It's been cold here in the Southeast. Quite cold. Not Minnesota negative umpty-million cold, but temps in the teens are plenty frickin' cold in a state where buying anti-freeze is something most people will do maybe once in their lives. Water lines have broken in Jackson, MS. Miami got a killing frost. My ponds have been frozen for two weeks.
As a result, the uninsulated, dilapidated hulk I live in has been a cold prison for the last couple of weeks. I've been pouring wood into my heater like it was gasoline into a Hummer, in a futile attempt to keep the atmosphere in my living room above freezing. I've given up on warm. 47°F seems to be the best one can hope for, but you can't see your breath at that temperature, so it at least makes it seem more pleasant.
As such, I've spent a lot of time wearing a coat and sitting on my couch wishing the mercury in the thermometer to rise. Which, no offense to the Tibetan monks who supposedly can do this at will, it hasn't.
So being dark and cold and slightly poor (the state has a weird payment system and I don't get paid between Dec 22 and Jan 15) isn't the sort of thing that leads a person to be cheery. I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder on occasion, and I have a handwritten note on my calendar for the month of February saying "It's okay, you'll be fine in March, calm down." But the combination of the weather and the poverty and the worn-out frozen feeling that my heart and bones had been replaced with those of an ice giant, have left me feeling that same old familiar wrung-out depression.
Fortunately, us music addicts have an easy route to self-medication. Mine has been the album "Weathervanes" from the Freelance Whales. A slightly dark, surreal, bouncy plate of "Hey-it's-not-so-bad-Bucko!" has kept me chugging along through the cold, dark nights. And hey, here's the band performing in a cold dark place, and they're smiling, so yeah. It works.
