Winter blues are no fun. Introspection, while typically a healthy practice to maintain, can lead, especially on leaden days replete with low-lying clouds and rendered out of focus by days of cold rain, to a depressed state of mind. ‘Tis the season for SAD.

The sun has fallen southward now, the days feel truncated, the air sharper and the evening chill aggressive. This very morning, the car was covered with ice and I had to enter the car from the passenger side because the driver-side lock, where the frigid morning breeze blew by, was frozen solid. It is as if the car had been attacked overnight by Jack Frost. Ah, but that’s just Southern California near the mountains this time of year. At least it wasn’t raining today, and sunny weather is forecast (though of course: caveat emptor) with highs nearing 70° for the next several days. Bipolar weather, a staple of the winter holiday season hereabouts. It makes me a bit wonky, like there’s this constant anxiety humming in the stratosphere, like there’s this lacrimal tinge to all colors, like sleep offers cold comfort most nights that lingers in my bones and impotently aches after the passage of the sun.

I picked a fine time to read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I mean that without irony. The novel reminded me of what it is I have in my life, of all the good things, all the important and meaningful things. I needed that. It also helped that I’d just finished Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, which too had conveyed its ultimately hopeful message to my understanding. Now, as I read David Foster Wallace’s¹ Infinite Jest, I find myself succeeding by feet instead of inches against the slow, disintegrative, disintegrating, miles of these—the darkest of days through which the world yearly travels in its unconscious spiral, carrying me along with it.

But I have another aid in my daily struggle: music. I succeed by feet instead of inches, and music keeps something like a spring in my step, and it helps my laces stay tied. Of especial potency here are a few albums I’ve recently obtained. These are, in no particular order:

• Throwing Muses, eponymous release (2003)
• Kristin Hersh, Speedbath (2007-’08)
• Deerhunter, Microcastle/Weird Era Cont (2008)
• Etienne Schwarcz, Le Carillon De L’être, and Angel (2008?)
• Alvin Lucier, Music on a Long Thin Wire (1979)
• Paul Dresher, Dark Blue Circumstance (1982-’87)

(Reviews for some of these and others are forthcoming, at least if I can make the time to write them without utterly neglecting my usual responsibilities.)

O.K., so I am being a little wishful in my thinking, and the truth is that some days I cannot rise above the weather or adequately escape the season. But I am trying. I have to try. If you have the tools at your disposal it’s kind of a shame not to utilize them, right? Music is an especially good tool in my experience for fighting against Seasonal Affective Disorder (learn more about SAD at the link). Now if only music and literature would cure the common cold! Alas….

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1. The loss of David Foster Wallace was a tragedy. He was the rarest of talents, arguably on a par with Thomas Pynchon and singular in his vision. It is sad for me to think that he lived so near to me and I never got a chance to meet him. As I read Infinite Jest I come, page by page, chapter by chapter, to admire him all the more. He was as sensitive as he was intelligent, as insightful as he was funny, as charming as he was, in the Scottish sense, fey. Were I so inclined as to believe in an afterlife of any sort, I would have to say that DFW’s spirit resides in the words he committed to the eyes of his readers, where it comes to life and moves through the characters and plots of his fiction and the delightful ravelings of his essays. However plain or recherché his meaning, he made the pursuit of it, his meaning, worthwhile. If that is how he may live on for a good long time, I will be content with that.