The Old Grindstone

It is like having some terrible medical disease, this working.  I keep thinking that I will catch up, that things will return to normal, but they won't, not as long as I keep doing what I'm doing.  Perhaps it was the little bit of fun that I had, fun that I allowed myself to have, that is making the rest unbearable.  I am sure it is the living that makes the life-in-death so terrifically unbearable.

To live!

All about me, there is life.  Things change and I am not aware.  Keeping the old nose to the grindstone makes for tunnel vision.

Even the sushi was bad tonight.

I have not worked out for days.  I don't get home until nine or ten.  And then it is something to unwind, some mindless television, and bed without dreams or fantasies.  What is life without that?

And then there is the endless paranoia.  You cannot exist as I live in the belly of the great Religious Beast and not live in fear.  At first it is exhilarating, but eventually it wears you down until you see only shadows. Friends who once urged you on quit dropping by fearing they might be implicated by association.  You become, as they say, a misshapen dog on some distant horizon.  And where you were once so sure there is only uncertainty.

I have read literature such as this and enjoyed it immensely.  I hope you can.  Living it, however, is quite another thing.

Admit it, though.  You once enjoyed it.