A friend responds to a missive, “You’re depressed and it’s warped your perceptions.” I pause to consider. This may be true – or not. How am I to know?

Depressed in this context does not mean clinically. Twice I’ve endured that diagnosis and it’s the worst. Grief paralyzes, you can’t sleep, you sigh for extinction. Some people it kills or permanently disables. I followed doctor’s orders and got over mine as one might the measles. If you’re prone to the disease, recurrence is likely. I shudder at the prospect.

Depressed here I take to mean blue, in the dumps, grim, glum, sad. This condition snags me often, sometimes several times daily. So does its opposite – elation, hilarity, delight – call it what you please – a giddy gratitude for now. So do countless temperamental gradations between. The weather in my head resembles Chicago’s: sunny to stormy to drab in an eyeblink.

Moody I might describe myself, though that adjective’s pejorative, suggesting grumpy, ungrateful. I am seldom grumpy – I work at it – and never ungrateful. Cheer I take to be a social obligation, like bathing, bantering, smiling at would-be jokes. I fake it if I don’t feel it. Imposing your displeasure on companions is as vile as farting in church.

Gratitude is a constant in my psyche. My bleakest funks I’m grateful for, for they interest me and are so much preferable to being dead. I loathe all complaints, my own especially. When the privileged whine, I want to smash their face with a pie.

Whether my moodiness is attributable to body, psyche, or intellect I can’t rightly say. Like a baby I get tetchy if I need sleep or food. Some days the headlines horrify me, on others I shrug them off. I ache when loved ones ache and swirl when they swirl. It grieves me to contemplate my departure from earth. Waking from a deep sleep, I often bob in bliss.

Writing I’m not feeling, I am too engrossed. Ditto watching a good movie or playing backgammon or, in the old days, playing tennis. Concentration is the antithesis of emotion, feeling a leisure activity.

Retired I feel more because I have more time. Work rescues many from despair. Moping I sometimes miss the treadmill of routine. Oh, to be a slave again!

Many sights that gloom me I could ignore, I suppose: human fatuity tops the list. I can’t believe how stupid, brutal, cruel we are, how selfish and oblivious to the wellbeing of others and insensible to the obvious advantages of courtesy and decency. The repulsive behavior of some politicians enthralls me like a bloody car-wreck: I cannot look away. How did these experiments in existence fail so dismally!

On the other hand, there’s Shakespeare – and Bach – and clouds of angelic makers lavishing me with gifts. In concert hall, gallery, immersed in a poem, how proud I am to be a person! Pooch Henry may rib me about human shortcomings – and he’s right, of course. What he doesn’t get is human grandeur, inconceivable to other creatures. “For love,” as Yeats put it startlingly, “has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement.”

Distance, too, modifies outlook. Tragedy, someone said, views life from the inside out, comedy from the outside in. The more I see myself as typical, as a unit and not unique, the likelier to grin. Rereading my mewling into my journals, I roll my eyes: “Poor baby!”

Am I depressed? Sure – who can help it paying attention? Exhilarated? That too. Fulminous at my species and my own inadequacies? You bet. Glad to be alive? Always.