Who's Sad in America?

I am.

I am sad. Sad sad sad. Not just depressed, not just a little blue today. Hard core, pulling your heart out through your lungs, then between your skull and your brain, and hurling yourself off Kilimanjaro sad. Dancer in the Dark sad. Scratching the paint off the walls, hanger abortions sad. Motherfucking down, man. I am Sad for Time, a levy looking over the tears of the years and crying competitively.

I cry at the sight of crushing beauty. I laughed and cried in Bowling for Columbine - it was like a Beaches movie for me. I feel loss at most times in the day and can see sadness in the grocery cashier's perfunctory smile and know that she is sealed in a relationship to some secret loss that keeps her scanning barcodes for a living because at least it's a job. I miss my dead mother, my dead boyfriend, my now three dead dogs, my terminally fetal career, and my dead father who treated me like I was dead before he died. I miss the America we had before terrorism, before the 80s, before 'Nam, before the sexual revolution. And as I grow older, the dead people and the dead eras on my list tally up, making sadness old hat.

I have Blue Blood. This is my schtick. Everybody's got something - some are fashion designers, some are cartoonists, some are massacre-ists, some are corporate defense lawyers. Mine's being down in the dumps.

SAD.

And this ain't so Seasonal Affective bullshit. This life of mine ain't nobody's acronym.

Sadness is ...

The feeling of loss. Careful now, because it's not THE loss - the loss is totally different - something that happens - a moment, a verb almost, a second - loss is an event. Sadness is the you you're left with.

It's the feeling of desperation, sobbing that has taken pounds off and makes you look like a blowfish with rosea. Sadness is the ability to see the black and white of lives lived and lives taken. Sadness is a broken heart. Sadness is a dog hit by a car when you just got him housebroken. (Alanis Morrissette would call this ironic. She is Sad, but masquerading as Angry.) Sadness is two towers coming down on a generation of comfort-seekers. Sadness is an unreturned phone call after the first date. Sadness is a mother's first, second and then final miscarriage.

There is loss and we all have it. Big or small. Tragic or planned. It seems our society has all sorts of discomfort and mythological ways of dealing with it. Loss is so enveloping that we must must must shut up the crying self sometimes just to get on with life. It's in the getting on that we discover the fluidity of sadness in all. The grace of it. The inevitable beauty in having had and lossed. The ability for sadness to fit in to most all circumstances, by virture of its propigation. When we cry in the movies, we know it never leaves. Sadness stays and becomes you - a slow bleed that never heals, but only changes in the course of growth. Dr. Phil and all the other pontificators are full of shit, saying that we can move beyond it. It's a trite simplification, promoting the ideal that we can "fix" sadness.

I say EMBRACE YOUR SADNESS.

This is Who I Am. I am a Sad Person. I am a Crier. And I'm coming out of the closet with my blue ribbon pinned to my skin. Proud to be Down. Flaunting my Abandonment, Protesting Viral Happiness, Capitalizing on the Panic of Loneliness and Loss that are as natural as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Not about to give into prescriptions. This is all natural, this thing of mine. My Time is Now. America's Time is Now. There is no better time than the present to be Sad in America. I'm not about to be shamed into toting my sadness around like it's a habit I'm trying to curb by confessing it at anonymous meetings. Not anymore. Nope. No siree. My sadness deserves to see the light of day, to come out and talk with the others, laugh low and guttural and find a place in this world whose very nature is loss and rebirth. Dude, just to get a little color in my skin, you know? Partake in the Seratonin Elite without all the Laura Ashley and Prada fashion.

So I want to encourage you - come out into the Dark. The Goth kids get it. The punks, but not the disaffected hipsters. Grunge music was its turn-of-the-century love child. Elvis impersonators are the embodiment of a loss that's found a fashionable place to kitsch its camp, just like the gay community has cornered the market on being the alternative, whether for good or bad. We give awards to soldiers, firemen, policeman who see the most fighting because we know they've experienced more than their share of loss, and a medal or a ceremony is all we can do to recognize it. We spend the next several years waffling from Ground Zero plan to Ground Zero plan, never confident enough of incapusulating the spiralling loss that happened there, because all we're really left with is is this amorphous sense of sadness that never really ends. But we still yearn to make it right - to justify, to beautify the missing pieces of ourselves. When all that's left swirling in the hole of loss is sadness, within that, you've got to put your hand out and hold on to what's left of you - whether it's a dance, a scream, a life, a mellowing wisdom, or a secret.

But just be, man. You're - I'm - Still Here. And it sucks. And it's Okay. And it's fucked. But UROK, because we're all sad. We're just afraid that if we say so, we'll be standing at the coffee maker alone and fidgeting.