Hello and thank you so much for joining us once again. It is a nightly pleasureous podcast. I am your host and the author of The Peace you're going to hear today, The Grey Night. How you doing? You can call me Daddy. You can call me Jack. Just as long as you keep on coming back. I think I say something like that at the beginning sometimes. I don't really, ironically compared to what I'm about to talk about,

I don't really sit down and plan that part out.

I used to be obsessive about every single part of it.

And then one day I just let go. Like this little fairy circled over my head

and sprinkled dust on me. Can you even say that anymore?

Sprinkle dust on me and all of a sudden I was like, oh, I'm just going to, I'm going to make time to record,

and then I'm going to sit down and press the record button, and then I'm going to start.

So, yeah, that's a long rambling introduction.

Let's keep it going.

Why not?

Hope you're well.

Hope everything is going good for you.

We're two months into the goddamn year by the time you hear this one.

And I've only recently discovered that depression, I've always assumed it was more of an end-of-year thing, at least in the U.S., in the Western world, really.

I've always heard that depression was, I always assumed, and I mean, I think I did hear it a number of times too in common parlance, that depression was steepest at the end of the year. But I got to tell you,

when I was a phone monkey and I had to do customer service via phone, I knew that January was a

terrible month for depression, or at least emotions that seemed a lot like depression. And recently I came across the fact that the

middle of January, the aides of January, because I'm going to keep using that fucking word,

that's when depression's at its worst, at least according to a couple of surveys.

There's another little bump at the end of February, though, which is where we're at now,

so I can't really check in with you. I can't, I don't want to be that parisocial parasite. I don't want to be that parisocial parasite.

I don't want to be your guru ever.

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