� David Cantwell in "Help Me Make It Through the Night: Anatomy of a Record" (again the Da Capo collection)

(Wednesday October 9)

I should clarify something about which I was too glib last time. What I meant to say is that when I asked Rohm how he was doing and he said that he'd been very depressed during the late summer but was finally starting to shake it off, what I was attracted to was much less the commonality of experience than his unashamed candor, the fact that he clearly saw the fact of being depressed and the circumstances that had engendered the depression as no reflection on his essential self and nothing to go around apologizing for. I admired that, and even if it were not all wrapped up in the package of Rohm, I would want to be around it.

I have a new mantra. I started saying it to myself on Tuesday afternoon, when after a slightly up-shaking experience downtown I wandered up to Capitol Hill in nice clothes without a clue what I was going to do with myself � literally and figuratively; I was thinking about some of the stuff I've been writing about here, at the same time trying to remind myself that I do so measure up and trying not to let me count the ways in which I often feel like I do not when suddenly the sentence presented itself to me as inarguable fact: Ingrid Bergman is not a parakeet. It is stupid, yes, but it made me smile to myself in such a way as to distract me from the involuntary fretting, and without going all Stuart Smalley on you, I must briefly argue that it is true. The same way I have a low tolerance for people who, for instance, complain that they're not meeting new people yet sit on their asses watching cable every night, who say they wish they had time to read more yet can always make time for the bars � who want it both ways � a rational person could call bullshit on my parakeet paranoia and say, Listen, you can either declare yourself in a non-defensive manner to be following the example of Ingrid Bergman or you can whinge and chirp and thereby show yourself to be the biggest chicken in the aviary. But not both.

So I am thinking about that a little bit. On Tuesday afternoon it worked like a charm, mostly I imagine because of the newness of it and because in repeating the mantra, I got that feeling where an unreckoned fondness for myself, a sense of potential likability, you nut, seemed to be bubbling up through the cracks of something old and hard, and it had been so long since I felt like that, since I caught myself pleasantly by surprise at all, that it sustained me all afternoon and through that night's marathon vegetable-cooking extravaganza. But then yesterday morning I was again rendered stunned and inconsolable by a perfectly (both meanings of that word please) awful intake interview at a temp agency downtown, where immediately after the placement specialist, and this was the nice one, told me that in addition to having aced the dictation test I had the highest Wonderlic score she'd ever seen � for an exhilarating prideful moment I thought: ha, I will be fine � she gave me a long lecture about how deeply deeply horrorshow the job market was, I should take it from her that it was ten times worse than I could ever imagine, but because she liked me and thought my shoes were stylish, she would be willing to put me on her consideration list for a job stuffing envelopes at [a certain coffee cartel headquartered here in Seattle] for two and a half days next week. The implication being that I'd have to grovel for it. And then she started giving me her personal philosophy of job-hunting during a depression (she said it), which I am not sure what part of it is self-serving and what part is true but nevertheless it made me quite panicky: Don't even bother sending your resume anywhere unless it is a version you have spent many hours customizing for that particular position and you are 100% sure that the position is exactly right for you, because once you've applied somewhere for one job and not gotten it, that's it, they'll never look at your resume again. You get only one blind chance to be considered. The only way anyone's getting a job these days, she continued, is either via friends on the inside or � here comes the potentially self-serving part � through a temp agency or, eventually, via contacts flukily made while working a temp gig. She told me that if I've been sending my resume out, I've only been hurting myself. Oh, and also, this conversation took place in a cavernous office suite previously staffed by at least ten people (I took the Wonderlic test at a former reception area that still had name tags on the buttons for phone extensions) and now maintained by only two. I should have looked around for a PimentoLoaf.com sign. Anyway, she drilled into me how tough times were and told me that if I managed to be diligent, calling every single day and declaring my willingness to work, after a month or so she might be able occasionally to slip me into semi-regular reception gigs. Again, the implication being that I'd have to grovel for it. Dazed, I said my goodbye and thank-you-for-your-time and walked up to Capitol Hill again � I'm trying to be good about exercise � to kill time before my 2 pm appointment at another temp agency, and I must confess that Ingrid Bergman is not a parakeet was not only unhelpful but so irrelevant to my experience that it might as well have been in Swedish. Do I need one mantra for each kind of feeling bad about myself? That seems extreme, like a hypochondriac's medicine cabinet, and I dearly hope the answer is no.

