I've felt the same way
Often, lately, I've felt the same way, although for the first time in my adult life, this doesn't mean I'm depressed.
The urge to go home has always represented a sort of surrender to me-- an admission that there's no secret rhythm to be found in a particular night, and that I'd do well to cut my losses and head for the hills.
I don't think of going home that way any more.
When I go through phases when I just want to go home, it's true that those phases often correspond with depression. It's a simple matter of not feeling good enough about one's self and the world to want to be seen inhabiting it in any significant way.
But in these same phases, home is itself intolerable, reinforcing the general atmosphere of failure, leaving one alone, uninterested and unperceived. So the urge to go home must be resisted at any cost, even that of trying to act casually merry in a bar you hate with people you don't care about.
As recently as the early months of 2006, I could be found stalking the bars like a fanatic, looking for who knows what, seldom finding it. I was pretty depressed then. I'm sure I'll be depressed again at some point in my life, probably sooner than later, and that I'll eventually ease back into the nightlife, having always slipped constantly between phases of intro- and extroversion.
But for now, my life is different. I have a new group of close friends and collaborators, who live in houses that I can call home more easily than the one I actually live in. I usually only go to bars when there's a band I want to see. With these people, in these houses in the country, where we make music and art all night, I've learned about a new kind of going home-- the kind that isn't an admission of defeat, but a statement of desire. Now when I go home, it's not because I'm unhappy in the outside world; it's because I'm happy in my own.
This is all so obvious, when I read it, but it hasn't seemed that way. You don't know me so there's no reason for you to care about the vagaries of my mental state and my social patterns; still, I have to stop and marvel about how the minutiae of life gets so tangled that the most obvious grace seems like an epiphany when it decends. And it's a good excuse to post this song, which I love, and I hope you will too.
You can make a house, but a home just finds you, without warning. The good thing is that, since it's immaterial, you can live in in everywhere you go; the bad news is that it tends to up and vanish just as mysteriously as it arrived. When this happens I'll venture back into the wilderness, a notion that is not without its appeal. But for now, it's good to be home.