The Modern Depression Guidebook

Modern Depression Guidebook - Brody - 1.
Praise for Modern Depression Guidebook
Dylan Brody has written an upside-down handbook that gratifies true depressives with its wickedly
surgical approach. Your tour guide stopped changing into clean clothes days ago. He ticks off Bottom
Ten lists with laser-scope accuracy, and with whatever is the opposite of verve. The Modern Depression
Guidebook is for people who think that the Gratefulness Movement should have filed for bankruptcy
long ago. He’d ask you to sign onto a class action suit against cheerfulness, but he knows that would be
too much trouble, and pointless. Just get his book, if you’re not too tired.
--Harold Fethe, anthropologist and S&P 500 executive
The Modern Depression Guidebook not only had me laughing but impressed me at the way it
approaches healing and understanding of depression from an absolutely unprecedented direction. Your
book will be excellent in any psychiatric setting dealing with depression. Your new approach is
spectacular.
--Barbara Thomas-Horton, MSW, Group (Depression) Therapist, Hollywood
Memorial Hospital, Hollywood, FL
As a long-time member of the National Association of the Mentally Ill (NAMI) and having had a
lifetime of experience with people suffering depressions of all kinds, I can say that I am thrilled that the
hilarious but didactic Modern Depression Guidebook by Dylan Brody has been written. It is hard to
believe no one thought of this clever, back-door approach to healing or helping depression with
laughter. Grateful for this book.
--Beverly Shrum Dale, NAMI, Asheville, NC

www.dylanbrody.com
PREFACE
Like millions of other Americans I sometimes get depressed. This happens

frequently enough that I am getting quite good at it. My mood can swing like Diana
Krall on a three-martini lunch. On a bright day when everything is going well I can find
the hidden source of sorrow, the magic trigger and... Voila! The bleakness of the world
comes clear to me and once more I am depressed.
Through years of experience I have developed -- or observed myself to be
practicing -- certain straightforward techniques to help a momentary sadness build upon
itself, resonating and reverberating like feedback, doubling and redoubling down the
corridors of my empty little life until, at last, I am comfortably ensconced in my
apartment, using up my sick days to watch Little House on the Prairie with my cat who
has made it very clear that he will not be coming near enough to comfort me until I take
a shower.
With this book, I hope to share some of my hard-won expertise with others who
may seek to improve their skills in experiencing, maintaining, and utilizing a depression.
Whether you are a one-time depression-sufferer due to a painful break-up or a
chronic depressive whose sadness recurs regularly, there is no excuse for not putting
time and effort into getting the lowest possible lows out of your moments of despair.
Here is where this Guidebook comes in.
With useful exercises to help you improve your sense of self-loathing,
easy-access listings of worldly injustices to ponder, and helpful hints on how to break
your personal hygiene habit, this book is sure to have your mood spiraling downward
like Larry Flynt at the Guggenheim.
But depth is not all there is to a depression. A depression must also be valued
for its duration. In order to ensure that a bout of melancholia lasts a good long while,
attention must be paid to detail in the vital settling-in period. If you stick with the
program, follow the simple, step-by step instructions in this book, cut your personal
productivity, and increase your TV-watching time sufficiently, I can personally promise
that you will see no mood brighten before its time.
Some of what I say may already be familiar to you. You may have figured out
on your own that a steady diet of Chips Ahoy cookies and Yoo-Hoo throws off your
sugar balance and helps to generate nausea and palpitations, which you are then free to
interpret as a horrible, life-threatening illness. Still, you are likely to find other useful
ideas that may never have come to you naturally. You may have overlooked the
benefits of leaving your laundry unwashed and scattered about your home in unsorted
piles, for instance. It may never have occurred to you to deliberately skew your sleep
patterns so that you snooze through business hours and have the long, lonely night to
ponder the missed opportunities with your eyes riveted to the wee-hours’ televised
parade of skin-care infomercials and send-us-your-gold ads.
From the handy list of unhealthy comfort foods to the easy-to-follow instructions
on how to alienate your friends, this book will help you make your next depression the
best ever. And once the blues have deepened into black, even old hands at the sadness
game are bound to find new insight and inspiration in a unique and entirely original
approach to the contemplation of suicide. You will feel your spirit plummet as your
fleeting fantasies of death take shape in your mind, forming complex and intricate plots,
leaving you with a dark, lingering death wish of which you can really be proud.
So, whether you are happy enough to delude yourself into believing that life is a
pleasant experience of which depression is a small but necessary part or depressed
enough to realize that life is miserable with occasional flashes of illusory joy, you are
ready for this Guidebook. Whether you are in it now, or you feel with a gnawing
certainty that it is coming soon, you know depression is a fact of life. You might as well
give it your best shot.
ARE YOU A GOOD CANDIDATE FOR DEPRESSION? Take the quiz:
1) Are you sad right now?
2) Have you ever been sad?
3) Do your moods change depending on how you feel?

4) Have you ever experienced great joy that you are not experiencing at
this moment?
5) Do you feel the occasional need to be reassured by those whom you
trust?
6) Do you feel the occasional desire to avoid talking to those whom you
trust and could offer you reassurance?
7) Do you view each day as a great, gaping maw of time that must be
filled?
8) Do you view each day as a bright opportunity for change even though
no day to date has ever brought that change?
9) Is success an opportunity for disappointment?
10) Have you ever experienced success, opportunity, or disappointment?
11) Have you ever considered suicide?
12) Do you believe in god(s)?
13) Do you now or have you ever had parents?
If you answered “yes” to none or more of these questions, congratulations! You qualify
as a candidate.
INTRODUCTION
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
-- Words of wisdom from some

idiot who thought it was a good
idea to make a thousand-mile
journey on foot.
Recent years have shown a marked increase in the popularity of depression as a

subject of literature, a topic of conversation and, for many people, a way of life.
It is important, right off, that a distinction be made between depression and
sadness. Sadness is a normally occurring human emotion caused by outside stimuli.
For example, it may cause you some sadness if you are staring at your monthly bills,
compiling a list of expensive things that you own and could sell. You cannot really
qualify for your merit badge in depression, though, until you stare out at a swimming
pool, compiling a list of heavy things that you own and could tie to your feet.
My own belief about depression is that it serves a valuable and vital purpose. As
uncomfortable as the sensation of hunger may be, the body gives us an important signal
when we need nourishment; consistently ignore or medicate this sensation and
malnutrition of some sort will most certainly ensue. Hunger, rather, must be fed, staved
off for a time, always with the knowledge that it will return to torment us later. So too
does the necessary discomfort of depression serve a purpose. Some might say it is a
psychic reminder to spend a while looking inward, or to focus on those around you.
Some would say that at the heart of every depression lies a self-esteem problem which
must be corrected, or a childhood experience which must be remembered and
reexamined. I believe that at the heart of every depression is an ages-old genetic
memory of a simple fact so long forgotten or denied that most of us are able to spend
much of our lives pretending that it is not so. The fact is this: Life on Earth really,
really sucks.1
FIG. 1
1 see fig. 1
CHAPTER ONE
GETTING STARTED
“Opportunity is rare, and a wise man will never let it go
by him.”
-- Bayard Taylor (This sounds really

