A Mood Swing Thing

When I sat down to write and starting casting about for ideas, I was angry. I was just blindly, unreasonably mad. I could try to explain why, but words couldn't adequately capture how senseless and stupid it was. I was upset with myself for getting mad, and knew well how unpleasant anyone would find me to be if anyone was around. I resolved to try and rid myself of this terrible mood, and the sooner I could manage it the better.

My first thought was to listen to Broadway show tunes. Most of them are fairly upbeat in my experience, and even those few which are dark in tone are still far too catchy to feed a wrathful mood. Well, I thought that the songs were working on me until I went into the kitchen and found myself swearing at the ultimately incorrect assumption that we had no clean plates left. Clearly, if I was going to rid myself of this foul mental state, it was going to take more than anything from "Anything Goes" or "Annie".

I then had an idea that actually got me going on my writing. I tried thinking of the nicest, cutest thing I could and came up with puppies. I thought then about litters of puppies we had at home over the years. They would always start off so small and helpless that you couldn't bear to leave them alone. Their eyes would be sealed shut, and the day they opened them was special. They always smelled of milk due to the diligence of their mother. It was a typically priceless childhood memory.

Of course, like most pet-related childhood moments, litters of puppies always ended with sad loss. We never could keep a whole litter of puppies, so our devotion to them was invariably severed by sales or  gifts. Still, that was better than how things tended to finish with the hamster offspring. There's always a dark side to things, and nobody can be more trusted to find it than me, can they? I may ultimately not have found a very happy direction, but melancholia is better than anger.