Truman Capote wrote:
Anxiety, as any expensive psychiatrist will tell you, is caused by depression; but depression, as the same psychiatrist will inform you on a second visit and for an additional fee, is caused by anxiety. I rotated around in that humdrum circle all afternoon…. when you’re in that kind of a sweat, the only lasting remedy is to ride with it: accept the anxiety, be depressed, relax, and let the current carry you where it will.
In the same passage he also decides that he is too upset to go out for food, and eats a moldy chocolate cake. He doesn’t mention whether or not he was popping pills, but there was definitely some hard alcohol mixed up in the whole scene.
I followed his essential advice, minus brandy and fungus, by laying out flat on the floor of the boat and reading Truman Capote on New Orleans:
Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes, containers of riddles never to be solved, nor even to be seen by vacationing visitors, or, for that matter, the most inquisitive, persistent travelers. To know such cities, to unwrap them, as it were, one has to have been born there…. of all secret cities, New Orleans, so it seems to me, is the most secretive, the most unlike, in reality, what an outsider is permitted to observe…