(Saturday October 12)

Why my yes, it has indeed been a while. I'll get to the why of it, such as there is one, in a bit. But first I want to tell something great that happened last night. Per agreement and having assumed designated-driver responsibilities, I showed up at Todd's last night to pick up him, Rich, and Rich's cousin for the night's entertainment. Keep in mind that although I think Rich is the bee's knees, I have not seen him in a few tumultuous months and I have no idea with what degree of moral skepticism he is inclined to regard me � that is to say, what he's heard about me and how he's filtered it � so all of a sudden, realizing this, in spite of myself I had the seethe in me of sheepishness, resentment, dread, and pre-emptive hostility. Todd let me in, complimenting me on my tights (thank you, Mary), and I took off my coat in the kitchen and walked through to the living room, where Rich was sitting on the sofa under the west window. I said hi and he said something like, "Hello, I'm Rich, I'm visiting from Bellingham" and this was so exactly the gratifying tabula-rasa reintroduction of the ladies-only dream I wrote about here that for a moment I was standing there, confused and stunned, and I think I actually did start to say something like In my dream � and then he stood up and hugged me, the best kind of hug, a real one. Can enough good things be said about Rich? Not on my watch. And that was the fourth in a series of events that day that helped make me feel a lot less loserish: one was me finally finishing the stain-and-varnish job on my three dressers, and about the other two I'm not going to say anything except that one of them started better than I think it turned out and now I am able to give you some advice that maybe it's not the best idea in the world to schedule a phone screen for right after you'll be getting back from a hard 100-plus-minute run. (D'oh!) All day Friday I was feeling tough yet charmed, I would tell Todd in the drinks line, as if I could chew through titanium and digest it and then shit out pinwheels.

Which, only now that I'm typing I realize, was at least partly a result of having gone on diary hiatus � I decided last Sunday that I was going to take this week and be unemployed and learn how to do that and not be anxious and self-hating about that all that time, like that was my job, an attitude that I also knew figured couldn't hurt me in the process of looking for an actual one. But Tuesday I went to one of the temp-agency appointments I made on my last Thursday at Arson, all full of if not diminished anxiety then the desire to bring that state about in myself, and what happened is that sometime between the Thursday afternoon appointment-making and the Tuesday afternoon office-visiting the agency had apparently gone under, I went to the address I'd been given, and, looking through the glass door from the lobby into the office suite, I could see that it had been cleared out. There were a few scattered papers and the prints in the carpeting that the desks and bookshelves had left, still the nameplate on the door, but that was it. And the way I would be able to snicker at myself and the unemployment narrative after Friday's spacey, low-blood-sugar phone screen, well, I could not do that yet on Tuesday, and the empty office really took the wind out of my sails so I was too shaky to write that night and then Wednesday there was another somewhat demeaning temp-agency experience but by that time I was reminding myself how long it had been since I wrote in my diary so I did it anyway and it was one of those cases where the writing-about made me feel not at all better but pathetically and shakily worse. I abandoned that entry and maybe will post it later just so you can see what I mean.

Now it's Saturday night and I'm home solo with the slaptop, watching the second in tonight's double feature of documentaries, "20th Century Fox: The First 50 Years" after "Go Tigers"; I joined Netflix last week. I've been home since around 4:30, alone with everything quiet and the refurbished dressers looking terrific, and it's been lovely. This is a Saturday night that will look lame as all hell to you, and I couldn't care less.