a kind, he can choose to “split” the hand, which means he can play each of the cards as a separate hand and ask for two more cards, in effect doubling his bet. That’s what Johnson did. His next two cards, surprisingly, were also both eights, so he split each again. Getting four cards of the same number in a row doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Johnson says he was once dealt six consecutive aces at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. He was now playing four hands, each consisting of a single eight-card, with $400,000 in the balance.

He was neither nervous nor excited. Johnson plays a long game, so the ups and downs of individual hands, even big swings like this one, don’t matter that much to him. He is a veteran player. Little interferes with his concentration. He doesn’t get rattled. With him, it’s all about the math, and he knows it cold. Whenever the racily clad cocktail waitress wandered in with a fresh whiskey and Diet Coke, he took it from the tray.

The house’s hand showed an upturned five. Arrayed on the table before him were the four eights. He was allowed to double down—to double his bet—on any hand, so when he was dealt a three on the first of his hands, he doubled his bet on that one, to $200,000. When his second hand was dealt a two, he doubled down on that, too. When he was dealt a three and a two on the next two hands, he says, he doubled down on those, for a total wager of $800,000.

It was the dealer’s turn. He drew a 10, so the two cards he was showing totaled 15. Johnson called the game—in essence, betting that the dealer’s down card was a seven or higher, which would push his hand over 21. This was a good bet: since all face cards are worth 10, the deck holds more high cards than low. When the dealer turned over the house’s down card, it was a 10, busting him. Johnson won all four hands.

Johnson didn’t celebrate. He didn’t even pause. As another skyscraper of chips was pushed into his skyline, he signaled for the next hand. He was just getting started.

by Mark Bowden, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail

[ed. Wow. Read the whole thing if you can stomach it. It gets worse with every paragraph.]

At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we'll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The ingenious plan to suck multiple fees out of the unemployment checks of jobless workers? Take your eyes off them for 10 seconds and guaranteed, they'll be into some shit again: This bank is like the world's worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt's funeral. They're out of control, yet they'll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents who refuse to believe their 40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard.

It's been four years since the government, in the name of preventing a depression, saved this megabank from ruin by pumping $45 billion of taxpayer money into its arm. Since then, the Obama administration has looked the other way as the bank committed an astonishing variety of crimes – some elaborate and brilliant in their conception, some so crude that they'd be beneath your average street thug. Bank of America has systematically ripped off almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, depositors, homeowners, shareholders, pensioners and taxpayers. It brought tens of thousands of Americans to foreclosure court using bogus, "robo-signed" evidence – a type of mass perjury that it helped pioneer. It hawked worthless mortgages to dozens of unions and state pension funds, draining them of hundreds of millions in value. And when it wasn't ripping off workers and pensioners, it was helping to push insurance giants like AMBAC into bankruptcy by fraudulently inducing them to spend hundreds of millions insuring those same worthless mortgages.

But despite being the very definition of an unaccountable corporate villain, Bank of America is now bigger and more dangerous than ever. It controls more than 12 percent of America's bank deposits (skirting a federal law designed to prohibit any firm from controlling more than 10 percent), as well as 17 percent of all American home mortgages. By looking the other way and rewarding the bank's bad behavior with a massive government bailout, we actually allowed a huge financial company to not just grow so big that its collapse would imperil the whole economy, but to get away with any and all crimes it might commit. Too Big to Fail is one thing; it's also far too corrupt to survive.

All the government bailouts succeeded in doing was to make the bank even more prone to catastrophic failure – and now that catastrophe might finally be at hand. Bank of America's share price has plunged into the single digits, and the bank faces battles in courtrooms all over America to avoid paying back the hundreds of billions it stole from everyone in sight. Its credit rating, already downgraded to a few rungs above junk status, could plummet with the next bad analyst report, causing a frenzied rush to the exits by creditors, investors and stockholders – an institutional run on the bank.