impressive, but tell the truth. How often do
you really hear people talk about this guy’s
great accomplishments?)
Do not miss the opportunity to get your depression started. Sometimes the initial
indicators can go unnoticed and a perfectly good depression can slip away before it
even has a chance to get started.
Keep your eyes open for the signs. When you awaken in the morning, is your first
thought a twinge of resentment at the sunlight for barging in unceremoniously through
your window to disturb your sleep? Do you find yourself cursing at birds for singing so
insistently? Does the cuteness of puppies strike you as cloying and needy? Any of
these stray thoughts may imply that your mood is ready to make the grand decline.
If you wake up in the morning, go to brush your teeth and, on first seeing yourself in
the mirror think, “Oh, great. This guy again,” you might be ready to start in on a
worthwhile depression. If you begin to think of Emily, the cute and friendly postal
carrier as “the girl who brings bills and trash to my door,” this could be an opportunity
to get things underway. If ice cream sounds too sweet, orange juice sounds too sour,
and every opinion you express sounds too bitter, you could be walking through the
twilight that comes at the onset of night.
The signs can be subtle, but if you make the effort you can see to it that your
opportunity does not pass you by. When you spot a sign, even a very small one, take
the time to sigh heavily. Let your shoulders droop under the weight of what is to come
next. Look into the near future and see the shadows that will soon engulf you.
When depressive opportunity knocks, answer the door. Or better yet, sit on your
couch and shout toward the door that it is welcome to come in and make itself
comfortable. If you ignore it now, it will just be back knocking again tomorrow, and
then it will come with a hand-scrawled note pointing out that you are such a loser you
even procrastinate before getting a proper depression started.
Overreaction is your friend. Naturally this applies to negative stimuli such as a paper
cut, the news of a deadly, though distant mining disaster, or a phone call from a parent;
take any of these as an opportunity to curse, bemoan the bad luck, and recognize the
splendid, all-you-can-eat buffet of crap that life has to offer on a daily basis. But also –
and perhaps more importantly – overreact to positive stimuli.
When the UPS truck comes down the street, become as gleeful and excited as a child
on the way to a petting zoo. This way, when it turns out that the truck is visiting your
neighbor or delivering nothing more than a pile of unwanted old belongings that your
father was tired of having clutter up your former bedroom which he has now decided to
turn into a workshop, your hopes can be dashed, leaving you as miserable and whiney
as that same child when actually in the middle of the petting zoo, besieged by sickly
goats craving attention and ostriches with neither social skills nor child-loving instincts.
If an attractive person smiles at you in passing, allow yourself to imagine that it is the
beginning of a great and lasting romance. When it turns out not to be the beginning of
a great and lasting romance, respond to the crushing end of a deep and meaningful
relationship. Do this enough times in one day and the truth about romance will begin
to penetrate your awareness: romance is a myth perpetuated by greeting card
companies, diamond distributors, and Hollywood writers who are trying to impress
their girlfriends and boyfriends. Be aware that those girlfriends and boyfriends will
eventually abandon and disillusion them, leaving them to write morose novels that they
will be unable to sell. When that happens, when their love fades, their talent proves a
fleeting and transient thing, their bank accounts begin to dwindle, and they find
themselves alone and afraid in a dark and empty world with no real plan for the future
and a constantly diminishing personal worth, they will be just like you.
Reflect on this at great length.
You are on your way.
Sometimes there will be no advance warning. You will be a day or two into a
depression before you notice that it is coming on. You notice the little sub-symptoms
first. You notice, for instance, an unusually large stack of pizza delivery boxes in your
kitchen. It occurs to you that you have been screening calls since Thursday and not
even the voices of your close friends have prompted you to pick up the receiver. You
discover that you have gone out to the grocery store in your pajamas and a bathrobe to
save yourself the effort of putting on clothes that you will just have to take off again in
the late evening.
A depression is surely setting in. The pressure from the world around you is
very strong just to cheer up. Every television commercial promises to solve the
problem: Sad people buy the right detergent and they become happy; sad people eat at
the right fast-food joint and they become happy; sad people find the lowest-priced
insurance and they become happy. Go ahead and purchase these products based on
these implied promises. They will not help. They are not really mood-altering
substances. If they were mood-altering substances strong enough to make a dent in a
solid depression it would not be legal to sell them. Buying them in the hopes that they
will provide much-needed relief will cost money, and disappoint you. Any
disappointment you can experience right now will serve you well as you move forward
into the blackness.
If you tell a friend that you are becoming depressed, your friend will offer
practical suggestions to solve the problem: burn candles or incense or flavored oil and
you will feel better; meditate or pray or hire a therapist and you will work it out; go
jogging or golfing or skiing and the endorphins will get you feeling good, the sunlight,
the blood flow, the cold air. Do not give in to the temptation, not even out of a sense of
loyalty and friendship.
Do not give in to the pressure. None of those things will work anyway. You
know that because you have the special gift of insight that only depression offers: the
insight to know that nothing will work. Nothing is going to make things better, and
there is a good chance that trying to make things better will only make things much,
much worse. Knowing this, you realize that any attempt to make things better will only
serve to remind you that nothing you do is going to make things better.
So buckle yourself in (as though that will really help if there is actually an
accident) and enjoy the ride. Things are going to get far bleaker before they get any
brighter, and there is no guarantee that "brighter" is ever really going to show up in the
forecast at all. This depression is now officially underway, and the only good news is
that this time you have a Guidebook grasped firmly in your sweatless, fatalistic little
hand, promising to lead you through every miserable step of the experience, and
guaranteeing never, ever, even in the subtlest of ways to attempt to cheer you up.
Have your favorite comfort foods on hand. Eating them is not going to make
you feel any better at all. Eating a great deal of them, however, will serve to make you
feel over-stuffed and physically uncomfortable which is very good for depression as it
harmonizes quite well with emotional discomfort.
Also, these foods are generally the least healthy for you overall, and will offer up
a good number of subsidiary self-loathing triggers to accelerate the slide into a pit of
despair. A slow but steady weight gain, for instance, can only serve you in this regard.
Consuming mass-packaged poison of any sort also gives you the chance to demonstrate
to yourself that you are utterly self-destructive, while whatever small comfort you take
from the taste and texture proves that you are also completely self-indulgent and devoid
of will power. If you choose carefully, you may be able to find one or two really good
comfort foods that will cause their own commercial jingles to play continuously in the
back of your head, thus filling you with a combined sense of cultural sub-literacy and
gullible manipulability. The following is a brief list of good comfort foods for use in
depression, which I will place side by side with a list of not-so-good comfort foods.
GOOD COMFORT FOODS STUPID COMFORT FOODS
macaroni and cheese tofu
hot fudge sundae celery
Oreo cookies rice cakes
Cheetos steamed artichokes
philly cheese steak sandwiches lentils
potato latkes with sour cream rhubarb
I also like to have some food I genuinely dislike like on hand, so that after I have
finished off every last crumb of the stuff I enjoy I can consume the stuff I despise while
hating myself for eating something so terrible rather than getting off my fat ass and going
to the store. That, of course, is up to you, but it helps me considerably to build my
velocity in the magnificent descent.
Television is an important tool. Like comfort food, it serves many functions in
the settling-in stage of a depression. It provides an endless source of things to be
depressed about: Newscasts bring you up-to-the-minute reports on terrible things
happening all over the world; daytime talk shows constantly present unlikable people
with horrible and unsolvable problems; soap operas remind you insidiously that people
with no discernable talent are making a hundred times more than you ever will. But
TV's most important function is that it gives you something to stare at blankly while
accomplishing nothing. Nothing, I repeat, nothing is more helpful in the establishment
of a depression than accomplishing nothing. While there is no rule which says that you
may not accomplish anything while you are watching TV it is a proven law of nature,
stretching back to the Neolithic era, that human beings are physiologically incapable of
accomplishing anything useful while watching television. Observe the following set of
lists:
THINGS YOU COULD THINGS YOU WILL

ACCOMPLISH WHILE ACCOMPLISH WHILE
WATCHING TV WATCHING TV
• Sorting the laundry Consuming comfort food
• Cleaning the coffee

table
• Writing your niece

a birthday card
• Composing a poem
• Alphabetizing your
CD collection
Now that you are settled in, glassy-eyed, vaguely uncomfortable, and dead certain
that doing anything else or being anywhere else would just make you feel worse, you are
ready to get down to serious business.
BASIC DEPRESSION EXERCISE #1
Make a list of your most secret dreams and aspirations. Point at it and laugh. Throw it
away.
List your three most recent accomplishments. Compare them to the accomplishments
of your heroes. When you realize that your achievements are not so much
“accomplishments” as merely “completed tasks” throw the list away.
Imagine you are sitting alone on a beach. Feel the warmth of the sun. Smell the salt
air. Realize that you are still the same person that you were before you started
imagining this only now you also have sand in your butt crack. Notice that you are
using up precious moments of life imagining your butt crack.
CHAPTER TWO
SELF-LOATHING
“Sorry. You are not a winner.”
-- Words of wisdom gleaned from a

