Posthuman Blues

I'm having a difficult time adjusting to the fact that I don't like where I am right now -- both geographically and psychologically. It's one of those truths that, with my own reluctant cooperation, manages to camouflage itself . . . and when detected, it expertly belies its presence with the mentational equivalent of radar chaff.

Thus I rebound from a state of what would likely become stark depression to one of merely bothersome self-loathing. So I drink more espresso, check a few more books out from the library and resume staring at the walls. (I've been doing quite a lot of that lately: literally staring at the walls and vaguely hoping it would all just go away.)

The act of driving across town has become a rite of dull agony. Other people have become gibbering caricatures to be endured. (Which isn't entirely aberrational; most of them really are walking turds.)

Not that I don't have moments of what seem deceptively like inner calm. But they're too easily shattered; I rebound into a world of abject loneliness that I can kill only with sleep and sickly self-assurances that tend to wither under inspection.

To some degree or another, this has been going on for at least ten years. More, counting college -- but I prefer to operate under the plausible fiction that college counted for nothing.

I'm transmitting from a space station that, neglected, is running perilously low on oxygen. I've ignored the flashing red LEDs and the entreaties from mission control. Now a strange clutching darkness has descended as if from nowhere.