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Today I am sick. Yesterday I was also sick; I will be sick tomorrow as well. My ailment has disfigured my mind and warped my perception. We do not exist on the same plane. This frail, scar-striped vessel which contains my consciousness is breaking down as I fade deeper into inner space. My muscles are wound tight like steel cables, my jaw clenched like a vice, and I spit slivers of chewed fingernails and broken teeth from my leering mouth while shrieking white-noise suicide propaganda to anyone within earshot. I am noxious, unclean, and worse yet, I am perfectly cognizant of the fact that I am slowly, painfully falling apart as my sanity erodes further with each passing second.

I hate myself and the world around me. I’m trying to bury all this anger, but it keeps on burning right back through. I want to recover and be human, or at least something closer to human, instead of just hiding inside of this human shell. I don’t know what a human is anymore anyway. Maybe I am one and I’m in Hell surrounded by mocking demons masquerading as people. My head is swimming in a fugue of bad intentions and I should not be alone right now.

Ce la vie.

The silence of my ruined home is appalling. I can almost hear the termites gnawing at the rafters, devouring this house from inside-out as I sit here in my office alone. The mold is gone, as is the unnatural smell of the chemicals the contractors used to kill it. All that’s left are a few gutted rooms, a heap of disconnected appliances, exposed wires and gas lines, various items of clothing, heaps of paper and books, debris, and an old glass pipe and butane torch I found in a drawer, stashed away however long ago, relics of a horrible era of my life long passed come back to haunt me wrapped in a new nightmare. I also have a gun and several magazines of ammunition at the foot of the twin bed I’ve set up in what was my daughter’s room. She and my wife have gone to stay with my mother in another state, as this house is not fit for them to inhabit in present condition. I am merely it’s keeper, a custodian of this rotting shell trying to get all the pieces of what was once a decent life put back together without further damage. I don’t know what will happen, but I am terrified.

The other night while lying restlessly in bed trying to not dwell too long on how miserable this broken little house feels without the joy and warmth of my family, I remembered walking into a 7-11 late at night covered in blood from multiple self-inflicted wounds. I was wearing a white t-shirt and had written something in blood across the front of the shirt. It either read “not my blood” or “stop me”, though now I can’t recall which phrase I had written. The 7-11 clerk looked mortified when I approached the counter to buy cigarettes. I remembered finding the whole transaction more than a little amusing. I chuckled aloud to myself and fell asleep soon after.

I’m sitting here listing to Atropine by Velvet Cacoon. It’s nighttime. I am alone in a house that does not belong to me. The drone of Atropine is mesmerizing, I can feel my heart rate dropping as my nerves grow calm. This meditative semi-serenity is ephemeral. Doubt is creeping in. It’s been a long day and I want to write more but begin to doubt myself. I no longer wish to continue. I can never find the words to describe exactly what I wish to convey, and yet I keep trying with imprecise and gaudy methods, fumbling through barely thought-out first and final drafts, like little stains that time can’t quite wash away, but aren’t large enough to be noticed at once consciously.

Little ideas trickle from the wellspring of my experiences in and out of focus. Every now and again, I catch a glimpse of something interesting, a unique -at least to me- concept relative to certain themes I’ve encountered which overlap and comprise various shades of existence as I am able to perceive them. Some are wistful, fanciful; others are darker, and I don’t dwell often in that realm. These glimpses of the latter darkness are maddening. If I were to spend any more time than I do thinking them, or rather, less time pushing them down and away, it would be panic inducing to say the least. I don’t know all the secrets of the universe, but I don’t think I’d like to, either. Once you learn something, it’s there to stay, good or bad. Some things are better not to know. I remember being curious about intravenous drug use once upon a time… I decided to investigate and found myself in the unenviable position of having become a full-blown junkie. Ever since, I like to think I’ve learned that some foreign concepts or themes should remain as such, and their absence makes existence less awful, if not less interesting.

By the time I finished my previous post, I had drunk half of a Four Loko Gold and smoked a modest amount of weed, and soon after dived promptly into bed. Sometime early in the morning, I awoke and realized my house was without power. This was expected, so I rolled over and fell back asleep. I woke again sometime later to several flash flood warnings for my area on my cell phone (which I ignored as it was already too late to safely drive in my car) and decided to check the sandbags I had placed at the foot of my front door.

“Oh”.

That was all I could think as I stared out into the grimy ocean that was swallowing up my street, the turbid waters gnawed at the top of the little heap of sandbags, spilled over onto my feet with every gust of cold air from the storming winds. Taking the car was a risk before but was now certainly useless. No starting it without the engine flooding, so driving was out of the question. I shut the door and paced around for a brief, uncertain period of time between my home office and living room.

“Well, maybe that’s the worst of it. It just can’t rain that much, right?”

But rain it did. It wasn’t much longer before I noticed the water spilling in from under the doorjamb. If the water kept rising, it would flood the whole house. All I could manage to do was scramble to stuff towels uselessly at the base of the door, a futile effort, but it was something that I could believe in for a short time. After all, at least I was trying to save my home. I passed the kitchen and stepped down into my bedroom, where I noticed the carpet was wet immediately. What I failed to take into account was that the laundry room and bedroom used to be a carport and sat lower than the rest of the house. By the time I had seen water beginning to breach the front door, water had already begun pouring into the laundry room from the back door and the carpet in the bedroom was just sucking it up. Game over. The house was fucked with or without me, so I trudged through the bedroom into the flooding laundry room and out the back door, made my way quickly around the side of the house and went promptly to my lifelong friend Jesse’s house next door, where I would weather the remainder of the storm in a daze.

Hours after Hurricane Ian had subsided, I woke up in Jesse’s living room and decided to survey the damage to my house. The flooding was significant. I sloshed through the house once, and left, wandering the streets in disbelief and sadness. My family’s home and a great deal of our belongings were ruined and sat in a heap outside by the mailbox for the last several weeks until a large truck with a mechanical claw came and gobbled it all up, scraping the last remains of our “normal” life off of the grass like so many cheap claw-machine prizes. The timing couldn’t have been worse, as were waiting on the FEMA adjuster to come in the driveway when the truck came through. My wife cried.

Life is hard. The older I get, the less certain I am about what I’m doing. Events like this rattle one’s confidence. I don’t know what else to say presently, but I don’t think we’ll stay here much longer. Maybe it’s a sign, or just bad luck. I’m still trying to process it all.

I just want to go home.