The Problem with Feeling Better is that Feeling Like Shit Again is Just around the Corner

 I used to believe that there would come a time in life when I would look back at the collection of days I’ve stayed alive in this world and I’d think, “Ok, finally - this is all now worthwhile. The juice is officially worth the squeeze.”

I kept waiting for that ‘rubicon’ moment when it would finally feel like the great payoff for continuing the banal business of living would begin paying dividends.

I kept waiting for graduation from Cruel School. I envisioned waking up one day, doing the math on my good days cancelled out by my bad, and finally realizing that there’s more good here. In the pool of my lived days, the creme had finally surfaced.

It always seemed just barely out of reach. With enough faith, maybe, I could snag it though, and at last I’d arrive at a place where it was an incontrovertible fact: being alive has totally been ‘worth it’. This is, after all, the promise of the seasoned trope, ‘it gets better’.

The rhetoric goes something like, “How will you know how good tomorrow might be if you aren’t here to experience it?”

However…the somber realization is now hitting me: maybe the day may never come when there is a majority of good days in this life.

I’m 46 now. It’s pretty clear now that there are more sunsets behind me than there are in front of me. And when I take stock of how much of my life has been lived in joy…in gratitude…in appreciation, love, opportunity, abundance…the figure is pathetically small in comparison to the interminable sea of despair I’ve been navigating with only infrequent, happenstance buoys of relief dotting the landscape. Admittedly, and not proudly, I swallow hard the fact that my lived experience has been a majority spate of despondence, psycheache, and melancholy.

It’s infuriating. And just when the fog lifts (and it does), I’m reminded by some faceless source of certainty that my respite from suffering is transient, so I had better not get used to it.

You see, the problem with feeling better is that feeling like shit again is always around the corner. Not only does this acknowledgement rob you of any present joy you might have during those flashes of positivity, but there’s also no good argument against it.

…because no one stays up forever. Especially not one of ‘us’ - the maligned depressives blighted by persistent malaise and misfortune.

What an embarrassing curse. How crushingly perverse this burden has been, and is, and how painful the misunderstanding that assaults us every day of our lives.

Fuck this endless war.

For us, our default state is the agonizing, contemptuous one - irreconcilably so. For us, feeling out of place, sad, unloved, ashamed, displaced, abandoned, forgotten, purposeless, and listless is emotional home. This is where we return from our occasional jaunts into faraway lands where there’s sunshine and levity. Our centers are dark, bleak, and unforgiving, despite any attempts we might have made to rearrange the furniture or replace the peeling, outdated wallpaper.

The rats still gnaw at the baseboards. The joists and rafters still heave under the weight of the skewed, sagging structure. We are trapped in ‘fixer uppers’ with no one even half-interested in picking up a hammer and going to work (least of all ourselves).

Lord knows we’ve tried.

It’s not that we like it here. Don’t you dare accuse us of that. We don’t want this. But we’ve tried so hard so many times to ‘just feel better’ and failed that the return to our museums of morosity are the only choice we have.

At least…at the very least…they’re familiar. There is that.

And so, when given the choice between trying again to be happy, this being perhaps the 500th time (who knows), we should be forgiven for not expecting much in the way of sustainable results.

I cry inside for all of us who live here. If you are one of us, know that your suffering is just, even if the circumstances that put you here are not.

Amidst the unfairness of this experience, there is a kernel of understanding that we hurt for a reason we are never privileged enough to know.

When that kernel dies, the last vestiges of our spirits die, too. And when that happens, all hope is truly lost.

I wish it were not the case that we are cursed to die slow deaths that no one understands and everyone wants to be as far, far away from as possible.

But please.

Go on thinking ‘life is good’ and that we just need Jesus. 

For some of us, it doesn't get better.

 I was 18. Freshman year of college.

I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was walking down the sidewalk somewhere on campus. It was brisk fall day.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I felt this overwhelming compulsion to cry.

Nothing was wrong. In fact, the sun was out, pretty girls were walking everywhere wearing their pretty smiles, and I had every reason to be enjoying every single breath I was taking.

But instead of relishing in the beauty of my surroundings, a sinking sadness pulled me off that sidewalk and dropped me under a tree a few dozen feet away.

Within about 30 seconds, I became incapacitated by a choking wave of despair that any attempt to describe would only serve as an insult.

I had no choice. I was overcome.

And so, I positioned myself to be out of sight from anyone, and under that tree in Georgia, I wept.

This wasn't some limp-wristed, half-assed kind of cry, either. This was an abruptly violent, tears-and-mucous bawl that spewed forth, powered by every muscle my torso could recruit.

I distinctly remember, as my face contorted and my body pulsed in agony, wondering what the exact hell was happening.

For as I said, nothing was wrong.

My dog hadn't died.

I didn't fail an exam.

I mean, I was even wearing sandals, so my shoes couldn't have even been on too tight.