They're in deep trouble, but they won't die, because our current president, like the last one, apparently believes it's better to project a false image of financial soundness than to allow one of our oligarchic banks to collapse under the weight of its own corruption. Last year, the Federal Reserve allowed Bank of America to move a huge portfolio of dangerous bets into a side of the company that happens to be FDIC-insured, putting all of us on the hook for as much as $55 trillion in irresponsible gambles. Then, in February, the Justice Department's so-called foreclosure settlement, which will supposedly provide $26 billion in relief for ripped-off homeowners, actually rewarded the bank with a legal waiver that will allow it to escape untold billions in lawsuits. And this month the Fed will release the results of its annual stress test, in which the bank will once again be permitted to perpetuate its fiction of solvency by grossly overrating the mountains of toxic loans on its books. At this point, the rescue effort is so sweeping and elaborate that it goes far beyond simply gouging the tax dollars of millions of struggling families, many of whom have already been ripped off by the bank – it's making the government, and by extension all of us, full-blown accomplices to the fraud.

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:
Illustration by Victor Juhasz

The Me Who Knew It

I was in my late thirties before it struck me that there was something odd about the tableau I have in my mind of a familiar living-room, armchair, my father in it, silvery hair, moustache, brown suede lace-ups, and me, aged six or so, sitting on his knee. The layout is correct – I have been back to the block of flats and sat in the living-room of the flat next door, with the same floor plan. Door in the right place; chair I’m sure accurate, a burgundy moquette; patterned carpet; windows looking out onto the brick wall of the offices opposite. My father looks like my father in pictures I have of him. I look like … well, actually I don’t have any pictures of me at that age. But I’m sure I looked pretty much like the memory I can call up at will. It’s not particularly interesting as a memory. Nothing special is happening. It could be a painting, or a photograph, except that I shift about as a child does sitting on her father’s knee. Here’s the thing, though: I can see the entire picture. I can, you may have noticed, see myself. My observation point is from the top of the wall opposite where we are sitting, just below the ceiling, looking down across the room towards me and my father in the chair. I can see me clearly, but what I can’t do is position myself on my father’s knee and become a part of the picture, even though I am in it. I can’t in other words look out at the room from my place on the chair. How can that be a memory? And if it isn’t, what is it? When I think about my childhood, that is invariably one of the first ‘memories’ to spring up, ready and waiting: an untraumatic, slightly-moving picture. It never crossed my mind to notice the anomalous point of view until I was middle-aged. Before then it went without saying that it was a ‘real’ memory. Afterwards, it became an indicator of how false recollection can be.

Memory has always been a worry to us. The thing we feel sure makes us ourselves (no memory, no me) is also something we know to be treacherous, overaccommodating, fugitive: delightfully and fearfully unreliable. We’re stuck inside our own heads with our recollections (or old photos and now videos that have become memories) and there is no way, except sometimes by trusting to the probably unreliable memories of other people, to be absolutely sure that we know what we think we know, or are who we think we are. That anxiety about the accuracy of our grasp of our past selves accounts for the way many other alarming aspects of being alive have become attached to the subject of memory; the theme changes and goes through cycles over time (law, war, politics, medicine, family, sexuality), but always serves to remind us to worry about the consequences of never being quite sure of what we and others remember. People have thrown all the expertise they can find or invent at the problem. We have asked shamans, clairvoyants, hypnotists, historians, scientists, surgeons, law-makers, artists and writers, social psychologists and psychoanalysts to investigate the truth, the facts, the interpretations, so to reassure us about the mechanism and reliability of remembering, but, as Alison Winter’s deft study of 20th-century memory controversies concludes, we haven’t come close to a definitive answer.

Yet, alongside our anxiety about the trustworthiness of remembering, there is an opposite pull, which is quite as powerful, towards the commonsense feeling that we can all know and trust our own memories; that we know our own minds. Memories when they rise feel reliable. Whatever scientists or other experts do in the laboratory, library or consulting room, individuals, including the experts themselves when off duty, proceed in their everyday lives as if their personal memories are a valid basis for action and interaction, just as physicists continue to walk on apparently solid floors while knowing that they are largely made up of empty space. We would be mad not to. Underlying the compelling feeling that we are our memories is a further common-sense assumption that our entire lives are accurately retained somewhere in the brain ‘bank’ as laid-down memories of our experience, and that we retrieve our lives and selves from an ever expanding stockpile of recollections. Or we can’t, and then that feeling that it’s on the tip of our tongue, or there but just out of range, still encourages us to think that everything we have known or done is in us somewhere, if only our digging equipment were sharper. It’s considered a fault not with recording, but with playback.

by Jenny Diski, London Review of Books |  Read more: 
Image:  Pablo Picasso, Repose, 1908 via:

What Makes Sushi Great?

