It's the time of the year when things go fuzzy and indeterminate. I was listening to a jazz show on the radio on a recent Saturday night when it occurred to me that people don't talk much about feeling blue any more. Some torch singer was moaning beautifully about how she had the blues over some bad gent. It sounded wonderful. It made me want to get drunk with her (which, thoughtfully, I already was) and sit glumly together at a white table-clothed table by the kitchen door of an old dark restaurant that smelled faintly of mildewed bricks and spilled wine. I realized I was feeling pretty blue, as I often feel as the days fall to darkness by degrees and trees turn to skeletons.

But people don't seem to get the blues much -- they get depressed. I think of depression as a form of apathy, an inertness. The wavelengths of the world pass through you. You're impervious to radiation, warmth, belief. That's not what I feel: it's more like the earth is vibrating with a desperate sorrow, trying to communicate a nameless, ancient grief through the spidery frost patterns in small puddles and blue specters of billowing car exhaust. But in some ways the effect is the same. There's that soft pause in conversation after everything I say; I can't seem to sustain a dialogue, leaving my friends struggling to rally back from a sad series of unintentional nonsequitors. Moments of inexplicable sorrow sweep me up as I engage in the most mundane activities. Petting the cat on the front steps one chilly evening, the sadness is suddenly written into everything around me, plain as skywriting, and I watch people walking by in the street and wonder why they don't look up and see it.

Susan worries a bit, but she knows it's just a state. True, albeit one that's contributed substantially to the ending of other love affairs. It's so much harder to be sad in the presence of another person; you feel the weight of your emotions in their life, and tend to adjust or cover up and get lost in the obfuscation. Eventually I've found it easier to feel blue alone. I won't let the simple, clear pleasures of a relationship sweep it away. Because I want to feel blue. The world is ill -- there's no way to deny it for too long. The world is slowly, softly extruding a shell, a snail's spiral that's getting more and more elaborate and beautiful even as it gets heavier and harder to haul around. There's a time to feel its mass bearing on your life, holding you close to the earth.

Why don't we just feel blue more? Depression, once incapacitating, is now treatable, but the blues probably never will be, not as long as we're made of flesh. They're waiting the morning after the drugs wear off. When those we love leave us forever, and we honor them with sorrow.

I believe the recognition of depression as a psychiatric disorder has been for the best, but it's come at a price. Now we think sadness is in need of psychiatry. My blues are often the most potent and profound creative periods I experience -- so powerful that I have abandoned relationships rather than leave them one moment earlier than they were ready to end. So lately I've been telling friends when I have the blues. I'm subtly promoting the return of the blues as a viable emotive state -- not in need of medication, intervention, or consolation, just space and patience.