Robert Manners

Today I Feel Sad

There's this website called Model Launch, which is all about male modeling; I rely on this website for light and fluffy entertainment, eye-candy, and variegated silliness. I was therefore taken quite aback to receive an update this morning that 25-year-old model Brian Bianchini (pictured above) committed suicide the other day during a downward spiral of depression, under which he had been suffering for quite some time. Though he was a local SF boy, I certainly didn't know him, but my heart nevertheless goes out to his friends and family. As with all suicides, I feel so sorry that life was such a torment to this boy that he preferred to end it. Such suffering should not have to be borne. But there it is.



This kind of news is not the best way to start off your day. Especially as I have been feeling kind of depressed myself for the last couple of days. Though my depression certainly isn't suicidal, it leaves me in a place where the destruction of a beautiful young man I didn't even know weighs with undue heaviness on my soul. It leaves me in a place where minor irritations like a temporary DSL outage at work or an ill-considered comment from someone at a meeting can bring me to the brink of a screaming fit of tears. It leaves me in a place where I just want to get back into bed with a gallon tub of Kozy Shack tapioca and a roster of grim German movies on VHS.



I just feel sad, is all. The wonder of Recovery is that you get to feel sad without having to do anything about it. Some days I'm sad, some days I'm happy, some days I'm pissy, some days I'm giddy. Not one of these moods will last very long, so why try to control them? Just experience them as they come along. I would of course prefer to be happy today, I'd even take giddy... but I'd also prefer to be rich and gorgeous and hung like a pony. That's not the hand I was dealt this life around.



Analogy: Life is a game of 40,000-card stud; some hands are low and some hands are high; some hands have aces and kings showing but mismatched twos and fours in the hole, so it's hard to tell what hand others are playing; you might run out of money before the end of the game, you might decide to fold your hand. Each day is a new card, and today dealt me a sad card. The next card in the hand, I don't know what, but I'm going to keep hoping for aces, I'm going to keep betting on each card, with prudence when I'm not too sure and with daring when I'm feeling lucky. I'm not going to fold until I'm out of chips and credit.



One gets dressed and goes to work and runs errands and so on and so forth. Or at least I do. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, that credit-card bill isn't going to pay itself. I could take a sick-day, or more correctly a sad-day, but I think it would be better exercise for my soul to try and stick it out instead. Sometimes these sad days turn out well later on. I just wish I could find my box of Blues Drops. Methinks I might be needing them today.