The point is I had zero reason to be any kind of sad at all, and yet, there I was under that tree, enduring an S-tier existential ache that manifested as the ugliest, vilest, and most consuming cry I had had since my mother passed years prior.

About 20 minutes in, sheer exhaustion took over. After all, one can only heave, secrete, and writhe for so long before the body taps out. And that's exactly what happened.

My abdominal and neck muscles were swollen with lactic acid. The tears and snot had begun drying into a stiff patina on my face, and I had just enough sense about me to attempt a standing position, which then turned into a slow, somber walk to my dorm room.

Keeping my head down, I made it to privacy, where I dropped on my bed and tried to understand what just happened.

Little did I know that what I had experienced was the first of what would be thousands of acute depressive episodes that would rip from me any kind of peace or contentment I could hope to enjoy for longer than a few days at a time.

That first episode was in 1998.

Some loose math will inform you that I'm in my mid-40's now. 50 is a stone's throw away, and by now, I have an ironclad grasp on the affliction that has been the albatross around my neck for the majority of my adult life.

Depression. More specifically, Major Depressive Disorder, or MDD.

Nearly 30 years of the stuff.

Jesus...reading that just now, man...it should make me feel like a warrior.

'30 years'.

Instead, it makes me feel embarrassed.

Oh I've tried it all. I know people say that and many of them are being hyperbolic, but in my case, it's everything and the kitchen sink:

Medications (more than 15 different ones)

Therapy (group and individual)

Inpatient/Outpatient treatment

ECT (that was a wild ride)

TMS (a recent and costly foray)

Psychedelic therapy (interesting, but altogether inconsequential)

Prayer (a last ditch effort)

Meditation/Mindfulness (a great tool but far from a true salve)

...and I won't bore you with the continued list. I think you get the point.

Speaking of points...what is the point in writing all of this out?

I used to talk about my depression in hopes of some kind of cathartic release, which does happen sometimes if I'm lucky.

But really, I think my point in writing all this up is to speak to the few of you who may feel completely alone in your struggle even after numerous decades of doing everything you're told to do in an effort to feel better.

Because, if you're like me, things just haven't gotten better for you.

Despite the well-meaning platitudes lobbed our way from friends, family and doctors, for some of us, it just doesn't get better.

Sure, there might be fits and spurts of hope...maybe an entire week or two might go by without a single suicidal thought or enervating bout of self-flagellation.

But, again, if you're like me, you eventually return to the default state.

The tired, melancholic, and yet still brutally honest state, where nothing is purer than the gravity that pulls your very soul down into the pit of your bowels with every passing moment.

This weight...this heft...no one can experience but you. It's 100% unique to your being, and in a way, it's sort of something to be proud of.

It's like, "There are many who may have sadness, but there are none who have MINE."

It's a small pride, but it's a pride nonetheless.

---

They say that when we die, we endure a life review during which we're shown all the consequences of every important decision we ever made.

For me, I've had to make a conscious, perpetual decision to simply stay alive.

To stay alive, despite the callous yank of death and the siren-like call of nonexistence

To stay alive, despite the instinctual urge to fold into the assured peace of non-being

To stay alive, despite the now-certainty that there's much more to fear in this life than there is to celebrate.

And so, when that life review happens, I hope I see first-hand the benefits of having made this decision.

Because I surely cannot see them now.

Thanks for reading.

Why Breaking Rules Is OK If You're Casa Bonita

If you live a block away from Casa Bonita like I do (a fact I'm never more than two minutes away from telling anyone I meet for the first time), you pay attention to the hullabaloo surrounding this gawdy, Pepto Bismol-ensconsed, culturally textured, kinda-Mexican-but-also-kinda-clowncar-esque steepled palace of mystery and memories. 

For the past two years or so, I've watched as new HVAC equipment was installed. A fresh coat of paint was slathered on. Two dudes known for their churlish, fart humor-fueled cartoon creation invested in it. Media speculation ran wild with tantalizing ideas of what the 'new' Casa Bonita might be like. 

Would there be cliff divers? (We now know that there will be)

Is the food going to still suck? (Probably not)

Will there be South Park characters? (One can only hope)

All this has been good fun to observe from afar, but as the time draws nearer and nearer to the pink pearly gates being swung open and the starving, rampaging masses of Coloradoans are allowed ingress into Casa Bonita, I'm sitting here wondering one thing: 

What's their tagline going to be?

Well, dear friends, yesterday, the marketing department at Casa Bonita, in between feverous sopaipilla binges and fielding customer demands for information related to the opening, dropped the tagline on us, in the form of this massive billboard.

Now, the first thing you'll notice is that you can't read the tagline. It's in white, against a light background.

Their creative team might have been easily forgiven for this graphic design faux pas were it not for the downright atrocity that is the tagline itself. 

Are you sitting down for this? 

Casa Bonita's new tagline is:

The Greatest Restaurant in the World

I'll give you a few seconds to let that sink in. 

. 

.

. 

Still not done yet?

Here's a few more.

.

.

.

Ok. Let's discuss. 

