Damn you, George Ezra

Yes, you, you peach-skinned cherub

So, the last five years have been... fraught, perhaps? Intermittently dreadful, oh yes. With periodic showers of crap. Generally, double-plus ungood.

Not that the long chain of years before these last five were a sunny smiling "before" picture. I am the very model of a middle-class neurotic: chronically, clinically depressed and anxious.

(I don't want to overstate this. None of it has been extreme enough to require hospitalization, for example. But it has been absolutely bad enough to make me feel like every cell in my body is bruised and knocked askew, like I'm dragging myself through a swamp with my legs encased in concrete. Just bad enough to make me feel hopeless and joyless and sleep 15 hours a day. So yes, many, many people are far worse off than I, but this is more than bad enough for me.)

But recently I had a sense -- a hope -- well, maybe it was a fantasy -- that I was reaching a new equilibrium, that I could soon be entering a period of calm. It's partly how this blog came to be. I just needed to get our financial affairs settled, and then I could finally take a deep breath, look around, get my bearings, and begin.

And then George Ezra released his second damn album, and every damn time I listen to it I have a gods-damned sobbing meltdown. And I cannot seem to stop listening to the gods-damned thing, and that warm, weary, burnished voice, roughened and wise.

That voice.

Damn you, George Ezra.

(Seriously. I need this to wear off soon.)

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