plastic Pepsi cap*
*In the credit where credit is due department, it was a

painting by the brilliant Opus Moreschi that caused me to
notice that this is a horrible thing to put in print for
people to find anywhere. It’s like a sadistic fortune cookie.
You cannot really hate the world around you without first really hating yourself.
Now that your blue funk is starting to tickle the edges of the ultra-violet spectrum, push
this depression into its next phase. Serve yourself a heaping helping of self-loathing.
There is a good-sized knot in your belly. Focus on that knot.2 Sink into it and
feel your shoulders curl inward. That knot is fear itself. Fear it.3
That fear is the fear that you do not deserve what you have, that anything you
have of value was given to you and anything you worked for is tainted and worthless.
Also it is the fear that you are not good enough at anything ever to have anything more
than what you have. All of this is true, of course. If it were not true, why would you be
going to all the trouble of hiding it so cleverly in a ball in the pit of your stomach?
All of that fear is really just a symptom anyway. You know that. You are not
afraid because you are neurotic. You are afraid because you know that you are weak
and this world demands constant strength. That is one of the things that make life on
Earth really, really suck. It requires great strength every day. It requires the strength to
go out there and talk cheerfully to people and constantly suppress the fact that it sucks.
It requires the strength to go out there every day and work for money that will just wind
up paying for a family of porcelain bunnies which will sit in your living room collecting
dust and reminding you of what a loser you are for ordering from the home shopping
club. 4
You do not have that kind of strength. If you had that kind of strength you
would not be so full of fear. You do not have the strength to get a glass of orange juice
because it would require that you face the pile of dirty dishes that you do not have the
strength to wash. There is really no sense in washing them anyway as they will just get
dirty again the next time you use them. You know this is just an excuse to avoid
washing the dishes, but if you did not use this excuse, you would find another, because
you are lazy. Inherently lazy and too weak to combat your own laziness5.
Look in a mirror and focus on your flaws.
2Be careful not to actually meditate on it. A trance state could lead to enlightenment and a
nirvana experience and who needs that? It's not like it would actually make anything better.
3 There is a slim chance that it is not fear itself, but rather cancer. Fear that, too.
4. Dusting, by the way, is another good thing not to do with good depressive resonance which
can include asthmatic reaction, difficulty breathing, and a resultant panic response.
5 There is a chance that you are not lazy, but rather suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Fear Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Assume an affectation such as muttering or stuttering. People will find you so

irritating to converse with that you feel completely isolated. This will quickly establish a
self-serving feedback loop which makes it difficult to behave comfortably in any
situation. This is just as well because every social situation you can remember handling
well has ultimately resulted in somebody's alienation, self-doubt, and/or humiliation.
Either that or a lasting friendship which eventually ended in a painful goodbye. Either
way, better just to avoid the whole unpleasant affair by simply continuing to murmur
and stammer. Occasionally blurt out an offensive obscenity if you are talking to
somebody who is likely to be put off by that. Once everybody you encounter has
begun to find you really distasteful, surely you will begin to agree with them.
If you are having a great deal of difficulty working up a really unhealthy
attitude, here are some exercises designed specifically to bring your self-loathing up to
speed.
SELF-LOATHING EXERCISE #1
Remember the most embarrassing moment of your life, the moment when you felt
utterly humiliated in the eyes of those around you, those whose respect you most
whole-heartedly desired. Examine the entire memory in great detail. Then run the
moment of your demise, the precise instant at which you realized the horrible truth of
your situation over and over in slow motion, indulging and exploring every nuance of
the experience. While you do this, repeat the following words to yourself in soft but
condescending tones: "You know you had it coming."
First, make a list of the things which are most important to you, those things which you
feel most deserve your attention and to which you are most willing to devote that
attention. Do this now, in the space below, before you read the rest of the exercise.*
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
*If you can not produce a list: Congratulations. Move on to exercise #3.
Now, taking the items on that list one at a time, imagine, in detail, as vividly as possible,
what your father would say about your prioritization of the item. Now your mother.
Think about everything bad that has ever happened to you. Then figure out just how
easily you could have avoided each of those incidents if you had just been a little less of
a loser.
Compare your appearance to that of anyone on TV with the exception of Rush

Limbaugh or Steve Bannon.
CHAPTER THREE
SLEEP PATTERNS
“Sleep, those little slices of death; oh how
I loathe them.”
--Edgar Allan Poe

Skew your sleep patterns. The faster you can do this and the more screwed up
you can get them, the better this depression is going to be. It does not matter whether
you start getting too much sleep or too little. All that is important is that it be entirely
the wrong amount and that it not come on any set schedule.
Being under-slept provides a sense of dazed confusion. The urgency of the
dreams you are missing will begin to invade your waking life in the form of free-floating
anxiety and personal paranoia.
Being over-slept will offer a muddy-headed haze. Your brain will feel a bit too
heavy to carry around in your skull and you will find yourself constantly on the verge of
developing a severe headache.
If you get just the right amount of sleep, one of two things will happen: Either
you will defeat your own purpose and the depression will dissipate, or you will find that
even getting the right amount of sleep will not help at all, and that will just make you
feel worse. So do not take any drastic measures like getting the right amount of sleep.
It will just wind up making things better or worse and since nothing is going to make
things better...
When you are awake, it is very good to think about sleep a great deal. Tell
people how badly you have slept. Even if you have slept well, make up stories about
how badly you slept and tell them to people. Friends who call, relatives, Emily, the cute
postal delivery girl. This has marvelous depressive repercussions. First of all, if you
have been sleeping okay, your subconscious will feel guilt over the fabrication and see
to it that you begin to sleep badly.6 Whether you have been sleeping badly or not,
nobody really wants to hear about anybody else's sleep patterns because there is simply
no topic of conversation more tedious. As a result, whomever you talk to about this will
turn off to you immediately, feeding your sense that nobody wants to talk to you and
that you should really just hide in your home.
Stay up later than anybody you know. This will ensure that during at least some
portion of every day you get to experience excruciating loneliness knowing that even
6Any guilt you can heap upon your subconscious is good and will serve you most mightily.
your closest friends would not be interested in talking to you just now. Late night
television will provide you with infomercials. These help to feed the massive maw of
your sadness in two ways. First, they prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that civilization
is grinding to its final end as everybody on the planet degenerates into idiocy. Second,
they give you the opportunity to spend money you cannot afford without leaving the
discomfort of your couch thereby proving that you are no better than the rest of the
moronic world.7 Not that it matters much, what with civilization grinding to its final
idiotic end and all.
Sleep as much as possible during business hours. This minimizes your risk of
actually doing anything to improve your life, and gives you something for which you can
be mad at yourself when you wake up. If you can generate enough anxiety over
businessy stuff that you missed the opportunity to accomplish, it will help keep you
awake through Jimmy Kimmel's inane ramblings later on. Throughout Jimmy's show,
remind yourself that he makes about four hundred times more money than you ever
will.
Make certain that the specific hours at which you retire and awaken are never
exactly the same for two nights (or days) in a row. This insures really unsettling
discomfort. Humans have spent so many centuries living on schedules that refusal to
keep to a schedule will confuse your body into constantly reminding your brain that
there is a crisis underway and surely it ought to be doing something to figure out a
solution. Because there is no actual crisis, your brain will automatically signal back that,
whatever is troubling your body, the brain cannot identify it and therefore cannot solve
it. It signals this by playing one or two lines of a mournful Scottish dirge over and over
again in the back of your head.8
When you do sleep, make certain that the thermostat is set either much too high
or much too low. Excessive cold is good in that it makes your sleep quite tense and
stirs ancient, instinctive survival fears. On the other hand, cranking up the heater offers
the added benefit of costing you money on a bill which will come right when you need
it, in about a month when you think you may be dangerously close to cheering up. Try
alternating between the two options. You will get the worst of both worlds and you may
7Whatever you order, it might be good to think to yourself this might make things better when
it arrives in the mail. That way, in a week or two when you have your first false glimmer of
hope that the depression is easing, it can be dashed by the postal reminder that you've added
to your credit card bill the cost of the Nordic Track or the Popeil spray-on hair which, as
it turns out, isn't going to make things any better after all.
8For a really good low try eating two boxes of Golden Grahams (preferably without milk) in the
second week of sleep-pattern disruption. The melodies of the Scottish dirge and the insipid
Golden Grahams tune will combine to provide the audio-mnemonic equivalent of nausea.
be able to make yourself more susceptible to illness which is good to fear whether it is
really true or not.
Sleep in uncomfortable clothing. This will help you to dream unpleasant
circumstances and can cut off circulation so you wake up minutes before one of your
arms. Nothing starts off a good day of depression like a couple of clumsy moments
fumbling numbly at an intractable light switch with rubbery, lifeless fingers.
Sleep with the local all-news station playing on a radio near the bed. Endless
tales of shootings, stalkings, kidnappings, and traffic reports will seep into your dreams
guaranteeing that even your subconscious sorting-out time will be steeped in images of
misery and despair.
Try to sleep when you do not feel the least bit tired. It may help to have a few
cups of nice hot coffee just before retiring. This way you will never sleep decently and
you avoid getting the hopeful idea that at least in sleep you have found something you
do well.
After a week or so all of this will become second nature and you will find that
you are tired all the time but you cannot sleep right at all. Remember to describe all of
this in great detail to anyone who will listen.
SLEEP SKEWING EXERCISE #1
Read this chapter again fifteen minutes from now, and again, every twenty-eight minutes
for the next forty-three hours.
Lie in bed with your head at the foot of the bed and your feet up where the pillows
should be. With your eyes closed, alternate between figuring out which direction is
north and chastising yourself for your failure, long, long ago, to earn a merit badge in
compass-reading and navigation.
Every time you read a sentence in this book or any other, look away, then look back
and re-read the sentence. If it says the same thing both times, you are probably awake.
If it does not, you are probably dreaming. Be aware that when you dream and you
realize that you are dreaming your subconscious mind frees the sharp-toothed creatures
that live under your bed whose slavering jaws you have kept still since childhood
through sheer force of denial. Now that you are dreaming and aware that you are
dreaming, they have once more gained the strength to emerge from the shadows and
may, even now, be breathing steamily at your vulnerable throat. Read that sentence
again. If it says the same thing that it did last time, you are probably awake.
CHAPTER FOUR
INACTIVITY
“Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean,
where's it all going to end?”
-- Tom Stoppard
In addition to not accomplishing things, you will find your depression flourishes
under circumstances of inactivity. It is best if your inactivity can actually provide
physical reminders of itself. Like telling people about your sleep patterns, this can
create a feedback loop or, as I like to call it, a depressive resonance. Here is a list of
good things not to do and the accompanying resonant feedback.
LAUNDRY Piles of clothes accumulate to remind you that you are

