There are, perhaps, varieties of mental health, we could say.  What's healthy for one may be a bit different than what is for healthy for another.

That great moment in Twain, I think of.  Huck and Jim, separated in the great fog in the river's channels at nightfall, and miraculously finding each other the next day.  Huck plays a little trick, telling his friend it all must have been a dream, though he's given away by the litter of twigs and river detritus on his raft.  Jim:  There I was, most heartbroke, thinking I'd lost Huck, and then I find him...  and all you can think of is playing a trick on old Jim.

Varieties:  the poetic underachiever, the organized overachiever...  one finds health in poetry and long attempts at prose, the other in the advances in neurochemistry, but each seeking an understanding of where kindness and sympathy, decency, empathy and all that stuff comes from and constitutes...

The first day off of the week, I just sleep.  I may get up and blog some, but I wouldn't call that serious, more just an exercise, an attempt to get the guts back in track.  Blogging is not that serious, just sort of lazy writing, writing for the sake of getting back in the stream of things, of first acknowledging the benefits of psychological health that come by it.  And maybe sleep and prolonged napping are a part of that regeneration of wordy thoughts, poking out of the semi-sorry compost heap of the workweek.  Sleep on the couch while all the demons parade, of how you've not done enough in life to make for any kind of lasting security or professional existence counted on, all the neuroses of the world and people you know poking at you, such that the next day you wake in such a sorry and desperate state that you have no choice but to write, like you too were caught in the foggy Mississippi night, lost, and only through struggle of words could hope to get back to dry land.

The one who is poetic is ever accused of being disorganized, time spend usefully being financial reward for all we seem to know.  And yet, why apply the standards of the overachievers upon him?  He's not done anything wrong, except not be as happy and therefore as self-confident as he should be given his talents and the opportunities presented him in life, no?  It would seem racist, in a way, the overachiever shutting the door on him and his poetry.

Who knows why we inflict harm upon other beings.  Perhaps we're just doing so unconsciously, without thinking about it, without being in the other's persons shoes and feeling their wants and needs and the terms of how to approach them politely.  Distracted tom-foolery, probably does as much damage as anything, done without as much thought, without malicious intent, but enough to cause offenses.

It hurts to write, it does.  It's work.  It rises up above you, all you should do, and you can of course only take off a little piece of it to work on, and it's enough to put you back on the couch helpless discouraged and depressed enough to take another nap even as the world outside is filled up with golden sunshine, but you remember, 'this is what it's like,' so you head on.

Why is there pain in life?  Does it represent a kind of molting, changing out of an old skin in order to grow, that wings might come out and finally lift one up with all the built-up strength within, so that one would rise and look back with partially-hidden indigence at how ignored he was, forgotten.

Unfinished thought.

And heading off on an errand to the pharmacy, it occurs to me that you have to embrace a kind of insanity, low grade, harmless, maybe just "less sane than you'd otherwise be if you were taking a practical approach to life," if you are going to write.  And think of it, the first lines of poetry I read in college, with Benjamin DeMott, were the words of John Clare, who himself was bound for an institution.  It's a foray into nature, an expedition to catalog the variety of life, the peace of the natural world, an acceptance of wildness within, the creature life of the subconscious.  For most the tune of a city is the great show of sanity, the advice taken from fashion magazines of how to look, what to wear, how to talk, how to act, what to buy, and if you're not a part of that, a slippery slope to homelessness.  So, you'd have to be careful if you're going to set out to explore the workings of the mind, as they are natural, following their own rules, their own vitality and vigor.  These things too, one must obey, even if they aren't practical at all.