On my theory that depression is a mental virus, a whopping, wholistic meme: it’s global and permanent, like the thought itself. Its vector is talking about depression in certain ways, and a sick mixture of stigma and pride. Early on, pride in not sleeping, in being stressed out expressed itself in the culture (see the Slow Movement’s attempts to blow out that furnace with a whisper). This was a good foundation for the petri dish we all live in now.

The problems with our friendships has been talked about in plenty of places. I believe that the idea of friend has been changed to include contacts, while true friendship hasn’t been similarly buffed up. In other words, contacts have become friends while we still only have the same small amount or fewer real friends. Also, the society of besting people, the hatred of stars and the time spent hating them. This is group loneliness.

Economic terms being simply that most of us earn much less money for the amount of work we do, with the focus being on those who earn far more than they deserve (and the lucky few who earn a lot for doing a lot), the average person is made to feel alien.

Is this how depression can spread? Because I’d always thought of it as genetic, but the World Health Organization is predicting an increase in depression world wide. It must also be a virus. A bug you catch no problem when you have the wrong genes.

Can individuals spread it?

Begin again the reassembling of the routine that was blown away and atomized out of memory by the bipolar. What did I used to like? Working back into the desire for something real tends to open up the memory bank, and out tumbles something painful. I just wanted routine but I got memories of old routines from better times. All old times seem like better times. Remember.

From its parts try to make a whole that works. The kludged robot shudders and stumbles around and you’re proud of the little mechanism, and a little sad for it too. Watch it work its way across the carpet, the whole world. You never thought of the walls in quite this way. It’s going to hit one and fall over. The effort of walking all the way over there again to pick it up. Which direction to point it in next? In your hand its legs are still moving, and you’re faintly put off. Like an insect rowing the air.

Put it down and aim it at something for god’s sake.

Other people’s evenings are inconceivably alien and distant. I drove through suburbs three months ago feeling homesick. Wanting the kitchen, the wandering around loneliness, the TV in the bedroom and the quiet. The impersonal hollowness and the sadness of my kid years, when I wanted to live in the suburbs.

The underlit garage awnings and the blue glows in the windows. When smoking, do so under those underlit awnings and stare emptily into the black middle distance until you can make out the pebbles in the road, those ones someone down the street guards against with the plastic on the front bumper. Small libraries, the irritable and bored women.

Get a coke at a drive-thru using three words. Rent a movie.