too lazy to put them in a machine; interfere with casual
movement in your bedroom for frequent annoyance;
and serve as the opposite of a room freshener.
DISHES Unwashed dishes clutter your kitchen making it

irritating and frustrating to put together even the
simplest meal; serve as a reminder of laziness; and, left
out, point up the amount you have been eating, and
attract small insects to share your home with you.
(When this happens, take a moment to realize that
they are the only beings who can tolerate your
company.)
PUTTING THINGS AWAY Chaotic surroundings provide a psychic

dissonance which can only enhance your general
displeasure and, of course, provide a constant visual
reminder of the fact that you are a loser living in a
hovel.
SHOWERING Very early in your depression you started letting

yourself go. You stopped paying any attention to
whether your clothes matched. You gave up dragging a
comb through hair that would just wind up matted
again by tomorrow morning. You discovered that you
could save time by washing the taste of sleep out of
your mouth with coffee rather than by brushing your
teeth.9
If you have been successful at not doing things, you
have already let your abode go all to hell. You have
certainly allowed your relationships to degrade what
with all the call-screening, not-calling, and over- and/or
under-sleeping. There is a damn good chance you are
going to be out of a job pretty soon if it has not
happened already, which is good, really, because the
job frequently requires that you leave your home and
talk to people.
This would be a very good time to stop bathing
entirely. No showers, no splashing your armpits over
the sink with a washcloth. Smelling bad is good. It will
give people a tangible warning that they do not want to
approach you, that it will not be a pleasant experience.
This creates marvelous resonance and you will find the
effects on your mind so subtle and troubling that, even
after your depression is over, even when you have
begun showering regularly once again, you will never
quite shake the self-conscious sensation that people
feel uncomfortable standing close to you. This will
prove to be particularly valuable if, shortly after the
9More good depressive-resonance there. Halitosis=nobody looking directly at you when you
speak to them=they probably have a pretty good reason=you are a hopeless waste of human
flesh.
apparent conclusion of a depression, you opt for the

relapse. It is very easy, in those first few afterweeks, to
decide that you really do not want to go back to
pretending with everyone else that life on Earth does
not really, really suck. It will help greatly if you are also
pretty sure you smell bad.
The list of things not to do could grow to infinite proportions, but you get the
idea. The hard part will be when you reach the point at which you simply must do
something.
When that happens, begin to do things half-heartedly. Just sit amongst the piles
of laundry and sort them for a minute or two before walking away; stand at the kitchen
sink with the hot water running up your bill for a little while as you turn a couple of
plates around under the stream and then put them back in the pile because they are not
really clean enough to put away. This will all heighten your sense of non-
accomplishment.
While you gesture at accomplishing these simple household chores, think. Do
not think of anything productive or constructive; anything that could lead to inspiration.
Think about those things that depress you the most. Here is a short list of topics you
might find useful. I have left a few blank spaces at the end so that you may add any of
your own that you would like to have on hand for easy reference.
the speed with which life is passing you by
the oil industry
the options in the upcoming election
the safety of the mining community
Jimmy Kimmel makes four hundred times more than you ever will10
the spotted owl
the length of your life relative to that of the Earth
Martin Luther King, Jr.
10I know I've already mentioned Jimmy, but this is a big depression trigger for me.
the time you were humiliated in grade school

the number of twitter followers Carrot Top enjoys
the overall suckiness of life on Earth
the dolphins dying in tuna nets
the Miami Dolphins
the lumber industry
the time you were humiliated in high school
AIDS
the amount of time you're probably going to have to spend alive on Earth
President Kennedy
the size of the Earth relative to the Universe
President Trump
all the wasted food in the world
the way your parents view your life
NAFTA's failure to make anybody's life better
overpopulation
the time you were humiliated at work
all the wrongs against humanity ever committed and...
...where they've gotten us
the government's failure to make anybody's life better
the widespread support for bans on gay marriage
homelessness
death
the density of the smog over major cities
the Hair Club for Men's failure to make anybody's life better
all the starvation in the world
the popularity of Maury Povich’s paternity test talk show
the ozone layer

Amelia Earhart
new viruses and bacteria we haven't heard of yet
the Roswell incident
drunk driving statistics
the school-to-prison pipeline
the current state of American education
DAPL
Dane Cook
__________________________________
__________________________________
__________________________________
__________________________________
CHAPTER FIVE
THE BENEFITS OF DEPRESSION
“I just want out. I've had it. I am so
tired. I am twenty and I am already
exhausted.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel
Depression provides the clarity of vision to recognize the simple fact that life on
Earth really, really sucks.
CHAPTER SIX
SELF-LOATHING
A man cannot be comfortable without his own
approval.
-- Mark Twain
Hey! You may be thinking, Didn’t I already read a chapter about self-loathing?
You did. This is another one. Why? Because self-loathing is very, very important. I
just can’t emphasize it enough. You just can’t indulge it enough. Really. You can’t.
Self-loathing is just one more thing you’re not good enough at, no matter how good at it
you get. Keep trying, though. Keep trying. Keep failing. Keep labeling yourself a
failure.
Hate yourself. Seriously. Hate yourself for who you are, for who you have
become, for the things you want and the things you have.
Think back on all the people you have wronged in your lifetime and all the
people who have wronged you. See your entire personal history as a long string of
betrayals and broken promises. Who was not there when you needed them? Who
needed you at a time when you had something to do that you decided was more
important?
No wonder you are depressed. Look at who you are and how you spend your
days. Look into the eyes of Emily the cute postal deliver girl as you tell her about your
weird and disturbing dreams and you will see just how loathsome you really are.
Look in a mirror and actively seek out blemishes and anomalies. If you have a
pimple, touch it. Squeeze it. Pick at it until it becomes a sore. As you do this, you may
imagine that you are using your fingernails to surgically remove a blemish but in fact
you will be further damaging your complexion. Later, when Emily focuses on the spot
or avoids looking at it, be aware that it would have been less noticeable if you had just
left it alone. This is just one more thing you have gotten wrong today and it certainly
will not be the last.
Self-loathing is key. Indulge in it. Revel in it. Hate yourself for your
indulgence.
Here are some more exercises to improve and enhance your self-loathing.
Replace all of your incandescent light bulbs with fluorescents. Now, in the light of those
bulbs stand naked in front of a full length mirror. As you look at your grotesque
complexion and your increasingly awkward body-shape, notice that this little exercise is
the only thing that’s ever gotten you to switch to energy-saving bulbs. Either leave those
bulbs in place so that you continue to look awful whenever you see yourself or switch
back to the old bulbs because you’re so vain that you’d rather look good in a mirror
than help to save the planet. Whichever you choose, take time to notice that everything
you do, you do for all the wrong reasons.
Think back to when you were a teenager. Make a list of the things you imagined then
that you would have accomplished by now.
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
Now use a highlighter to mark those things you have not accomplished. If there is
anything on the list that you have accomplished, think about how much less satisfying it
was than you had imagined it would be. Be aware of every corner you cut and every
way in which your accomplishment was not really what it appears to have been.
Create a list of books you have deceptively claimed to have read and movies you have
claimed to have seen. Think about how much more poorly educated you are than you
like people to think. Search your memory for clues that people might have seen
through your façade and humored you, pretending to believe your nonsense.
Upon completion of this exercise, you may be tempted to read books you have claimed
to have read or to see movies you have claimed to have seen. If so, be very careful not
to read or view materials that will actually cheer you up. Here is a handy list that will
help you to make properly depressive choices:
BOOKS
The Bell Jar
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Fountainhead (unless you’re a Libertarian, in which case you
will mistake this for a masterpiece of common-sense
observationalism)
anything by Bill O’Reilly
any biography of Dorothy Parker
The Diary of Anne Frank
Ethan Frome
Watership Down
The Giving Tree

