I dunno if I can write about this coherently or not but I keep reading / thinking about the Germanwings pilot and whether or not he committed “suicide”, taking all of those people along with him. Two babies… At least that’s what I heard. When I was little kid and I heard that a baby had died for some reason, I would always ask my mom something like, “But that baby didn’t know what was happening, did it?” She would always answer, “No, it didn’t”, even though that isn’t exactly true and now that I have been a mother for more years than I care to count, I know that.

I am a nervous flyer to begin with. An internet buddy of mine recently flew to South Korea and got stuck next to a Giant who was drunk when he got on the plane and proceeded to drink a large number of beers. I’m sure he was obnoxious but being me, I’d’ve probably been drinking right along with him (and likely laughing my *ss off) although I would’ve limited it to a few whines. I mean, for one thing, one of the things I hate worse than flying is airplane bathrooms. The one and only time I went in one, I couldn’t get the damn lights to go on and, in trying to figure that out, I accidentally summoned a flight attendant. No I don’t need any help peeing (I had the lights on by then)! Jeebus. Reminds me of the time I accidentally called the Caddylac Onstar lady in the Uncly Uncle’s vee-hickle. NOOO! I don’t need help! I was just trying to adust the radio! (I don’t actually hate flying. I grew up flying. I just hate flying. It’s complicated.)

So, was the pilot depressed or not? I do not know. My own personal not-all-that-informed opinion is that many of the people who are diagnosed with depression are not necessarily on the bipolar spectrum (that’s probably not a correct term, deal with it). The Commander saw a psychiatrist *once* in her life. A well-meaning relative suggested maybe The Comm might be depressed after she had her small stroke at 91. I was living day to day back then, operating on whatever scraps of data came my way (not that I always had a full dataset to work with) and I thought something like, “Why not?” The Comm saw the psych and I was not surprised when she was pronounced *not* depressed.

In her case, she was very upset at losing some of her mobility, her driving privileges, and her house. In other words, her independence. The weekend before the little stroke, she was cooking breakfast for us in her house. She visited her house many times after that but she never lived there again. Is that depression or is it simply anger at having horrifically bad things happen to you that you can’t control. What drug would help with that? I’m glad she wasn’t diagnosed with depression and I’m glad no one prescribed happy pills to deal with it. She didn’t need those.

I could probably write a book about Custom Processes right now (you do not want to know). I’m not sure I can bring this back to the Germanwings pilot and close it in a neat way. I dunno if he was depressed or not. If he was, I dunno why he took a whole airplane down with him. If he was depressed, could he hide a condition like that from his employer? I’ll betcha he could! But not sure that was really what his problem was… Seems like more information comes about this every day. Maybe we’ll never know for sure.

Like the pic? I got many facebook “likes” on this kinda random iPhone photoooo I took as I walked out of the Haisley woods back into my neighborhood. Beautiful rain this morning morphing to bright sunshine this afternoon. At least there was no goddamn ice!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2015 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.