The Funk

There's this thing that creeps in sometimes.  It's called the funk.

What the funk is, basically, is a semblance of paralysis.  From your earlier days, it's the consequence you thought would never come, but has finally arrived.  It's your normal yearning for productivity, a desire to spend your time doing something coupled with a gripping compulsion to totally refrain from moving.  When the funk's got you, it becomes almost impossible to fathom doing anything at all.  You'll sleep until 2:00pm, and when you wake up, you'll just lay there stuck in thoughts about what all has gone wrong that you are helpless to control.  Senses are dulled and rooms seem darker; you move into yourself, totally.

When you wake up and the funk is there, it's like you'll never get out of your bed -- it isn't great, being there, but nothing else would be great either, so you stay -- and it's like no-one will ever come into your room.  But yet it doesn't just occur when you've only just woken up; sometimes, mid-day funk creeps in when you can't figure out how to occupy your time.  It's the polar opposite of momentum; it's "objects at rest tend to stay at rest" but it's not just an object, it's you, and you get stuck in it.

It's very hard to get out of the funk.  I've yet to find a surefire way to escape it when it comes.  They say industry is the enemy of melancholy.  But what is the enemy of the funk??
It seems like sunshine is a great combatant.  For several years now, I've been very disturbed by those very dark, blue-gray rooms people are sometimes in, either with the curtains drawn in daytime and no lamps or with the sun almost completely past the horizon and no-one has turned on any lamps yet.  People act like the television is okay for room lighting, and most of the time it's just not.  Maybe I'm just chronically deprived of Vitamin D; it seems interesting that so much of the time at work, if I get the blues, it's usually around 8:00pm, just as the sun has gone down.  That can be a particularly nasty funk, when you're stuck at work, posted to answer a phone that isn't ringing and escort customers that aren't coming; because sometimes you really just can't do anything.  And then the funk has you.

I'd like to bring out a greater awareness of the funk; the funk is real, and acknowledging it as such is the only way we'll be able to take preventative measures... whatever they may be...