any self-help book which claims to cure depression
The Guinness Book of World Records (unless you appear in it)
Anna Karenina
MOVIES
Bambi
The Deer Hunter
Terms of Endearment
Frances (Not the thing about the talking mule)
Testament
The Seventh Seal (be hyper-aware of your lack of comprehension)
The Nuremburg Trials
Compare your appearance to that of anyone on TV with the exception of Barbara

Walters or Linda Hunt.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LOATHE THY NEIGHBORS
“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors,
and also to love our enemies; probably
because they are generally the same people.”
-- G. K. Chesterton
Now that you have your self-loathing up to snuff the next wave of your
depression should roll in nicely. You will begin to realize that for all of your flaws (and
there really are too many to enumerate), you are nothing compared to the horrible
Fellini parade that confronts you in the outside world.
A short trip from your doorstep to the local convenience store will reveal
repugnancy far greater than any magnification of fecal matter ever could. From the guy
on the sidewalk with the nose-hair who needs to know the time to the overly friendly
checkout clerk who thinks it witty to pretend the twenty you gave him was a five, the
people around you seem detestable.
This should not surprise you. They really are detestable, all the time, every day.
It is just that, like you, people generally fail to notice because they are far too busy
filtering from their consciousnesses (I guess that should be consciousnae) anything
which might point them toward the obvious fact which they are pointedly ignoring: Life
on Earth really, really sucks.
Now that you are this far into the depression, you may be ready to see what I
mean by that. It sucks at every level. From the cubical constructs we inhabit to the
grid-cities we infest, from the graying skies to the sewage-stained seas, from the birds
who remind us of our inability to fly to the fish who torment our dreams, dancing like
demons of the underworld, this frail existence is simply saturated in really major
suckiness. 11
Your friends are not there when you need them. And if they were, they would
probably just tell you to cheer up. Your home is uncomfortable and horribly messy.
Your bills seem endlessly overwhelming. Your parents never fully approve of you or
your life. Hell, you do not fully approve of you or your life, you are just too much of a
stupid loser to think of any way out of it without sacrificing your insurance benefits.
11Okay. That dancing fish demons thing might just be me.

This is, in fact, the suckiest of all possible worlds. And to make it even worse,
there are all these people in it.
There are poor people who want your money. There are rich people who will
never give you their money. There are
terrorists who blow up civilians and then there are all these uninjured civilians who go
on television to whine about the terrorists. Politicians jabber on and on about social
spending and budget gaps and they all make a good living telling us that if we let them
do what they want, life on Earth will start sucking less in just seven to ten years, but they
are all known to be liars anyway. Not to mention the fact that they have been saying
that for well over seven to ten years already.
Sure, you have always believed that "government of the people, by the people,
for the people" stuff. But look at the people. They are mostly idiots and the ones who
are not either smell really bad or wear too much hair spray. You do not want them
governing you any more than you want to govern any of them.
Smokers pollute your air with their foul habit while non-smokers go around
trying to tell other people what to do. Animal Rights activists throw blood on people
who kill helpless animals. Environmentalists send letter bombs to prevent
deforestation. And where is basic human decency in all of this? Where is kindness?
Where is compassion? Sitting in front of Wheel of Fortune with a box of Ring Dings12.
Or are those Devil Dogs? I can't see from here.
It is sitting there with its comfort food and its guidebook in hand, too frightened,
weak, and self-indulgent to do a damned thing about the ills of society, the destruction
of the planet. Besides, there is really no reason to bother. Humans are really just a
viral infection on the skin of a huge, space-hurtling life-form. Most of them are not
even smart enough to grasp the simple, obvious fact that depression has given you the
vision to recognize.
If you really hate yourself and you know that this is nothing compared to the
abhorrence you feel toward your fellow man, you are well enough into your depression
that there is no turning back.13
12If you don’t know what Ring Dings are,

take a moment to hate yourself for your
cultural illiteracy and unwrap a Ding Dong.
Same thing, different coast.
13See fig. Two.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SPIRITUALITY
“Acceptance without proof is the fundamental
characteristic of Western religion; rejection
without proof is the fundamental
characteristic of Western science.”
-- Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu

Li Masters
Many people seem to find happiness and comfort in their spiritual beliefs. Jews
take comfort in a fatherly, vengeful, vindictive, judgmental, Caucasian bearded deity.
Christians enjoy the remarkably conditional love of an ego-driven deity who rewards
only those who tell him his son is the coolest. Buddhists find joy in the worship of a
jolly fat guy despite the fact that he does not have a single flying reindeer in his stable.
Modern Pagans worship nearly forgotten gods and seek to influence their world by
speaking incantations which they believe to be effective because they spell the word
“magik” with a “k” on the end.
While I certainly advocate showing respect and tolerance for whatever
superstitious nonsense people want to indulge in, I do not think you should be fooled
by them. Does anybody actually believe that there is an invisible man in the sky who
has a plan? It simply makes no sense. These
people are all just going along with the mob in "Where is my faith? Even deep
the hopes that the mother-warmth of the down … there is nothing but
crowd will make them feel better in the cold emptiness and darkness. ... If there
dampness of their own fear. be God — please forgive me... Such
It is simply easier to pretend to faith deep longing for God ... repulsed,
than to commit to critical thinking and many, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal...
many people spend their lives taking the path What do I labor for? If there be no
of least resistance. I urge you to do the same. God, there can be no soul. If there
Pretend to believe in something. Pretend to be no soul then, Jesus, you also are
believe in God or Christ or Shiva or your not true,"
ability to call upon Hern the Hunter to do
your bidding. Light candles. Pray for
salvation. -- Mother Teresa
When none of these serves to change
your life in any way, feel the betrayal and loss
of misplaced faith. Be aware that this cannot be the fault of the non-existent deities you
have been wasting your time talking to. It is entirely your fault for not worshipping
correctly or for not believing whole-heartedly enough.14
Remember that, if there really is a deity, any deity, it means that the majority of
the world is wrong about their deities. Whomever you have chosen to believe in is
either non-existent, or so irritating a creature as to have knowingly, all-knowingly,
14 If you DO find yourself actually believing in a deity, be aware that this deity knows
every one of your doubts and takes each one personally. You cannot hide your uncertainty
from a deity and deities can be really pissy when they feel disrespected.
omnipotently, deliberately created a world in which most of the people believe in a

