Gary needs help

If you can spare a few dollars, send it to Gary Farber. He’s really hurting, physically, mentally, and financially. Hit his Paypal button if you can.

It’s bad enough he suffers from gout, an extremely painful disease. But he’s also suffering from profound clinical depression.

I have a lifelong history of recurring profound clinical depression.

Lifelong, since childhood, though I didn’t know anything about it until my early 20s, when I was first diagnosed (and should have been in treatment since early childhood).

It has a great many symptons, and reachs, and I’ve evolved somewhat over the years in the ways I cope, in some circumstances.

It’s led to my scattered, often-disasterous, fragmented, semi-life, with many long periods of semi-homelessness, or being on the verge of homelessness, and to my being unable to hold a steady job for long. All my life it’s ended up being temp jobs, or freelance work, or short-term jobs, or no jobs, and eventually losing the temp ones I had, quickly or slowly, with the job at Avon Books in 1986-9 being the only real permanent job with the faintest promise, and I screwed that by getting fired in 1989, after my depression after my father and Terry Carr died the same week. (And then screwed pursuing a lot of other promising publishing opportunities after that, after my depression over losing my job.)

I could go through an endlessly long list of all the other times, both before that, and since then, that depression (in many forms, including panic attacks, fear, near-catatonic inability to do anything except panic, or semi-sleep, and on and on — just a literal inability to do things, talk to people, leave my apartment/room, etc., plus lots more at different times) has kept me from doing what I needed to do to get a job, work, keep a functional sleep/wake schedule, cope with minimal necessities, and so on, thus resulting in my desperate situations at times, with several times I would have been indefinitely on the streets if not for someone taking me in for a while.