A friend of mine once met a delegation of revered Japanese chefs. There was a wizened gentleman among them who was clearly the leader. He spoke little, but the other star chefs deferred to him, paid him obvious respect. My friend finally asked, quietly, “So, what does the old guy do?” The response: “He has mastered rice.”

To be honest, I don’t know what that means. I mean, I know the difference between a pot of rice that I like eating and a pot that’s gluey, but there aren’t a whole lot of points between the two. And yet here is a man whose claim to fame among master chefs is that he makes rice better than the rest of them, and to accept that is to accept that there is a level of cooking that most of us will never comprehend. At some point, cooking is not a matter of skill; it’s a matter of understanding, of learning to see the differences between one perfectly good pot of rice and another, of the minute details in something that, for most anyone else, is pure pearly blandness. Truly great cooking is, in this way, first an act of learning to see, and then a striving to do. This is why, among chefs, the truism is that simple food is hard.

Sushi, of course, is the ultimate in simple food: mostly just rice and a piece of raw fish, it would seem that anyone with a knife and one functioning hand can make it. But take an impossible eye for detail and apply it to fish—Where did it come from? How long should you age it before serving for best flavor? How long should you massage it to make it tender, but still have texture? Where should you cut a piece from, and at what angle, to highlight the flavors of different parts of the muscle? Since temperature affects aroma, how warm should you let the fish get in your hand before serving it? How hard do you press the fish into the rice to form a bite that has integrity, but is not dense?—and you begin to see where a simple food is not so simple. You don’t have to buy into all the minutiae a sushi master trades in to know that the pleasures of great sushi span from the animal to the emotional and the intellectual, which is a great trick for anything to pull off, let alone a piece of raw fish on rice.

What animates a sushi master? What drives someone to be so focused, to be a god of small things?

Jiro Ono, 85 years old and counting, is a revered sushi chef who runs a restaurant inside a Tokyo subway station, and Jiro Dreams of Sushi is easily the best, most beautiful movie about sushi you will see this year, or, let’s face it, probably any other. The film is part documentary bio-pic, part food-blogger’s wet dream. (OMG, did you see the super-macro shot of that tuna??!? NOM NOM. Etc.) It doesn’t take us into the world of technique: Jiro has mastered rice, too—his rice dealer claims that he doesn’t bother to sell his best stuff to anyone else because they wouldn’t know what to do with it—but while he describes how he does it, the film never shows us the whys and what-fors of his method. (Though, as Silvia Killingsworth reports for the New Yorker, the French-American star chef Eric Ripert describes Jiro’s rice as “tasting like a cloud.”)

Instead, the movie focuses on the life of a man who is utterly devoted to his craft. Jiro doesn’t have a secret to why his sushi is more astonishing than anyone else’s. What he says, over and over, is that great sushi—and, by extension, greatness itself— is the result of hard work, of dedication, of a commitment to excellence that, in the end, trumps everything else in life.

by Francis Lam, Gilt Taste |  Read more:
Photos courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

Hidden San Francisco

Moraga Steps: If you happen to walk down these steps, this is all you’ll see,

 

another set of steep steps negotiating another steep SF hill. Turn around and you see what’s hiding on the risers.

 

 Nothing less than a map of the universe, in lovingly detailed mosaics.

 

From the bottom of the ocean,  with fish,

 

to the sky, with birds,

 

and up to the sun:

 

by LuminousMuse, Open Salon |  Read more:

Depression

Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation.

If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life.

It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too.

No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself. Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged.   

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Image: Zero

Self Portrait, Kkory

Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen - Drifting. Oil on panel, 100x100cm (2010)
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