Anyone who's read this thing for a significant time knows I do that. I handle my own affairs, perhaps getting some advice or talking about it, but almost never emotionally connecting about it. I take an evocative situation and intellectualize it for the sake of discourse.

The truth is I have felt like scratched slate propped against a brass railing. I work and produce for my job, go home and produce for my hobbies, and often go to Emily's to unwind but also because it is expected of me. I intimately see how life can act as a 20 eyelet pestle, rubbing back on forth. Slow. Imperceptible. It's like a day after having had an hour of sleep, occasionally picking your head up for a gasp of clarity before your mind relieves itself and flops back down.

The weeks pass so quickly. I can see how life is relatively short. I think back to things 5 years ago and wonder if I've lost the time someplace. Maybe it's just loose change, y'know, rattling somewhere I can pick up and use.

I think about death every day: if it's like sleeping, what qualities it has, if it's like rubbing the ridges of a quarter. It occurs to me before I sleep, when I think about the future, whenever the ground comes up like a wave and life's circumstances get mud on my face. I feel so lost sometimes. It's a mist or a fog bringing reality and misconception together, separating yolks from whites like clarity and living. It's a daily triumph to forget just for a little while, to turn off the frontmost mast of my brain.

My cardinal emotion is fear.

No, not exactly fear. Anxiety.

I'm anxious I'll produce enough publications to have a career that goes somewhere, as opposed to being a lecturer with no respect, no paycheck, and just a Ph.D.

I'm anxious of sharing anything remotely deep with my girlfriend, given that in many ways we are very different people.

I'm anxious to describe my fears to people. Of the things at night I see and feel, of the forbidden hatreds that raze across my mind in flickers or extended brush fires, of confiding that I am not only nearing the end of some rope but that I feel like I am drowning inside of myself, only to reach dry shore unexpectedly, soaked and freezing and trying to get dry but somehow falling back in, as if I had to fight with all my spirit to stay stable.

I'm anxious. Yet I also barely give a fuck. I've abandoned the notion I came back to this planet for a grand purpose. I'm just trying to survive spiritually and emotionally.

For I have seen the grand cog. And there are far worse things than to be conflicted.

I'm anxiously barely giving a fuck while fighting myself--and sometimes what seems like myself--whenever I am not distracted. So I viciously sink my hands and mind into occupations and occupieds. I try. I try so goddamn hard I am tired by the end of the day every day.

Because at night, naked as the outside whispers in, I realize I either missed something important or lack of some something bubbles up like a well spring.

I'm not sure whether everything is fine and I fail to realize it, or if the world is a fireball, staccato in its warning, and I keep hitting the snooze button.

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