David can't write when he's Sad

Instead you will watch him roam back and forth, and you will watch his fingers roam from the keys of his computer to the whites and blacks of his baby grand piano. He will, for a moment, type out a sentence. But it's too contrived. Or it's too honest -- too straightforward to even warrant it's own appearance on the page. Either way, it simply won't do. When he finally finds a sentence he likes, David sits back and exhales, marveling that he has at last created the initial sketch for the map for the foundation for the bedrock of his masterpiece. In four minutes, you will watch him hate it again.

He then closes the document; his frustrated rise from the desk-chair barely worth the trouble as he just turns to collapse on the duet bench again, three feet away. And David folds open the piano cover and immediately begins pounding into the keys, his hunched body swaying forward with each press of his fingers into the instrument. Melancholy chords -- always melancholy chords you will hear from David's room at this time of night. Sometimes he tries to sing along to his compositions. David would be thoroughly embarrassed if you ever found out the names to these half-songs. They are of an excessive and personal nature such as, "The clover-patch down the wooded path is where I hope to find you again," or his newer, more brooding,"I don't live in the past but I would still like to know which of the things you told me were not lies." But as he sings, you'll notice he's so flat that even he doesn't enjoy his own voice. David resolves to let the chords and the melody speak for him instead. He watches the dull lamplight sprawled across the mahogany surface of the piano, satisfied that something in his vision had definition and shape.

David was not depressed -- not at all. Why would you ever try to diagnose him with something so trite? If you asked him, he would laugh like the act of laughter itself denotes happiness. The possible trajectories of that sort of conversation were all so limited anyway. You'd both end up in silence, adjusting in your seats, pretending to be deeply enthralled in that small dark stain on your shoe or that scar on your hand you've had for years. Besides, even if he was depressed, (which he never was) David had found a way to defeat depression. Whenever he had thoughts of killing himself, he'd go grocery shopping. There was no way he could justify suicide knowing he had just blown $80 on groceries. The neighbors often remarked that David must be throwing late night parties. After all, some weeks he would come home day after day with a car full to the brim with brown paper bags with produce and packaged containers spilling out the top of them. You may have noticed a loaf of bread tumble out of his rear left window last week. It stayed under his back wheel for quite some time.

David spends his hours at work contemplating which song he'd try to make progress on that night. Which poem would he agonize over that would finally capture what he had been trying to say in the last two or three? But upon arriving home, he usually went straight for the small cardboard box in his room. He is fond of calling it his liquor cabinet. But I'm sure you're familiar with it -- David said that you put quite a dent in his supply the last time you saw him. He asked me to pass along his concern. He thinks that you may have a problem.