Real Depressed Men Don't Cry
Posted by JohnD
Photo Credit: Kenn Kiser – MorgueFile
Not sure where the following came from, but it turned up on my cyber doorstep recently. I guess some men have trouble living up to their fantasies.Ok – everybody knows depressed people have these outbursts of grief and crying for no apparent reason. At least some people do. But certainly not me, a guy – I’m not going to start springing leaks in my well-caulked hull of a head. Real depressed men don’t do that. Certainly I never do that – not ever – well, hardly ever. And should an accident like that happen, a spill of mental incontinence when least expected, it’s not going to happen in public. No way.
So what happened the other day was totally out of line. I was driving to work, having picked just the right time to miss all the jams and fly down the freeway, when I’m listening to the radio. Not just any pop tune bouncing beat kind of thing but the stealth ego breakers of NPR. Serves me right. The story had something to do with concentration camp survivors. They had been contacted by this dying veteran with a shoebox full of snapshots taken of a liberated camp at the close of the war. The guy found out who was in the pictures and delivered them to the survivors. Then they all had a celebration to honor the guy after his death – all those happy tears – and somebody made a movie of the whole thing. OK, very moving, very ennobling, but I don’t know these people. What’s it to me? And there I am exiting the freeway onto the downtown street a few blocks from my office when these lurchy guttural swellings started rising up in my throat. What the hell is this? Am I about to throw up as I’m pulling into the parking lot? No, it was worse than that. I’m fighting down this sobmachinegun choking my breath and pushing wet stuff out of my eyes.
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