You know…. kinda like Three Times A Lady by Kenny Rogers…. a little bit, anyhow….

Anyhoo. Time feels weird today.

It is hard to describe, but everything feels like it happening at two speeds at the same time, like some bizarre cosmic reverse zoom effect on my reality filter.

(Gets a hell of a lot of work, that reality filter of mine. Honestly, in some sense of the words, it is more of a fantasy filter that lets just enough reality in so that I don’t try to hump the furniture. )

In the first speed, I am zooming down the highway, strapped to the hood of a Mack truck, flat on my back, only able to see the road through my feet, and controlling the vehicle with a Playstation controller stapled to my lip.

(That image brought to you by the Chubb Group, my playing way too much Rayman Raving Rabbids for the Wii, and Viewers Like You.)

In the other speed, time is gracefully slow, like glaciation. It gets kijnd of frustrating at times, because things happen so damn slowly, but on the other hand, it has a kind of calmness to it which is quite soothing.

Obviously, I like the second speed better. I am definitely going into the time of life when a person begins to feel like they are hurtling pell-mell into the future at a high rate of acceleration, days whooshing past like telephone poles next to the highway, with nothing but old age and Death at the end of the road.

I have to keep reminding myself that despite the tricks that the mind plays on us older people as our time perception increases and the days seems shorter and shorter, it is all an illusion and the day has the same number of minutes it always has.

Probably, my random sleep habits do not help the matter at all. Every two hour nap is a touch of the fast forward button of my life, which is the last thing I need.

And yet, the very idea of staying awake for sixteen hours fills me with a terrible and enervating dread. All those hours to fill with activity, all those hours of somehow keeping my mind busy and distracted so that I do not have to deal with the incredible panic and tension growing daily under the skin of my psyche because of how old I am, how much I hate myself, and how I cannot handle even the modest pressure of trying to pick something to do with my life and just god damned do it for a while.

And so forth and so on. For me, depression is often like being wrapped tightly in a million icy tentacles all tugging in every direction possible and the only way out is to push a button that is impossible to reach because of all these fucking tentacles.

And so you try to do the best you can with the very limited mobility you have, and it is all too easy to fool yourself into thinking life is not so bad, you can maybe cope, you are not that sick, and you can pretend your life is normal for a while.

But then, despite your careful adjustment of your blinders to prevent this exact thing, a situation comes along that show you just exactly how weak, ill, incapable, and pathetic you are, and how unsympathetically sad your life is, and you are crushed again.

And so you become depressed, and do the only thing you know how to do, which is to retreat even further into the tiny dungeon of your mind, where you at least feel safe.

I know that if anything truly horribly traumatic happens to me, I will just plain give up and stop paying any attention to reality and lapse into catatonia.

I have no choice. Even though being trapped inside my own mind with no outlets is my absolute worst nightmare, with no more solid ground, to drown forever… it is all I know how to do.

My dream, I suppose, is to get to shore and stay on shore, but deep down I know that diving deep into my own filthy waters is an addiction I will not easily shed, not without my life becoming far more pleasant and fun.

If the sun shone more warmly on me, I might be tempted to stay out of the water for longer.

Then again, maybe I am just too numb from the cold to feel the sun.