First of all, on the face of it, this tagline is horrifically broken. It's not about the customers or the experience of visiting Casa Bonita itself, nor is it at all unique. It's not imperative. And it attempts to depict Casa Bonita as an actual contender in the comparison of the world's ultimate dining destinations, including:

• Geranium in Copenhagen, ranked the #1 restaurant in the world, where a 3-hour tasting course will set you back a cool $600 a person. 
• Maido in Lima, where you can score an authentic Peruvian dining experience and wine pairing for about $1,250. 
• Quintonil in Mexico City, where $400 hardly buys you a seat at the table. 

The point is this: even a cursory evaluation of the world's greatest restaurants would lead even a gastronomic neophyte to the obvious conclusion that there is no way in hell Casa Bonita could ever be considered the greatest restaurant in the world. The mere assertion is laughable, which makes Casa Bonita's new tagline comically flat, absurdly arrogant, and an absolute embarrassment for those of us who write copy for a living. 

...or is it?

Here's the thing. If Casa Bonita was any other company in the world, this tagline would have been scrapped during the first round of cuts, and the person who came up with it would have been promptly and justly fired with extreme prejudice. 

But, this is Casa Bonita. It's a self-evidently ridiculous place. Its history is ridiculous. It looks ridiculous. Its very brand essence is steeped in a kind of unabashedly self-aggrandizing proclamation of kitsch and camp, which, upon further and deeper consideration, makes this tagline...

absolutely...

perfect. 

...because we all know Casa Bonita isn't actually the greatest restaurant in the world. It's not the greatest anything in the world. But, the very gall it takes to stand up and trumpet such a farce of a claim is exactly the kind of thing that a Casa Bonita mascot would do (I, for one, vote for Cartman). 

And you know what? It works, which is why breaking all the rules is 100% A-OK, so long as you're Casa Bonita and not anyone else. 

• BD

Bret Dallas and The Brothers of Brass: Epilogue

 After nearly five years of constantly being at each other's throats, I'm proud (and relieved) to say that our beef is over.

This story is a long and twisting one, but it bears a moral that I think has import for anyone who has ever held a grudge...especially one lasting for almost half a decade.

____________________

I'm Bret Dallas.

I play guitar on the 16th Street Mall. I've been at it for something like 12 years. Honestly, I've lost count.

I'm loud; I get it. But, there are more people who enjoy the music I make than there are who dislike it. At least, it has always seemed that way.

Back in 2017, my go-to performance spot was at 16th and Champa, right in front of what was then the Rialto Cafe (RIP). This is a highly trafficked area of the Mall, which makes it prime real estate for street performers. So, I shouldn't have been surprised when a brass band began playing their music on the corner next to the Chili's restaurant.

Now...I don't know if you've ever experienced the sonic throttling that a 6- or 7-piece brass band can produce. It's *impressively* loud. But, you know, when the music is actually good, it kind of doesn't matter how loud it is, does it?

Well, it does if you're vying for the same performance space like I was.

When the Brothers of Brass first hit the scene in Denver about five years ago, they pissed me right the fuck off. And, I got pretty damn vocal about it. There was a Westword write-up on the situation, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't fan the flames on Reddit more than a few times.

In the throes of all this rifting, I began to get downright exhausted. I takes a lot of energy to keep hating all the time, and when COVID hit last year and the crowds along the mall began to thin out, I found myself wondering why the hell I kept allowing this nonsense to eat away at me.

Fast forward to a few months ago. The COVID hullaballoo had started to abate, and I found myself enjoying an open mic jazz show at the Mercury Cafe with some friends when who should take the stage but the venerable Armando Lopez himself—one of the frontmen for the Brothers of Brass.

He ripped it proper as is his MO. Dude is a beast on clarinet and sax, though it's taken me this long to admit that without doing so through clenched teeth.

After he stepped off the stage, I decided it was time to place my hat firmly in my hands gulp down my pride, and offer up an olive branch.

"Armando. What's up, man," I said.

"Bret Dallas. How are you?" he replied.

"I'm alright. Look, man. What would you think about all this fighting becoming water under the bridge?" I said, extending my hand.

"Man, we've always wanted that," he said, shaking my hand.

...and that was pretty much it.

To give even more credence to the character of these guys, the sousaphone player I had an especially hard time with went out of his way just a few days ago to approach me and offer an apology of his own. I was shocked. So shocked, in fact, that I didn't get the chance to respond with an apology of my own.

So, Khalil, if you're reading this, I'm sorry, too. I did and said some shit that was way out of line, and I apologize for it.

...which brings us to today.

Love it or hate it, the 16th Street Mall is a staple of the Downtown Denver experience. As it continues to evolve (hopefully for the better), I hope the musicians who bring their magic continue to do so alongside each other instead of as adversaries.

I know I've learned a lot about myself and my craft these past few years. And, I'm now genuinely happy to see the BoB enjoying their hard-won success.

Keep it funky, my dudes.

Thanks for reading.

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