Two months ago in the year 2017 Keith Ross turned sixty-five. Most of the time he wished that he had died ten years earlier. When he was fifty-five, he still thought he was doing reasonably well. Although he was about forty pounds overweight at this age, he was still relatively healthy and was functional most of the time. He held a job he liked, although he hated dealing with his supervisor.

Although he had been in debt for most of his adult years, his financial liabilities had never seemed nearly as ponderous as they were at present. The thing was that Keith never expected to wake up one morning only to find that he was now officially a senior citizen. He didn’t mind being sixty-five years old, at least on paper. Keith just didn’t like all the negative baggage that came with old age. He wasn’t happy about the fact that he was now approximately ninety pounds overweight and that his stretches of good health were now becoming few and far between. The truth be told, he felt like shit most of the time. Besides the limitations that come with obesity, his family doctor had informed Keith that he now had a mild case of COPD. After forty plus years of smoking a pack a day of cigarettes what else could he expect.

Episode Two

Keith took hold of his Roku remote and found the Creflo Dollar channel on his tv. He had now completed his substitute teaching assignments for the rest of this year. Keith was exhausted and he really hadn’t been feeling well since January of 2017. His doctors could not properly say what ailed him so Keith had to come up with a diagnosis of his own. Left to his own devices, after hours and days of personal research, Keith concluded that he was suffering with chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia These medical conditions caused Keith to lack any significant and sustained energy to get done what he both needed and wanted to do.

He wanted to continue with his substitute teaching gigs in the fall, but this month he had found his assignments to be extremely exhausting to the extent that he was unable to do much but lie on the couch when he got home from work. Keith had managed to struggle through this year by relying upon sheer willpower, a doctor prescribed stimulant and a concoction of natural supplements. For a while his self designed treatment protocol appeared to be working. For about one month he felt relatively healthy and could occasionally string together two or three days in which he could actively pursue some of his extracurricular hobbies after work.

Unfortunately, he had ultimately neither discovered the secret to sustained energy nor the fountain of youth. He woke up one morning to find that his get up and go had got up and gone. He found this realization to be very troubling and depressing.

Keith surely didn’t need any more things to make him feel depressed. He suffered from what is clinically termed double depression for most of his adult life. Double depression means that one is mildly depressed most of the time, but will occasionally succumb to severe episodes of major depression.