Author: Adrian's Got the Moose

Due to the normally freakishly accurate algorithm YouTube uses to tell me what video they think I would be interested in watching next, and to my nihilism, last Tuesday night I found myself watching a video titled something along the lines of “Depression Isn’t Real”  Further watching within the same channel revealed videos titled “Why Fat-shaming isn’t Real” and ” Dear Black People” , so that’s reassuring. Instead of rolling my eyes and moving on to some nice cheerful porn, I got angry.  So rant ahead.

The lady in this video claims that depression is simply being sad, and people claiming to be depressed just need to cheer up, get over it and move on with their lives. Sadly this is not a unique viewpoint, its common in religious groups, Big Pharma conspiracy nuts, and people who struggle to see anything from outside their own experience.

The fact  that these people seem to be unable or unwilling to understand is that there is a difference between being sad due to an event or situation and being depressed because your brain sucks at being a brain.

For example, I am currently sad due to being unable to bugger off for an overseas trip until November.  This leads me to longingly flip through my passport, and rereading flight booking information, and moping around.  I suffer from clinical depression because my brain has a malfunction to do with the secretion and absorbing of serotonin. When not sufficiently medicated, this leads to me feeling worthless, having anxiety and insomnia, generally being miserable to be around, and on one memorable occasion, a strong desire to drive a perfectly decent car off a perfectly good road and into a healthy native tree at 100 kph. Spot the difference?

Not the video in question, just an excellent example of how this shit stews inside you.

The YouTuber in question seems to just try being as obnoxious and as offensive as possible, trying to upset reasonable people and delight trolls. She also disables comments on her videos, which to me is the YouTube equivalent of farting in an elevator just before you step into men’s accessories.

I’ll keep taking my green and pink pills, and do my best to ignore ignorant arseholes.

You finish work, you had a shitty day, which involved the loss and then destruction of some expensive and vital pieces of equipment. It was not exactly your fault, but local government has a tendency to blur and confuse the concept of responsibility.

A beer before dinner sounds good, this turns into a second. While you are not trying to get drunk, you sure don’t feel like being sober. After you finish the second, delicious, full strength beer your brother and landlord hands you a lychee beer, which turns out to be as vile as it sounds, but it’s also not the night for leaving a beer half-drunk. Now you are still not drunk, but the world seems a tad less focused, which doesn’t help as much as you were hoping it would. After watching the first fifteen minutes of a dozen movies, you give up and head to bed, This would be a good idea, if you could sleep even with a little pink pill. Which you fucking can’t.

Before I left Cebu I finally booked my accommodation for a single night in Hong Kong, accommodation is expensive in Hong Kong, and my funds were running low. The place I ended up booking was the Pearl Premium Guesthouse in a building called Mirador Mansions.

I landed in Hong Kong at midnight, tired and irritable. I exited the train station and discovered that while I could view offline maps on my phone, I couldn’t get a GPS location, So I headed towards a busy building, to get a bearing. which turned out to be Chungking Mansions.

While I stared at the address on the building and trying to orient myself with the map, I was viewed as easy pickings by the Mansion’s dealers, pimps and touts. A guesthouse tout approached me, extolling the virtues of his place, pressing a business card into my hand, which he took back when I told him I already had a booking, then ominously wished me good luck. An exquisitely smelling woman offered to help me, which quickly turned into a sales pitch for the most beautiful women in the world Hong Kong dollars could buy. I was offered dope, meth and cocaine in urgent whispers.

Once I worked out which direction to go, I started moving and it only took a few minutes to get to Mirador Mansions

Which was almost comatose compared to Chungking Mansions. I rode the elevator almost disturbingly alone to the 16th floor, where the reception to my guesthouse is located. An Indian receptionist photocopied my passport and handed me a keycard, and gave complicated instructions to get to my room, which I mostly ignored, opting for wandering around the 7th floor until I found the right door. One swipe of the card granted entry into a hallway with a shared kitchenette, another into my room, which turned out to be cozy, and clean.

The bathroom was a standard and cramped affair where you just about have to sit on the toilet to have a shower.

After a good night’s sleep and some 7-11 coffee, I did some research into both mansions. They were both built during the sixties, originally intended to be purely residential, but quickly morphed into something more interesting. The first few stories became retail, including electronic shops, jewellers, tailors and souvenir stores. The rest is a mix of cheap restaurants, residential and guesthouses. Chungking Mansions in particular became famous in the backpacking world as the cheapest accommodation in Hong Kong, with a flotsam of down scale immigrants from many countries, with a liberal sprinkling of drugs and prostitution. At one point, one-third of second-hand phones in Hong Kong passed through Changking Mansions. Many Chinese residents of Hong Kong refused to even walk past the place. in the early 2000’s , both mansions were at least partly cleaned up, with fire regulations imposed, CCTV cameras installed and many ladies of the evening evicted.

Despite this clean up, both mansions still contain a strong sense of marginal lawlessness, the immigrants are still there, I suspect you could spend hours in the corridors and only hear Cantonese or Chinese from the more adventurous or down at heel Chinese travelers. Many consumer goods from South East Asia and the Subcontinent are only available in Hong Kong from these two mansions. I suspect that the spirit of the now demolished Kowloon Walled City lives on here, if not many of the same residents.

I’m looking forward to visiting again during my next layover , as long as I keep my wits about me.

