sun sept 26
woke up: 9:40 am

Woke up at 9:40 on a Sunday with nobody making me. Not bragging. Okay, bragging a little.

My dad was watching golf. The Ryder Cup, which I didn't know was a thing. The Americans were getting killed going into today and then they came back and won, and my father, a man who has said maybe forty words to me since August, jumped off the couch and yelled at a golf ball. I sat down and watched the end with him. We didn't talk. It was kind of great.

Okay. Here's the thing I've been trying to type all week. I think I've been depressed since like March. Maybe before. The parking lot thing. The sleeping. Standing in a field full of fires and feeling nothing. That wasn't me being cool about it. That was this.

I don't know if I'm going back to school. Ron says I don't have to decide yet. The spring registration stuff came in the mail and it's on my desk under the guitar picks. It's not a mistake yet. It's just sitting there.

A few people e-mailed after the Woodstock entry, mostly to say they were there too and it sucked for them too. One guy in Pennsylvania lost a shoe in the mud and never found it. Man, I hope you found your shoe.

thu sept 23
woke up: 10:05 am

Second session. Fewer "I don't know"s. More "I guess"es. Ron says that's progress. I said Ron is easily impressed. He laughed, which I didn't expect. Next week we talk about seeing a doctor about maybe medication. I said I'd think about it. I am thinking about it.

mon sept 20
woke up: 10:45 am

The one thing I used to like is guitar. I've had an Epiphone since I was fourteen and it's been in the closet since spring, under the winter coats. Saturday I dug it out. The strings were dead, like rusty-dead, so I rode my bike to the music store on Elmwood and bought a new set, which counts as going outside, Ron.

It took me an hour to restring it because I forgot how, which is embarrassing. Then I played for two hours instead of fifteen minutes. My fingers are killing me. I lost all my calluses.

Fun fact: if you are from Buffalo and you pick up a guitar you are legally required to play "Iris," because the Goo Goo Dolls are from here and everybody's aunt went to high school with one of them. I played it. Making fun of it at first. Then not making fun of it.

Around nine my dad knocked. I thought, here we go. He opened the door like two inches and listened for a second and said, "That sounds good, Kyle." And closed it.

That's the whole thing. I don't know why I'm writing it down.

thu sept 16
woke up: 11:30 am

Went to the counselor yesterday. Beth drove. She waited in the car the whole hour reading the new Harry Potter, which she swears she bought for herself.

His name is Ron. He's like fifty, beard, cardigan. There was a box of tissues on the table angled right at me, which, rude.

First a questionnaire. Do you have trouble sleeping? (I have trouble NOT sleeping.) Have you lost interest in things you used to enjoy? (Define "things.") Then he asked me about a million questions and I said "I don't know" to basically all of them. I counted. Twenty-six. Ron said, "I don't know is allowed in here," which kind of threw me.

At the end he said the word. Depression. He said it like a normal thing, like you'd say strep throat. He said it's really common and really treatable, and we'll meet every week, and maybe later I see a doctor too, and we'll see.

He gave me homework. Homework! Get up by ten. Go outside once a day, even just around the block. Pick one thing I used to like and do it for fifteen minutes even if I don't feel like it.

On the way home Beth didn't ask me a single thing, which is how I knew she really, really wanted to.

fri sept 10
woke up: 1:00 pm, sort of against my will

My sister ambushed me.

Beth is 25, a nurse, married, lives out in Cheektowaga, and has always been the one who has it together. Today I woke up at one and she was sitting at the end of my bed. Just sitting there, holding her car keys.

She said, "Mom called me." I said, "Great." She said, "Kyle, I think you're depressed." I said something sarcastic, I don't even remember what. She didn't laugh. She said she made me an appointment with a counselor at a place on Delaware, next Wednesday at four, and she's driving, and she already got my manager to switch my shift. (She went to high school with his wife. Buffalo is one big small town.)

I said I wasn't going. She said, "I went to somebody, you know. In nursing school. For almost a year." I didn't know that. Nobody told me that. I'm nineteen and nobody tells me anything.

Then she cried a little, which Beth does not do, and I said fine. Fine. One time.

Then she made me eat a grilled cheese, because she's a nurse and she can't help it.

tue aug 31
woke up: 2:10 pm

Nothing happened today. I slept. I went to work. I came home. That's the entry.

sat aug 21
woke up: 12:05 pm

Big fight with my dad tonight.

He's worked at the plant for twenty-six years. He gets up at 5:15. He has never in his life slept past 6:30, including the day I was born, which he has told me. So when he comes home at 3:30 and I'm eating cereal in my boxers, it's like a personal attack on everything he believes in.

Also the college sent a letter about my spring grades, and my mom opened it because it said "the parents of" on it, so now they know. All of it.

He said, "You're nineteen years old and you sleep till noon like a cat." I said cats sleep like sixteen hours a day so technically I'm underachieving even at that, which was the wrong thing to say. He said, "What is WRONG with you?" really loud, and the thing is, I don't know. I wanted to say, I don't know, Dad. I don't know what's wrong with me. Instead I said "Nothing" and went down to the basement and turned the TV up.

My mom did the thing where she washes a pan that's already clean. She does it when they fight. She's done it my whole life. Cleanest pans in Erie County.

thu aug 12
woke up: 1:15 pm

Mistake number two, for anyone keeping track: I'm not in college anymore.

Technically I stopped going in March. I don't know why. I'd get up and get dressed and drive there and then sit in the parking lot with the engine running until it was too late for class, and drive home. I did that for like three weeks, and then I just stopped getting dressed. Three F's and a W. I didn't register for fall. My parents think I'm "taking a semester to work." My parents know about half of this.

What I do now is work at the video store on Hertel, four to close, five nights a week. It's honestly fine. You put tapes back in alphabetical order. People get mad at you about late fees like you personally invented time. Tonight a lady returned Titanic, both tapes, rewound, in the right boxes, and I almost cried from gratitude. Nobody rewinds. The sticker literally says Be Kind Rewind.

Rich goes back to school in two weeks. Dom's moving to Albany. Then it's just me and the tapes.

mon aug 2
woke up: 12:50 pm

Everybody keeps asking how Woodstock was, like I went to Disney World. So here's the whole thing, once, and then I never have to say it again.

Dom, Rich and me drove out Thursday in Dom's mom's minivan. Three hours on the Thruway. The whole thing was on an old Air Force base in Rome, which means it was on pavement. Runways. Miles of blacktop and hardly any shade, in July, when it was like a hundred degrees. You could feel it coming up through your sneakers.

Water was four dollars a bottle. Four dollars. There were free fountains but the lines were insane, and by Saturday the ground around them was a mud pit, and I'm not describing the porta-johns because this is a family web page.

The two stages were so far apart that you spent half your life walking. Rich got sort of heatstroke Friday and we sat in the medical tent for two hours. By the time Limp Bizkit played everybody was out of their minds, like the heat had cooked the people part out of them.

Sunday night the Chili Peppers played, and people had these candles some group handed out for a vigil, and they used them to start fires. Then bigger fires. Then things that weren't supposed to burn were burning. We could see it from way back, orange all over the field and smoke going up into the lights. Dom wanted to go closer. I didn't. We walked about a million miles to the van and drove out while cops in riot gear were coming in the other way, and got home around five in the morning.

Here's the part I don't tell people. I stood there watching the field burn and I didn't feel anything. Not scared, not excited. Just, yeah. That makes sense. That's the part that bugs me.

Anyway. Woodstock. Two out of ten. Would not recommend.

you are visitor number

(most of you came for the fires. it's fine.)

e-mail me if you want. or don't. [email protected]
last updated sept 26 1999