fabrication.
Either a world of discord and war, disease, pestilence, and poverty is the best a
deity can do or most of the people on the planet devote their lives to believing in
someone who does not exist at all. Looked at in the latter way, life on Earth really,
really sucks. Seen in the former, the suckage extends on into heaven and eternity for
ever and ever, amen.
CHAPTER NINE
THE SO-CALLED EXPERTS
“How dreadful knowledge of the truth can
be when there is no help in truth!”
-- Sophocles
At some point, the temptation will become too great. You will have a sudden,
fleeting flash of hope. At this point it will seem like a good idea to seek professional
help.
I advise you at this time to go see a professional therapist. In addition to costing
a great deal of money (poverty will help you recover that bleak feeling), a professional
therapist is a person whose job it is to sit and listen to you bitch and moan about your
miserable little problems. This means that it is in his or her best interest to see that you
do not cheer up. If you feel good, why see a therapist? Furthermore, professional
therapists are trained to know a great deal about the workings of the human mind and
the manipulation of moods. This makes them well equipped to protect their best
interests.
You didn't think I was going to suggest that they could make it better did you?
Surely by this time you have come to understand that nothing can make it better.
When a psychologist or psychiatrist seeks to diagnose depression, he or she will
ask a series of questions. Among the symptoms they seek are difficulty sleeping and
sleeping an inordinate amount, an increase or a decrease in appetite, feeling listless or
feeling restless, weight loss or weight gain, and feeling stuck in a rut.
In short, anything that has changed is a symptom of depression. If you have
noticed that nothing has changed for some time, that too is a symptom of depression.
How can this be? The answer is startlingly simple once you look at it through the
properly cynical lens.
A huge industry has grown up around depression. This industry includes
psychiatrists, psychologists, pharmacological salesmen, self-help authors, life coaches
and personal trainers. Anybody involved professionally in any of these endeavors
makes a great deal of money because depression, as you and I know, is ever-present,
utterly incurable, and, in fact, the only reasonable response to the lengthy and
unpleasant experience we generously refer to as “life.” A diagnostic system guaranteed
to prove your mood is bottoming out is good for their bottom line. There is nobody
you can trust to have your best interests at heart. This is just one of the many, many
ways in which life on Earth really, really sucks.
In his book Life Strategies, Dr. Phil McGraw offers these words of wisdom:
You've got a mess on your hands, for sure. You don't need
a Ph.D. in behavioral sciences to know that in virtually every
dimension of human functioning, America is, in varying degrees,
failing. The divorce rate in the United States is estimated by
some authorities to be as high as 57.7 percent, and the average
length of new marriages is twenty-six months. Sixty-two percent
of our society is obese. Reported emotional neglect of children
has increased 330 percent in the last ten years. One in four
women has been sexually molested. Suicide is increasing at an
exponential rate. At least one out of every six of us will
experience a serious, function-impairing depressive episode at
some point in our lives; thus, antidepressants and anxiety-
reducing agents are now a multibillion-dollar industry.
Do these sound to you like words that are intended to cheer you up, to brighten
your day? Of course not. These words are designed to make you need the writings
and advice of people like Dr. Phil.
Other experts try a little bit harder to pretend that their advice is useful.
Peter McWilliams writes in Life 101, “The simple solution for . . . depression:
Get up and get moving. Physically move. Do. Act. Get going.” While this sounds valid,
remember that it comes from a guy who is in the middle of writing a book. Not only is
he doing something, acting, going, he is a creative, successful fellow who people listen
to. What does he know about you and your depression? If you get up and get moving,
you will be depressed, living with a gnawing void, and out of breath. Does he really
think gasping for oxygen will make all the difference in the equation? Besides, do you
really want to take the word of a guy who gets his jollies photographing young, down-
and-out street urchins? Sure, he wrote the book Transcendental Meditation but how
transcendental a fellow is he? This is the guy who made it apparent to the whole world
that a “Libertarian” is actually just an arch conservative who wants to be able to smoke
pot.
Dr. Joyce Brothers really took the path of least resistance when she said, “Those
who have easy, cheerful attitudes tend to be happier than those with less pleasant
temperaments. . .” Really, Doc? Is that your studied opinion? You think that people
who are in a generally good mood tend to be less miserable than normal people who
are caught up in the suckiness of day-to-day life? Sheer genius. Also, people without
allergies tend to sneeze less than those with allergies, and folks without emphysema
breathe more easily that those who have holes in their lungs. Apparently Dr. Brothers’
educated advice to the depressed isn’t. She would rather just deal with the cheerful and
save the trouble.
That’s right. Now that you are among the depressed, even the people you are
told to turn to for help want to have nothing to do with you except in as much as you
give them an opportunity to turn a profit on books, CDs, and DVDs.
Psychiatrists are real medical doctors who can prescribe actual medications
which they claim will alleviate your depression. Psychiatrists drive expensive cars and
have decent houses to go home to after seeing you for ten minutes and then suggesting
that perhaps you should increase your dosage by a quarter of a pill.
Pharmaceutical salesmen literally make the rounds to the psychiatrists’ offices
giving out free samples for doctors to offer their patients. The doctors who can
prescribe medications are allowed to own stock in the same companies that
manufacture the medications they prescribe. The medications the doctors prescribe
often have side effects that are far worse than the illness they purportedly treat. A
psychiatrist may well offer you a medication for depression along with a warning that it
is also likely to cause weight gain and difficulty reaching orgasm. How exactly is that
expected to cheer you up?
Life coaches stay in business as long as you feel you are incapable of making
your own decisions. Fitness trainers and subscription-based health clubs make most of
their money from people who commit to paying large fees and then quit using their
services.
Let me break this down for you as simply as I can. In a capitalist society, you
cannot trust anybody. In a communist society, you must distrust everyone equally. 15
WARNING: This medication has

been known to cause muscle
cramps, loose stools, diarrhea,
indigestion, heartburn,
headaches, weakness, heart
arrhythmia, insomnia, joint pain,
fatigue, dizziness, nausea, loss
of concentration, blindness,
tingling sensations, fires, floods,
locusts, rivers of blood, rioting,
looting, uncontrollable vomiting,
increased anger, decreased sex
drive, difficult traffic conditions,
overdue library books, tax hikes,
hives and the willies. If full body
paralysis occurs, contact your
physician at once as this may be
a sign of an adverse reaction.
15It may sound to you at this moment as though I am advocating socialism; I urge you to take
this as an indication that I am just one more person you should not trust.
CHAPTER TEN
LEAVING YOUR HOUSE
“I am just going outside and may be
some time.”
-- Captain Lawrence Oates,

