What do you do when you simply cannot break through the barrier of depression and do something and enjoy it? Now the truth of the matter is there is little if any joy or even mild happiness in my life. A burden of depression hangs heavy over my chest as though a great weight resides there. I go through the motions of trying to do something constructive but it is simply going through the motions and it furthermore requires enormous effort. I notice now my husbands drawings. He really is not interested in drawing but a while back during the winter months we , or rather I, decided we had to do something other than fall asleep in front of the TV too depressed to concentrate or even care. Than waking with headache and a more disagreeable disposition than normal. I than feel guilty... no not quite right , difficult to say quite how I feel other than to be even lower in spirits then when I fell asleep. Perhaps regretful is a more suitable word, regretful that I had wasted more time of my diminishing life and should have done this or that. Such as read a book or draw or do something useful.

So endeavouring to draw for an hour each night I and my somewhat reluctant husband, who however can take it or leave it and does not analyse his life or what he has or has not done, sit and draw for a long and very tedious hour. I do not enjoy it at all, it is a chore. Knowing what to draw is the first annoying obstacle, along with the knowledge that drawing does not come easy and is not a natural talent, it is a huge struggle and you would think that after over forty years of trying I would give it up as a lost cause. I can draw a moderately acceptable rendition but the talent is not there and neither is the inclination. So why do I persist? Is it a compulsion? A compulsion to do something to justify my existence, to make me feel as though I have done something. At the end of the day I simply do not enjoy it, but then again what do I enjoy? Not much I am afraid, thwarted by health, by OCD and depression and I ask myself what is the point. Yet I can not just sit about and do nothing. I envy those who just amble through life, potter about from day to day from one task to another, neither analysing nor regretting or wishing that it was anything other than what it is, although I imagine that most people take stock of their lives, but not everyday over and over.

August 18th

I feel sad about the rabbit next door shut in her lonely hutch for a whole week. Our neighbours have gone away on holiday and the poor creature is all alone and that is where she will remain until they return in a week’s time. My husband is providing food and water but dare not let her out for a run in the garden as she is difficult to catch. I cannot understand why people wish to keep an animal stuck in a hutch or a cage, it seems cruel to my way of thinking. The owner loves her rabbit in her own way and seems not to realise the cruelty of confining an animal who like all creatures including human beings wishes her freedom, her time in the sun, or the wind or the rain, her time to mate, to eat to roam at will, free to do all that any being wishes to do. Thinking about it here I feel like crying. She is such a gentle little creature. But of course humans enslave the gentle creatures don’t they, call them pets and say they love them than clear off on holiday leaving the animal in a lonely cold dark rabbit hutch. The owner occasionally lets her rabbit run about in the garden for an hour hour or so, so the rabbit will miss this.

Also a worry should she become ill .

Of course you cannot release pet rabbits into the wild, they would die. But if people stop buying them they would not be breed. If people really must keep pet rabbits, guinea pigs, or rats, they should at least make sure the animal has plenty of room, a tiny hutch of about three feet even with two storeys is cramped. There should at least be a big run for the animal to spend as much time outside as he or she wishes. My husband when he was child kept a rabbit in a hutch which was six feet by five and in addition a large open air run. But cages and boxes (hutch) are still cages and boxes no matter how big. But really those tiny hutches you see, in comparison it would be like living in your bathroom but with a low ceiling. Furthermore there should be at least two animals of the same species, I do not think that human company compensates for a member of a creatures' own species. I think people should have licences to keep any animal and the condition of the animal should be checked from time to time.

I think though ultimately the keeping and confinement of pets and  animals in zoos safari parks, and so on should be phased out.

 Oh it makes me so sad.

I have a splitting headache, it appears they 're getting more troublesome, more frequent and more painful. Right now life seems enormously difficult. As those who regularly visit here will know we have had a lot of trouble with our computer and right now it is in for repairs after several blue screens , commonly referred to as the blue screen of death. There maybe a fault with the hardware, mostly likely our backup hard drive recently purchased after the disaster of loosing our computer's hard drive. Never again will I buy a back up hard drive as there is no point if it too malfunctions. I guess for the most part we have to accept that with a computer anything you create, your work, your photographs whatever are ephemeral. At any moment they may be lost forever. Unlike their paper equivalents,  hours of work are likely to go puff so to speak , irretrievably gone.

I recall a museum exhibit the subject of which was the history of writing. Amongst the exhibits were various examples of ancient writings such as engravings on stone, Egyptian hieroglyphics on papyrus, medieval manuscripts on parchment and eventually paper. Than a large floppy disk, the kind which was about a while before I had a computer. Now these floppy disks are of course obsolete and even the smaller ones now are heading in the same direction: our computer does not have a floppy disk drive. Therefore all that data on the large floppy disk is irretrievable now let lone in hundreds or thousands of years time. Whereas the parchment, stone, papyrus, and paper are still here and readable today, at least some examples are . Not that I am of course saying we should go back to using parchment as this is an animal derivative, which naturally as a vegan I would be totally against using.  The point I am making is that it makes you think doesn't it. Not that I am saying that in a hundred years time anything I have written or anything I have done will be of any significant import . But nonetheless from time to time I feel a certain anxiety that all the work I have done over the years will cease to exist. I doubt if computers are really a practical way to replace paper, most of which of course doesn't survive anyway, but ancient floppy disks or DVDs and hard drives of course will be entirely useless in the future.

Oh dear what is the point of all this.  How your mind easily becomes lead astray by such pointless contemplations, with its morbid connotations. Such morbid preoccupations are of course the fear we all have of being gone lost and forgotten, all our work, our efforts our successes even our failures, gone forgotten.