In which for once we don’t talk about impending financial doom

This was an exercise in killing time; while I’m happy if you want to read it, I’d prefer you read this effort if you’re to pick only one.

The coffee shop I’ve been frequenting when my morning schedule allows probably isn’t really owned by Bob Dylan’s granddaughter, so there’s no need you flocking here to gawk. And anyway you can’t call to tell anyone until you leave, as it’s a no-cell zone, and a no-WiFi one as well. The only reason I can blog from here is that I can’t, and similarly, your ability to place the shop geographically and in time will vanish once you cross the threshold going the wrong way if your intent is to gossip. It’s a damn oasis.

Some of the staff are friendly. Others, including the woman who isn’t Dylan’s granddaughter, seem snobbish. The manager is nice and exercises standard staff wiles, such as remembering the drinks associated with new faces, not that “large coffee” is all that tough. Lots of show business types come in, although I can’t tell at what level they’re operating. Scripts get ripped and reconstructed in front of my wondering eyes. Other scripts get written by people hogging the indoor tables for four with their computers and piles of ‘research’.

My spot is outside on what I’m still tempted to call the lanai but is known here as the patio. I have a table by the burbling fountain, assuming no one is sitting at it already and that the fountain pump is plugged in (it’s a two-outlet fixture, conveniently). At the moment the fountain is indeed burbling and I’m sharing the lanai with two other single tables, including one script dude (reading and annotating and texting furiously), and a four-top with about eight people celebrating the impending departure to Brazil of several among them. They appear to have spent time with Robert Wagner during one of the past several days; they love the way his characters always love their wives. (I guess that wasn’t him in “Strangers on a Train;” I can never remember the actor who plays the tennis pro.) But too many of their butts are too big for a show biz confab.

Now, as it turns out, I can’t blog from the library either; my site server was down while I was happily pseudo-blogging away at the coffee shop, and for some considerable number of hours before that, and now an even more considerable number afterward.

This is depressing; I’m missing out on the admittedly minimal affirmation I get from checking the slowly accreting SiteMeter statistics, which are instead thumbing their noses at me. I managed to finally get the average number of daily visits back above 100 — the consequence of more writing which, whatever you think of the result, takes time and considerable energy, the latter of which has been in as short supply as the former has been in long — and now this.

During a conversation a few months ago in which we were discussing this and that, my brother concluded that depression, unpleasant as it may be, is in fact a survival selected for by nature. This was in response to my comment that a recent period of relative alertness had me in a constant state of near-unbearable irritation, sparked by both people and situations, that didn’t go away until I got comfortably depressed again. His take was that depression prevented me from killing myself or someone else, hence, a survival trait.

(A quick aside: next time you hear an Anthony and The Johnsons tune, imagine it as sung by Elmer Fudd.)

I mention the depression-as-good-thing conversation because I have so much invested in this site, and in the process of generating content for it, that the reasonable response to a prolonged site outage would be to scream and break things. But I’m depressed, benumbed and bedraggled, so I didn’t do those things, either of which would have gotten me in trouble; instead I calmly strolled to an area permitting cell phone use and called the hosting service tech support line, the first time to find out what was happening, and the next three times to mock the 30-60 minute repair estimate, which, like the five-year estimate for achieving commercially feasible nuclear fusion, remained perpetually 30-60 minutes away.

I left the library with the broken status still quo. Presumably the site has been back up for some while; I’m back at the coffee shop and unable to check on it, and I have to hit myself in the head with a social worker for several hours after I leave here. But even if it isn’t, I will not, by the time you read this, have done anything particularly stupid in response.

Because, you see, I’m miserably depressed; I’m a survivor.