Antarctic Explorer (these were
his last words)
Eventually you are going to have to go out and do something if for no other
reason than that it allows you to say, "I tried that," when people suggest that you will feel
better if you go out and do something. Create an excuse to go out and observe the
carnival of grotesquerie we laughingly call “civilization.”
Make certain that wherever you go you will be greeted by stimuli appropriate to
your desires. Try paying an unnecessary visit to the dentist or asking your mechanic to
see if he can find anything in your car that could use fixing.
Go to museums about dead people and dead things. Extinct things are good, as
are artworks by people who are no longer with us and will never again grace us with a
new work of such great beauty and whose talent is far beyond anything you could ever
hope to achieve. Abstract art that is utterly beyond your comprehension will help you
to feel inept and undereducated.
Naturally cemeteries are good, but you may never have thought about how much
depressing mileage you can get out of a zoo if you focus on the bars rather than the
beasts they contain.
Also, I cannot recommend highly enough the option of crashing the weddings
and funerals of strangers. Stay in the back, on your own and every time somebody says
"dearly beloved" remind yourself that you are not included.
Choose something to do that will involve seeing people while remaining
relatively passive and inactive yourself. Going to a play may serve you well if you
choose something that is not uplifting,16 just something that is playing nearby,
overpriced and poorly directed. Here is a short list of plays you might seek out for this
purpose:
PLAYS
16An Up with People performance is an okay thing to go see, because it’s just pathetic and
fraudulently cheery enough to be viewed with derisive irony.
As Is
Ghosts
anything by Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill
The Seagull (particularly a bad production)
No Exit
On the way to the theater, perhaps you will play some music on the car stereo.
It’s fairly obvious that depressive mileage can be derived from listening to a pop music
station or Radio Disney. Who among us is not brought to the brink of suicide by the
sound of a modern, over-sexualized teen idol,
mixed and tone-corrected to sound vocally competent, earning one more airplay royalty
toward the purchase of a new diamond encrusted collar for an emotionally neglected
but heavily accessorized purse dog? There are other options, too, though. Here are
some music choices that may not have occurred to you, any of which can prove most
useful in the audiophonic maintenance of your funk.
TOM WAITS is always a good choice. Not only do his music
and lyrics dip into the inkwell of depression themselves, it
is possible to listen to one of his albums hundreds of times
and still wonder if he is going to survive to the last track.
Worry about him. Think about death.
COUNTRY WESTERN MUSIC is damned unpleasant to listen to
and the lyrics tend to be sad.
CLASSICAL MUSIC will bore you to tears and will make you
aware of just how musically illiterate and unsophisticated you
really are.
PROTEST MUSIC OF THE SIXTIES serves to remind us all that
even the noblest efforts come to naught. Sure, we’re out of
Vietnam, but have we found our way to the global peace and
universal, loving harmony the activists of that era hoped for?
Of course not. You know why? They failed to take into
account the deep down suckiness, that’s why. The ideas of
peace and love are for suckers. Suckers and liberals.
POLKAS.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LONELINESS
“One's need for loneliness is not satisfied
if one sits at a table alone. There must be
empty chairs as well.”
-- Karl Kraus
You are out of work in your messy apartment, tired, smelly, surly, and loathing
yourself for muttering at the television while sitting amidst your collection of empty Ben
and Jerry's tubs.17
Do not pass up this opportunity to notice that nobody is there with you. Not
that you actually want to talk to anybody. People are irritating idiots who seem to have
nothing better to do with their time than counsel every loser they meet on how to cheer
up (except the ones in twelve step programs and they are more depressed than you and
nobody needs that kind of a bummer). But the point is that you are absolutely alone.
Why are you alone? The answer is obvious. You are out of work in your messy
apartment, tired, smelly, surly, and loathing yourself for muttering at the television while
sitting amidst your collection of empty Ben and Jerry's tubs.
Who would want to hang out with you? Nobody, that's who. And they would
be right... or rather, everybody else besides Nobody is right. You really are no fun to
be with.
17 Ben and Jerry contribute a portion of your every purchase to help save the rainforests.
You contribute the entirety of the purchase to your thighs. Go ahead. Try to find a way to
feel good about yourself in that equation.
Sob over that injustice, that you should be left all alone just because you are no
fun to be with. It is not fair. It is a wrong as great as any, this blatant social
discrimination against the depressed. There is nothing you can do about it, naturally;
no way you could right the wrong. You cannot even think of a way that you would be
able to fix it if you had the strength of character it takes to get off the couch. Not with
your mind numbed by all the time you’ve spent gazing at Wheel of Fortune.
Watch the idiots guessing wrong. Stare at the morons inside the cathode tube18
and realize that even they, these tiny-brained creatures who have just guessed that "N"
and "C" might be the missing pieces of "THE STATUE O_ LIBERT_," would not be
willing to spend five minutes with you right now. Nor would you want them to. You
are miserable in your loneliness and still you would choose it over the company of
these idiots. Look at all that money they just won, just for the sake of picking up the
extra injustice while you have the chance.
You are doing well. You've done this before, haven't you? Of course you have.
Because depression is nothing new. It has been there your whole life. It always will be.
In these moments of miserable solitude, it is your trusted companion. Occasionally it
may be interrupted by brief moments of happy delusion, but those cannot last. You
know that. Not only have you done this before, but you will do it again. And when that
happens, nobody will be there for you. You will be out of work in your messy
apartment, tired, smelly, surly, and loathing yourself for muttering at the television while
sitting by yourself amidst your collection of empty Ben and Jerry's tubs many, many
times in the course of your life. Then, right afterwards, you will die. Alone. That is
how it works.
Now, repeat the following words in your mind. Repeat them to yourself: It is
always darkest just before the sun sputters its last, casting the very final fragments of
humanity into the cold, black void.
18
If you have a new, flat-screen TV, be aware that you have been suckered
into spending money by a system that indulges in planned obsolescence and
that your old TV is in a landfill, poisoning the planet. If you DO still
have a cathode ray-based television be aware that you are behind the times
and therefore an obvious loser of epic proportions.
LONELINESS EXERCISE #1
Imagine you are sitting in a dark room. Imagine that room is in a large, abandoned
house. Imagine that abandoned house is at the edge of a town that has been entirely
destroyed by plague. The only life in the town is the mass of burrowing maggots that
feast on the dead. Listen to the sound of your breath and know that it is the only sound
you can hear. Imagine that with each breath you might be drawing in the germs that
killed everyone else. Everyone.
Write up a list of people whom you have loved in the past and to whom you have not
spoken in a long time. Do not call them. Be aware that if they wanted to talk to you,
they would have called by now. Seriously. Wouldn’t they?
Look back over your left shoulder. Now look back over your right shoulder. Is anyone
trying to read this page other than you? Didn’t think so. Turn the page whenever
you’re done with it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
OBSESSING ON DEATH
“The fear of death is more to be dreaded
than death itself.”
-- Publilius Syrus
(Since dying, Publilius has
neither confirmed nor denied the
accuracy of his speculative
proposition)
It takes a while to really work up to it, but once you are ready you will find
obsessing on the subject of death quite rewarding.
First off, just thinking about death automatically presents you with a number of
unanswered questions, and nothing does more to undermine your self-esteem than
becoming consciously aware of things you do not know. The following is a short list of
things you do not know about death and other topics just to remind you of how much
you do not know.
Is there an afterlife?
If there is an afterlife, does it hurt to be separated from your body?
Why has nobody noticed that "head over heels" is the position one is in when standing?
Will anybody show up at your funeral?
Can they send you to hell even if you've never believed in it?
Why is there no shorter word for "monosyllabic?"
How many pins can you push through the head of an angel?
What is the AT&T salesgirl in in the blue shirt’s name?
While it is all well and good to spend as much time as you like trying to imagine
oblivion, trying to wrap your feeble, hopelessly undereducated brain around the
question of what it feels like not to be, there is so much more fertile ground in the
"undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns" 19 that we must tarry a
while herein.
How will you die? It could have gone in the list of things you do not know, but I
saved it because it is well worth some exploration. Imagine all the possible ways that
you could meet your demise. Do not stop with the easy, likely ones like "getting hit by a
19From Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, though Shakespearean scholars universally agree that he was
referring not to death, but to Hoboken, NJ.
truck," or "getting a finger cramp that causes you to accidentally flash an inappropriate
gang sign in the wrong neighborhood." Really take the time to flesh out your scenarios.
For example:
Perhaps you will try to get a stuck piece of toast out of the
toaster. You will see the plug next to the outlet, but you will not
realize that it is the microwave, not the toaster which is
unplugged, so you will reach in with a fork. As the first jolt
comes through the metal, you realize your error, but now it is too
late. The tines have magnetized and your muscles have gone
rigid in response to the A/C charge so there is nothing you can
do. As the current holds you in place you can feel your heart
jumping, straining in your pounding chest and you can smell the
flesh of your fingers beginning to char. You know the voltage is
killing you but there is nothing you can do except stand there
and hope that the circuit breaker will blow before your eyeballs.
It won't.
You see how much fun that was? When you really take the time you can get a
good solid death fantasy going. The more gruesome the better. And the more time
you spend knowing that you are going to die and are unable to fix it, the more resonant
the fantasy will become because ultimately that just makes it a magnification of your
current condition, i.e. mortality. You are going to die and, in fact, there is nothing you
can do to fix it.
Also it is very good to imagine that you will die entirely alone and unloved. This
way you can add self pity to your list of loathsome personal qualities as you imagine
your body lying, undiscovered, decaying on the living room floor for a few days before
anybody even notices that you have not been around.
Do not think of any of this as daydreaming. Rather think of it as a careful
process of mental preparation for the inevitable. If you can imagine every possible way
of dying in enough detail and with enough honest clarity, you will surely be prepared
when the big day comes.
Here is one more thought to consider on this topic.
Maybe it will be a long, long time before you die. Maybe

you'll live another sixty or seventy years and always have a runny
nose and a scratchy throat. And at some point soon you'll
become incontinent and have to wear a diaper under your street
clothes until you wind up having a stroke which leaves you in a
wheel chair at the age of forty-nine and, although you can no
longer speak clearly or move your limbs, you will not be
considered terminally ill which means that doctor assisted suicide
is out of the question and you don't have the physical ability to
wipe your own butt much less drag yourself to a window, open it
and throw yourself out. Then your parents will come to live with
you.
This brings us to...

