Getting the blues

The blues. Everyone I know gets down sometimes, it's a fact of life. Yet sometimes there's this shame associated with feeling blue. As if it's a bad thing. I was blue this morning, before sunrise. I was in a state of mind I'm not kin to, tired of hoping for anything that wasn't already on my plate, or in my lap, or driving me to my next project. Tired of hope, what a thought. Yet the thing about getting the blues--a lot has to do with exhaustion.

And that's the thing. Pushing oneself to exhaustion the goal is to get tougher, stronger. And yes, exertion does that. But if we're smart we see the signs of wear and tear. If we can't change the course of our activities, we surely can change our attitude. Whatever it is that is making us tired of hope.

At the dam, workers in 1931 didn't know what to expect when they got their jobs. They worked as hard as they could digging into rock for the diversion tunnels and of course the blues came.

Men then had to deal with feeling down when they wanted to feel up. This contradiction--this kind of hurt beneath the surface, they wore like invisible medals. Medals of fainted hope.