Always on the Sunny Side

Damn. I have an upset stomach. I’ve had it for a couple of days. I won’t go into the grisly details. Maybe I have a bug, or maybe my stomach is reacting to the Advil I take at night for my aches and pains so I can get some of my half-assed sleep. If it’s that, who knows, maybe the Advil is eating a hole in my stomach and I will die of internal bleeding.

Or it could be that damn clock change a couple of weeks ago. I am very regular bowel-wise usually, but since the clock change I am not. I won’t go into the grisly details. It could be that because, as soon as the clocked changed, I took a nose dive into deeper depression, or whatever the hell my condition is. Just call it immense fatigue, plus exhaustion, massive ahedonia, and achy feet and limbs. Also my concentration nears zero. Each day is like a forced march across Siberia.

But I make myself work out every day, except the days I teach. If I work out on those days, I have no energy left for class. So yesterday, I went to the club, did 25 minutes on my machine, and went and took a steam bath. The steam bath looks god-awful these days (they are trying to repair it), but when there’s a lot of steam you really don’t notice.

So I sat down and I must have groaned because this guy hidden over there in the steam, asked how I was. I know him from around. Not so good I said, and he said, had a long day, and I said, no it’s a bit bigger than that. I am depressed and ever since the clock changed I am more depressed than usual. Usually, I wouldn’t say that, but yesterday I was too damned depressed to make anything up. He said the clock change bothered him too and after a brief pause indicated that he was taking something, some med, I forget the name of it. I took it once for a couple of days and it made me want to jump out of my skin. I hated it. But it seems to work for him. We are all different, he said. The guy has a philosophical streak.

After the steam, the guy kept talking. Turns out he hates Sunday. Me too. But, he continued, he used to hate Sunday because everything was closed, but now you know everything was open. Frankly I wasn’t following his reasoning. He was raised in Alaska, he said, where it was dark like all the time, but now he is in Santa Barbara where it is light all the time. Yeah, I said, that’s true, not grasping his point. Where are you from, he said; South Carolina, I said. Well, he said, Santa Barbara is better than South Carolina, isn’t it?

Whereupon, this guy who is disrobing to go swim, says, Hey, there’s nothing wrong with South Carolina. Turns out this guy is working in CA for a year and he lives in South Carolina. He has a place in Greenville no less, and knows where Laurens is, and Clinton, where Brother Steve lives. So we get to talking. He seemed like a nice guy, though I did not get his name.

I think the guy from the steam room was trying to say and trying himself to stay “Keep on the Sunny Side.”  But I am just no good at the power of positive thinking.

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