Remember that hair product commercial where young guys mistook moms for their daughters, because they had such young hair, thanks to [product]? One of them lives on in my mind. Occasionally it pops up, like some nefarious Internet trojan opening a window and I see this teenaged football quarterback tackle a mom; they roll in the grass, he gets a look at her face and goes, “Sorry, Mrs. Robinson, I thought you was Gail.” Maybe he doesn’t say “was”, maybe he says “were” but I had to write “was” to get his Oakie accent across. Gail’s mom seems flattered and gives her hair a little toss.

I tackled altogether too few moms back when I was a teen, and now it’s too late. Imagine I tackle some mom; she’s not going to buy the “sorry, I thought you were your daughter” excuse, is she. I’m just guessing; I haven’t tested this.

You’re in a bad mood, one says.
He’s been in a bad mood since yesterday, another one says.
He told me he likes being in bad moods, the youngest one says.
Thanks a lot, he says to the youngest one.

She had been in a bad mood herself, you see. And I was trying to tell her that she didn’t have to pretend to be happy. That the mood could, possibly, work itself out faster if she just lived through it. That’s what I get for trying to explain to a six-year-old that I like being melancholic.

That’s what I call it. I can’t call it depression. If you’re depressed you can’t go to work, you can’t get out of bed in the morning. Dishes pile up in the sink. The cats catch their breakfast in the goldfish bowl. What I have is at most this low-grade depression, this melancholic state that keeps me, at most, from realizing my true potential. Which is probably a blessing in disguise, because first thing I would do if I were galactic emperor is implement forced sterilization of jerks who cut you off in traffic et cetera.

So instead I choose to mope around.

Not all the time, of course. There’s a cycle. There are the peaks where I stand there looking at the veins in a leaf going, “wow.” Telling my kids, “look at those clouds! Just look at those clouds, would you.”

And look. I realize my writing is not going to win me the Miller Lite literary prize or anything, but I enjoy doing it and I think being melancholic helps me there, because blah blah outside looking in blah blah frame of mind.

And the real lows are few and far between. There was one depressing unemployed winter I slept on a friend’s condemned couch in the condemned house he rented, occasionally getting up to eat instant noodles. There was last night, and a couple other nights this week, where I just couldn’t get to sleep.

I read Gamma a story once where a papa bear goes from bed to bed to car to bed to sofa to chair all night and finally falls asleep just before his alarm goes off. I didn’t realize that his insomnia was rooted in depression. The author of that book was probably a seriously depressed person, come to think of it. You have to wonder, sometimes, don’t you, who are these people writing my child’s books? Like, “Mom’s Jelly Donut” by S. Freud or something.

I should take a walk, I thought at one point. And I remembered that my father had gone on long walks when he was the age I am now. Hours-long walks at night, in the dark. Now I understand why.

What do you do when you can’t sleep at night like that? she asks.
Stare at the ceiling, he says. Stare at the ceiling and try to sleep.
If you’re trying to sleep, you have your eyes closed, another one says, splitting hairs.
Yes honey, he says. He stares at the ceiling through his eyelids until it grows uncomfortable at the attention and shifts around, tossing its hair coquettishly. Around three he finally falls asleep. Around five his alarm goes off and he wakes in a short bed in a pink room with a Shakira poster on the wall and a panda bear night light.