Ah Asheville

I went to see my new therapist again today and I really like him, although my brain has this tendency to swerve wildly between believing in things "new age" and not believing in them at ALL, and he definitely tends towards things of a newish age nature. Only in Asheville, I believe, does your therapist think you should a) get your chart done, b) go to a sweat lodge and c) do some kind of ritual to invoke the spirits of your ancestors for guidance. That's actually not a bad idea, because it turns out I'm afraid of my ancestors, which is something I didn't know until I considered having them all over for dinner and drinks as it were. I think he wants me to face my fears, which is going to take a while, but I suppose it must be done, and I guess we might as well start with the family. I know it seems weird to fear your ancestors, but I do have a lot of them, and the ones for which photographic evidence exists tend towards long beards and stern expressions. Even the women don't really look, you know, jolly, and the children are all completely serious, even when they're shoved into pony carts or standing there with dogs. And then something about 100 year old photographs of dogs really gets to me, somehow, and I have been known to sniffle.

In other depression news, I put myself back on Lexapro, since I have about 5 weeks worth stashed away, even discounting the one pill Theo ate a while back (didn't affect him at all. Dogs don't need anti depressants - I wish I could get that enthused about a milkbone myself.) The only problem is that my stash expired in October 2005. Of course I took one first and then started to worry that I'd poisoned myself and that terrible hallucinations, shock and death would soon follow. Fortunately, though, I have all these friends who work in mental health (yeah, I know, I know) and one of them found out for me that Lexapro doesn't really turn into LSD or arsenic or anything when it's out of date, it just gets, possibly, less potent. So we shall see whether my brain chemicals get sufficiently altered to turn me into less of whatever it is I am right now and more of a sort of cheerful (not too cheerful, never that) human type being.

My mother says that depression is a completely rational reaction to the state of the world today and all smart people should be depressed. Of course she also says that there's never been any kind of mental illness or depression in our family at all, ever, and when I point out that both my grandmothers were hospitalized for depression or madness or, actually, since I have no idea what they were put away for, who knows, maybe that convenient female complaint of nerves, she says that people were always locking women up in those days for no reason at all. This has always evoked a picture in my head of a guy with a big butterfly net lurking around a city street, just waiting to nab a passing woman and haul her off for electro shock therapy - and then that's that, for as my aunt, famously, once said "Mother was never the same after the shock treatment."