“When somebody comes up to you and says “I think you might be depressed, clinically,” you should say “Thank you, thank you very much, because that means I’m AWAKE.” Is there any reason we shouldn’t be depressed? Question: you living on the same fucking planet as me, asshole? Did you ever think that depression might be the reasonable, human response to the bullshit we’re going through as a species, and it’s meant to propel us into the next evolutionary step or at least to the next step of social change? Did you ever think that, fuckhead? Did you ever think that maybe it’s the people who are happy all the time that are really fucked up in the head? Did you ever think that, asshole? Maybe they’re the ones who need pills. You know, these guys: ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ ‘I don’t know, I feel great, again!’ Well, that’s creepy and weird, man. Maybe you should be on medication, clearly you’re self-centered, narcissistic, borderline, I don’t fucking know, but could you move along? You’re draining me with your happy. I’m doing the Big Work, move along.”
My Cricket is missing. She has been gone for 6 days and every hour that passes destroys my hope that she will come back.
Cricket saved my life. She appeared one day five years ago two sizes too small and crying in the gutter, exactly like me in those days. We were both lost and scared and had no idea where to go, nobody to turn to. I will be thankful that we found each other for the rest of my days. Nothing/nobody will ever fill the hole she is leaving behind.
Cricket nursed me back to health as I did the same for her, teaching her how to eat, forcing food down her throat, protecting her and giving her all the love inside of me that nobody else would take. She soaked up a million tears into her fur. She smelled like a musty linen cupboard, like clean sheets and dust. I buried my face in that fur and sobbed my crumbling heat out. I was sick, devastatingly depressed and suicidal. I don’t know how I would have managed to go on living without her tiny comfort. Cricket nursed me through more heartbreak than I care to think about. The whole world stopped so many times while I fell to pieces and she sat with me and soaked it all up.
She moved house with me six times. Once I had to leave her with “friends” for a whole month while I lived in Port Pirie. They weren’t very good people and they did not look after her well, and I fretted every single day we were apart. My favourite memory of her is the day I went back to get her. I walked into the room where she was snoozing on the windowsill. She looked at me and sprang up into my arms, making the little pigeon cooing noise she made when she was in a good mood. She cuddled me right back as I teared up with joy, and she purred like a racing car the whole time. I will never forget that moment or that little excited pigeon sound. She had missed me too.
I keep expecting her to run in through the back door, chirping and spinning around my ankles and calling for her dinner. I just want one more hug. I just want one more sniff of her lovely fur. I just want her to curl up on the end of the bed and I want to get cranky at all the dirt and shedded hair she leaves behind and I want to hear her snarl at Mickey and I want to watch her never-still tail twitch back and forth because she is eternally angry and I want to scratch the little white spot on her nose and rub her ears and have her dribble on me in her sleep and curl up on my shoulders while I hunch over my computer which always destroyed my neck but I could never stand to shift her.
I couldn’t get out of bed today because I was having a dream and in the dream the world was going through some sort of end of days type crisis and I think there were a few zombies but they didn’t seem that important because after a few (what felt like) weeks of running around and hiding from shit, it turned out that Lady Gaga was actually the Head Boss Lady of Total Fucking Annihilation and everyone was running and hiding from her and if you heard some one yell “Gaga’s coming!!” well, shit son, you had better wash that purple stuff out of your hair because Lady Gaga will eat your head if she catches you with purple hair, don’t you know that she is the only one allowed to have purple hair?
Everybody is milling around in a supermarket carpark when suddenly Gaga comes crashing through, throwing cars at shit and generally being a total asshole about the whole thing, so I run and hide inside the supermarket which for some reason becomes my childhood bedroom, and Boyfriend is yelling “Quick! She’s nearly here! Get in the cupboard!” and I climb in the top of the cupboard and he leans against it all casual like, nothin’ suss, and Gaga comes in the room but oh fuck, it’s Boyfriends brother, and he has a pocket knife in his hand, and he pushes Boyfriend out of the way and opens the cupboard and starts stabbing my legs, and then he turns and stabs Boyfriend in the eye, and then I somehow have the pocket knife so I stab him in the spine until he falls down and is pretty obviously paralysed from the whole spine stabbing thing, and then we run away.
So now we need a plan to get rid of Lady Gaga/Stabby Brother because she’s obviously fucking everything up for everybody but it’s ok because I find a giant tub of cream and when you rub the cream on yourself it makes you invisible, which is pretty fucking handy if you have to hide from some sort of giant, hideous, soul sucking Beast Of Popular Music, and then I am in an alley which has a clothesline in it, and I figure that if I am invisible, and I hang a noose from the clothesline, I can probably wait there for Lady Gaga (I hate even writing her name, it makes my teeth grind) and slip the noose over her head which she will not see coming because I am invisible and totally stealthy, and then yoink up the clothesline because it is a rotary hoist thing, and then she will hang and all our problems will be solved, but it doesn’t work because she doesn’t ever come down my alley and my invisibilty wears off and then I realise I’m fucked, she’s going to find me and probably eat my head because I forgot to wash my hair, but then suddenly it’s ok because I am at the Adelaide Show and I am eating Bertie Beetles.