So I consider myself a fairly experienced traveller. I have had my blood sucked by leaches in Thailand, scammed by taxi drivers in Turkey, gotten Bali Belly in Indonesia, been abused by T-shirt sellers in Vietnam, perved on German belly dancers in Dubai, been propositioned by ladyboys in the Philippines and in Laos, and been maliciously herded by hermit crabs while heartbroken in Cambodia.

Now that I have laid out my credentials, there is a problem- the more you travel, the more the places, experiences and people tend to blur together, often aided by the culture and infrastructure travellers tend to want and expect.

This poor bastard trying to sell counterfeit Ray-bans to tourists at Alona Beach could be plying his trade in Indonesia, Thailand or Vietnam with no changes to his sales pitch. In any SE Asian island you can walk around in a day, you will find a Reggae Bar, where it is as easy and as acceptable to buy dope and light up a joint as it would be to buy and drink a beer. The middle-aged white guys with their young, pretty, local girlfriends could be at any country where the realities of economics makes the line between dating and prostitution a lot more hazy than in most western countries. The rooms I stay in tend to be the same as well, no carpet, a slab of foam on a low frame, power points in inconvenient locations, and cold water showers.

During quiet moments its enough to leave me wondering why I bothered leaving home.

But then I have another beer and get over it. A few beers later I start to wonder if I am a standard issue short-term traveller, clinging to my private rooms instead of dorms, spending too much time at beaches rather than exploring the countryside. My tan a tad too light to be convincing, staring at exquisite Korean women for too long, and thinking of home a little too often.

Somewhere on Route 60 a headache with accompanying waves of queasiness hit me, probably caused by the ill-advised substitution of sleep for caffeine with a side order of the  underlying tension of the last month. Alighting from the bus, The Anxiety hits. Can all these exquisite twenty-somethings actually see this fucking headache? Is my fly undone? I feel like my dialect of English is entirely unknown here, I would be better off trying  to converse in Latin. Motherfucker, that is the fourth “Cheer Up Emo Kid”  t-shirt I have seen in the last two minutes. Do Emos even still exist? Surely they have all been wiped out by some angst-plague by now.

I retreat to a food court and grab a Boost juice, using it to wash down a handful of Maxigesics. This seems to help, but the knowledge that there  is more bus, more driving plus airport before I sleep is doing nothing for the queasiness.

Will the art gallery help? surely the obnoxious school kid density should be lower. There is only so much push-up bra fourteen year olds acting as dumb as  possible and dudebros named Daniel reeking of Lynx Africa pretending to be gangsters I should be expected to put up with.

a few hours and some retail therapy later, I’m drinking my fifth  ice coffee for the day and indulging in some people watching in between pages of my book.  Some impromptu soapbox action is going on. a too-pretty woman is lecturing an indifferent and inattentive audience about her battle with substance abuse. I’m feeling normal enough now to wonder how blurred the line is between substance abuse and medication. Anyway I enjoy my substance abuse.

At some point I realised I was channeling Hunter S Thompson, then it got worse.

Early September I had my final session with my psychologist. Bernadette was moving to Canberra for a position in the Department of  Defense, and after a discussion with my doctor I had decided to not seek the services of another psychologist. I felt like the law of diminished returns had kicked in, and was at a better place than I have been in years.

Bernadette  did have some final advice, or a passing shot as it felt like at the time. Something I had not been willing to address if my complete lack of action, and only academic interest, in dating. When you suffer from low self-esteem, depression and varying degrees of anxiety, the idea of being in a meaningful relationship feels as impossible as winning the lottery.  While the mental health issues are mostly under control, dating and being in relationships still seems to be something for people who are not me.

In the ensuring conversation with Bernadette, I told her that I use Tinder, and while I get the occasional match, I struggle to start a conversation with any of them.  I admitted that this was because of a fear of rejection, and failure. She pointed out that I was already rejecting myself and failing myself.

Since then I made a promise to myself that I would only swipe right on women I would be willing to message, and to message all matches. This has resulted in fourteen matches, and no real conversations.

Which leaves me drinking twelve year old Scotch and watching Designated Survivor on a Saturday night, instead of chatting, either virtually or over drinks, with a curvy redhead insurance broker with unlikely blue eyes.

A coworker tells me that many people use Tinder as an ego boost rather than to meet people, which if true doesn’t help me much.

I keep staring at my pen wondering how to end this without it simply being a woe is me story, but all I can say is Bernadette, I’m going to keep trying.

So it seems the best way to start this venture is to tell you a little about myself.

I’m a thirty eight year old straight male, currently working in local government, in the environmental field- weed control, and maintaining trails, firebreaks, campgrounds and anything else the powers that be decide is important on that day. Before that I had a long and unexciting career in the retail side of the fuel industry. I live and work in the City of Albany, Western Australia.

I suffer from depression and anxiety with a side order of low self-esteem and insomnia. I’m on two types of anti-depressants and earlier this year I was seeing a psychologist.

I love to travel, mostly backpacking through SE Asia. I also enjoy reading, listening to music, the outdoors, and petting and looking at dogs.

Politically I lean hard to the left, and am occasionally accused of being a social justice warrior

I’m moderately tall, of average build with broad shoulders. I keep my dark brown hair closely cropped due to male pattern baldness. I have four piercings in my left ear, which is a recent development, partly due to being sick of the only backpacker with no piercings or tattoos, and partly because I was called boring by someone who I should probably have ignored.

I’m mostly going to blog about my life, travel and social issues. I’m basically using this as therapy, and because I stopped blogging previously due to my depression, which is now more under control.

That’s that, now let the dice fly high!