So I went to see my doctor about the Cymbalta's troublesome habit of fucking off to the corner bar three or four days a week. I thought she'd increase my dosage, but instead she convinced me to try some new "mood stabilizer" called Abilify (who gets paid to think of these names?). When I picked up the prescription, I learned that, were I to work up to the recommended daily dosage, it would cost $426 a month. CONTACT YOUR DOCTOR IMMEDIATELY if the fact that your crazy pills are costing your family the price of a dinner for two at the French Laundry causes you to experience violent mood swings, feelings of worthlessness, or thoughts of harming yourself. God damn my stupid brain anyway. I am utterly respectful of mental illnesses and emotional disorders in others, but when it comes to myself, I am practically a Scientologist: "There's nothing wrong with you that a good kick in the ass wouldn't cure! Why can't you quit whining? If you just make up your mind that you're going to be OK, you will be. You make me sick, ya big pussy."

Alas, my inner Scientologist has failed to convert me.

Seriously, there is a history of depression in my family and I have certainly struggled with it before, but I wasn't on any psychiatric drugs before the failure of the federal levee system, and I was doing OK. It seems to me that things in my brain should have returned to that level of OK-ness by now, and it pisses me off that they haven't. Can catastrophic events permanently change your brain chemistry?

I hate even talking about this shit, but I decided in 2005 that I would try to maintain a certain level of candor in this journal in order to give readers a realistic picture of one New Orleanian whose life was torn apart by Katrina and its aftermath. Other than some very nice cucumbers and mint currently being served at The Green Goddess, that picture is really all I have to offer the public world right now, so there you go.