And the smog is too think to see through for more than a few inches, and hot as an oven, and toxic enough to give you a constant pounding headache and makes it hard to breathe at all, and the place you are stumbling through is filled with smoky shadows of things that might be real or might just be tricks of the light, and you have no way of knowing, or even avoiding them, until you slam into them and bark your shin and stub your toe and fall spinning and tumbling and scraping onto the hard, jagged, filthy ground.

And ever time you get back up again, it takes more of your energy to get back up, and you are filthier and you have more bruises and sores and cuts open to the toxic fumes, and you are tempted to just lay there forever and never move again, but soon you start to ache and the terror caches up to you and you start to be convinced that if you don’t keep moving, the shadows will get you and have no choice but you heave yourself to your bleeding feet once more and keep blindly stumbling through the stink and the heat and the dark.

And you know there is help in the smog somewhere, but you can’t find it, even if you know where it is, you can’t get there on your own. And who can help you? They can point and push and tug and call your name, but you can’t really see them through the smog and filth, and trying to maintain contact with them is so hard when you can barely see or hear them, let along feeling the love they try to give. Everything hurts, and your energy is always being drained, and you don’t know how to find the way out of the smog, or if you do know, you don’t know how to get there, because nobody can understand just how little you have to invest in any plan and how much it takes out of you just to make it through another stumbling, fumbling day.

I am not in the best of moods.

Meh, this too shall pass. I am just feeling down because of bad sleep that kept being interrupted by unremembered nightmares leaving me feeling very low and anxious and low-level paranoid. It’s really a Kafka-esque purgatory, but I can feel that it is running its course and will end with enough time and hydration and soothing computer nipple nursing.

But I have been thinking dark thoughts lately, along these lines : what if you are too sick to do the things you would need to do to get well?

it really gives one a perspective on autonomy to have the sort of emotional and physical problems that I have. Past a certain point of emotional disability and mental disarray, you are just too messed up to take care of yourself in any way. And unless you have a very strong support network of people to help you out when you just cannot got on, or when, as so often happens with me, you get lost in your inner fog and forget what it is you are supposed to be doing, or can’t tell which of the hundreds of things you should be doing to do….. you are pretty much fucked.

I suppose I need something like a keeper or a handler. Someone to provide the focus and continuity and direction that I cannot seem to manage myself. By myself, I am diffuse and diffident and easily lose my way or simply hit a period when I am completely incapable of coping and everything falls apart.

By myself, I can’t do anything, really.

But I am certain hat, with the proper support, I could be amazing. I know that I am brilliant and creative and insightful and capable of making beautiful and wonderful dreams, but I just can’t seem to get there on my own. And if you can’t get there on your own, it seems, you just can’t get there.

It would be one thing if I had an obvious external handicap or dread disease or something. But as far as the outside world can tell by looking at me, I am just some fat guy who is a loser because he can’t cope with the simplest things. Or at least, that is often how I feel about myself.

My brother’s right. I should just forget about dreams and potential and just try to make a life for myself.