Seasonal Affective Disorder: Mid-Winter Blues

It's the weary look on my dog's face as he stares down subzero temperatures outside the window, loathing the inexorable prospect of having to shit in a blizzard of cold. It's the groan of my old Chevy truck in the pre-dawn morning as it grunts in rusted agony, jaded by too many winters, knowing it is too early for such nonsense and longing for retirement hibernation in some quiet junkyard at last. It's the old familiar feeling of another date gone awry - one that like all the rest before it sounded promising during the correspondence stages but had dulled upon arrival or perhaps even before that; and it's trudging back to my car after a half-hearted goodbye - two lonesome footprints in the snow - when that loathsome familiar thought pops back into my head that maybe I already found my soul mate in life but had gone and thrown it away, leaving everything hereinafter vain, for naught. It's sitting in the dank, cold basement of a church at an AA meeting, the smell of cheap coffee and gasoline-stained dungarees wafting in the air to compose such a sad smell, wondering after all how I found myself here on a Friday night with all these tortured souls and wondering if I look just as beaten down by life as the other worn out faces around the table. It's another Saturday night, bored and restless, reading Kerouac as the weatherman on the television set tells of yet another blizzard about collapse onto the town and relating far too much to Jack's sad prose and his protagonist's longing for something more out of life. It's the thought, frightening and real, that my life has become nothing but a revolving door, that maybe as Springsteen lamented, the glory days have all passed me by. It's the deep longing for a some sort of spark, something to keep me moving forward, something to keep the rust from compiling in my winter-sick soul. It's waiting for something better.