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CONTEMPLATING SUICIDE
“. . .You might as well live.”
-- Dorothy Parker
I strongly encourage the contemplation of suicide during a depression. I do not

encourage the act of suicide primarily because I live in the most litigious nation on earth
and to do so would probably leave me open to some sort of a nasty law suit later on.20
Besides which, we come back to the issue of making things better. Sure, there is
a chance that a successful suicide will end your depression, but look at your success rate
in other areas. What makes you think you are going to be any better at this than you
were at anything else? You are really far more likely just to injure yourself very badly
and rack up a bunch of medical bills that you cannot afford. And it is not like you
could turn to your friends for help. They are all avoiding you at this point anyway.
Also, there is no guarantee that a successful suicide will solve the problem.
Remember that the question of an afterlife still lingers. There is always the possibility
that after we die we get to spend eternity enjoying the mood we were in at the time of
our passing. Forget about whether this is how you want it all to end. Is this how you
want it all to go on forever?
Contemplation of suicide, however, is another matter entirely. There is no
better way to spend your time lying sleeplessly in bed than thinking up clever ways to
kill yourself. The key is to be creative. Try to find a way of ending your life without
leaving any evidence pointing to suicide. Come up with a technique which will leave the
police entirely baffled. Here is a personal favorite which I came up with after a box of
Twinkies and a half hour program extolling the virtues of the Abdominizer.21
I purchase a really long strand of piano wire. I then use a
diamond-tipped drill to put a quarter-inch hole at the very
bottom of the rear windshield of my automobile. I fashion a
noose out of one end of the wire. I coil the wire in the back seat
of my car and run the free end through the hole in the rear
20I realize that this qualifies as an admission of the fact that I have given in to a subtle
form of censorship, that I am waiving my First Amendment right to free speech in order to
avoid a potential future threat to my inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. The
truth is, I find myself giving in to subtle forms of censorship like this frequently. I
consider all the subtle forms of censorship imposed on modern writers and artists to be among
the many, many ways in which life on Earth sucks.
For similar reasons, in the hopes of creating a marketable piece, I have not once mentioned
the many ways in which heavy marijuana use can either serve or hinder a depression (take that
as a hint and do the experimenting on your own, just don't tell them you got the idea from
me).
21The Abdominizer, when it arrived in my mail box, turned out to be a two dollar blue plastic
chair with the arms and legs removed, which I was able to pay for in three easy installments
of $29.99.
windshield across the trunk, past the bumper and secure it tightly
to the rear axle. Now I get into the driver’s seat, belt myself in
and start the engine. Leaving the bulk of the wire (did I mention
it should be a long strand?) coiled in the back, I place the noose
around my neck and hit the road. As I drive, the axle acts as a
winch, taking up the slack as it turns, pulling the wire out through
the minute hole. If I've planned right, I'll have enough wire on
hand to get from my parking space to the freeway before the wire
pulls taut and decapitates me. Now here's the really fun part.
I've stayed in the slow lane so my car can naturally drift off to the
right shoulder without hurting anybody, but it should have
enough ground to cover so that the axle will reel in the very last
of the wire. The police will have no reason to look at the axle of
the car for the instrument of death. They will find themselves
utterly baffled. There I am, on the side of the freeway, ignition
on, doors locked, car stalled, with my head inexplicably
separated from my body.
I also like to imagine the few moments of consciousness
I'd be likely to experience after the decapitation and before the
last usable bits of blood have drained from my skull.
I imagine that I watch, wide eyed and aware as I bounce
sharply against the headrest and fall past my own chest, roll
across my own lap and wind up, for those last precious seconds,
staring upward from the gritty floorboards at the underside of the
fuse box beneath my dash board.
By no stretch of the imagination do I mean to suggest that you should spend a

lot of time rehashing my suicide idea. Rather, it is my intention merely to stimulate
thought, to give you a sense of just how far you can go with this. Create your own. Fill
in the fine details. Build the dark imagery. Enjoy the wonderful possibilities for the
orchestration of your own demise.
SUICIDAL IDIATION EXERCISE

Imagine yourself dead, decaying, at the moment that your
body is discovered. Now, let yourself slide backward in
time to the moment of your death. Jot down everything
you know about how it occurred. Find ways of making
your death more mysterious or more pathetic, depending
on your sensibilities. How can the method of your self-
imposed demise be masked? How can the tools be
disposed of after you are no longer around to clean up
after yourself? (ProTip: Gravity can be your accomplice)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE FINAL THROES
“Don't let it end like this. Tell them I
said something.”
-- Pancho Villa
(These were his last
words)
Eventually there will come a day when you feel a little less sad. Maybe some sort
of useful realization came in a dream. Perhaps you are merely thrown off your game by
the smell of spring flowers in the air or the streak of bright sunlight through your
bedroom window. It is also possible that some really specific single thing, that which
originally triggered this depression, has at last been accepted or recognized or
sufficiently repressed to allow a temporary recovery to begin.
Whatever the reason, the cloud of misery has begun to disperse. Try as you
might you cannot seem to shake the vague feeling that things could get better. You find
yourself smiling and you have an irrepressible urge to shave whatever part of you it is
that you have not been shaving for the past few months and go out to a park.
The whole thing is starting to slip away from you and if you are not very careful,
you will wind up right back where you were before the depression came along: going to
work every day, smiling at people, making friendly chit-chat with strangers at the
convenience store.
Don’t panic. This is a natural part of the ebb and flow of depression. It must
ease up for a time in order for you to fully experience and appreciate it when it returns,
and I think we all know that it will return.
Remember, without light, we would have no way of discerning shadow.
Life’s brief and transient moments of comfort and satisfaction are simply high-
water marks by which we may properly gauge the depths to which we sink.
As the world around you brightens, as you begin enjoying the company of your
friends for a time, as you step out into the world with a song in your heart, take the time
to look up at the clean blue sky and think to yourself, “This too shall pass.”
END

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Modern Depression Guidebook - Brody - 1.

Praise for Modern Depression Guidebook

--Harold Fethe, anthropologist and S&P 500 executive

--Barbara Thomas-Horton, MSW, Group (Depression) Therapist, Hollywood

Memorial Hospital, Hollywood, FL

laughter. Grateful for this book.

--Beverly Shrum Dale, NAMI, Asheville, NC

Like millions of other Americans I sometimes get depressed. This happens

ARE YOU A GOOD CANDIDATE FOR DEPRESSION? Take the quiz:

1) Are you sad right now?

2) Have you ever been sad?

3) Do your moods change depending on how you feel?

5) Do you feel the occasional need to be reassured by those whom you

trust and could offer you reassurance?

no day to date has ever brought that change?

9) Is success an opportunity for disappointment?

10) Have you ever experienced success, opportunity, or disappointment?

11) Have you ever considered suicide?

12) Do you believe in god(s)?

13) Do you now or have you ever had parents?

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

-- Words of wisdom from some

Recent years have shown a marked increase in the popularity of depression as a

“Opportunity is rare, and a wise man will never let it go

-- Bayard Taylor (This sounds really

GOOD COMFORT FOODS STUPID COMFORT FOODS

macaroni and cheese tofu

hot fudge sundae celery

Oreo cookies rice cakes

Cheetos steamed artichokes

philly cheese steak sandwiches lentils

potato latkes with sour cream rhubarb

THINGS YOU COULD THINGS YOU WILL

• Sorting the laundry Consuming comfort food

• Cleaning the coffee

• Writing your niece

BASIC DEPRESSION EXERCISE #1

BASIC DEPRESSION EXERCISE #2

BASIC DEPRESSION EXERCISE #3

“Sorry. You are not a winner.”

-- Words of wisdom gleaned from a

*In the credit where credit is due department, it was a

Assume an affectation such as muttering or stuttering. People will find you so

Compare your appearance to that of anyone on TV with the exception of Rush

“Sleep, those little slices of death; oh how

--Edgar Allan Poe

SLEEP SKEWING EXERCISE #2

SLEEP SKEWING EXERCISE #3

“Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean,

where's it all going to end?”

LAUNDRY Piles of clothes accumulate to remind you that you are

DISHES Unwashed dishes clutter your kitchen making it

PUTTING THINGS AWAY Chaotic surroundings provide a psychic

SHOWERING Very early in your depression you started letting

apparent conclusion of a depression, you opt for the

the time you were humiliated in grade school

the ozone layer

THE BENEFITS OF DEPRESSION

“I just want out. I've had it. I am so

tired. I am twenty and I am already

A man cannot be comfortable without his own

The Giving Tree

Compare your appearance to that of anyone on TV with the exception of Barbara

LOATHE THY NEIGHBORS