When I look over my shoulder, which I do all too often, I don’t see the lost component in those thousand and maybe one entries that litter my journals and are threaded throughout every story I have authored. What I see from where I am standing is that my children grounded me on the three days that they were born. And the city has never been less than an adventure. I harbored Sumac Street as a mile-marker to the end of something fantastic, yet what a fantastic and exciting new life that had begun right there in that very stone house with the blue trim. And who would I be if it were not for news rooms? Because I know no other way of life beyond pecking at the keys or scratching a pen against the surface of the pages in a sketchbook. I don’t sketch, of course. But I don’t like writing on lined paper.  To avoid the lines, I write in sketchbooks. For spacial reasons.

Then sometimes I blame being lost on the city. Always somewhere to go and someone’s voice to hear. The clatter of this town swells my brain. There are days when I wake without a sense of direction. Without a map or a timeline. On those days, I float. Downstream. Hoping to catch a rapid. Or drown. Either way.

Most recently, I’ve blamed being lost on the house in which I now live, which is not the one on Sumac or Jamestown. Jamestown was good. I loved those bones. I laid my hands on them, smoothed my palm across the surface of its moldings, grazed my fingers along the walls. I’d tell it so. I’d whisper, “What a good house you are. I feel myself here. I am alive and vibrant here.” So many things poured from me onto pages and screens on Jamestown. Three screens, to be exact. Two PCs and a laptop served tenure in that house.

But this house, this house is different with its sterile surfaces, straight edges, and clean lines.  I’ve tried lying on the sofa in the middle of the day after the girls are off to school and only the fish tank has something to say. It gurgles regardless of the term Whisper written on the side of its filter pump. I let the algae grow because that’s how I think the fish want to live. I think they like the green and sometimes they eat it off the sides. But usually only when I go days forgetting to feed them. I do that. Forget them. Sometimes the gurgle from the tank falls on deaf ears. Unless I try to lay on the sofa in search of myself; then I hear it. So loud it crashes against my raw and irritated mind. Like a blister. My brain. Not the fish tank. The tank is not like a blister.

I beg for the quiet when the sofa doesn’t work. I request it. To myself, to God, to the Universe. To anyone who is listening. I say things like, “Do you realize that there is still this dream?” It’s the one I fashioned as a child from the surface of my bedroom window sill that faced east so that I could watch the sun rise in the morning and watch the fields turn orange against the sunset’s glow just before supper was ready. It was there where I thought about it.  It was there where I fashioned my first book. I called it, My Book. It was about me. And the very first line reads something to the extent of, “I want the world to read what I have to say.” Something along those lines. I could get it out of the closet in this house and quote the line. It’s fifteen feet from where I sit now. But I am far too lost for that kind of business. Rummaging through crap that reminds me of how much crap the world has yet to read.

I asked him today if maybe I wasn’t good at this. Maybe, for my whole entire long-lived life, I had chosen a dream that didn’t match even a small part of me or my capacity to fulfill. I tried to find the roots. I vaguely recalled winning contests, writing for the local newspaper as an adolescent. Then I remembered the sixth grade autobiography. Her note beautifully written next to the A+. “You should be a writer.”

That’s all it took. In fact, I was a little irritated that someone hadn’t mentioned it earlier because I had just devoured two weeks of my life preparing a report on practicing medicine for the career segment in my language arts class. Of course I would be writer. And not a pediatrician.

I do not practice medicine. Following the receipt of my sixth-grade teacher’s note, I practiced writing. I thought briefly about medicine in 1999, following the birth of my second child. I researched schools, programs, financial aid. I hadn’t written since the babies had made themselves comfortable in my life and consumed my every waking and sleeping hour. I acknowledged it as a sign to become a doctor. Who wouldn’t think that, right? It seemed like a perfectly natural process to me.

I targeted a start date on my higher education. I had essays to write, of course. Letters to the officials who rule the kingdom of that caliber of education. I logged onto my PC, circa 1985. One of the original McIntoshes. And thought it wise to clean out the plethora of documents and files that had collected for more than a decade. I wasn’t a writer. I no longer needed the stories. Clean house, ducks in a row, all was good. Except when I stumbled upon that one story. The one that was inspired by the dream I had had with the orphans in Guatemala. I couldn’t pull myself away. I printed all 347 pages of the manuscript and crumpled it into a folder that I tucked into the outside pocket of the diaper bag. I never completed a medical school admissions package.

I don’t have an end to this. Other than to say that lying on the sofa in the middle of the afternoon, listening to water gurgle from a tank that is green from the inside out does not make me feel that inner self. It reminds me of the wooden swing my father installed on a branch of the maple tree at the corner of the house in which I grew up. The hours, the days, I sat on that swing and gazed at the landscape that neither moved nor transformed other than the occasional tractor that interrupted it seasonally. It was the same view from my bedroom window sill, the one facing east. Because the swing was below the window, to the left a little. I inserted the landscape and tree swing into the Guatemalan story.  But in the story, the view becomes exhausting for the character and forces her to retreat from a place she once held dear.  I take photographs of the field and the hillside when I go home now and again. I stand in the spot where the swing once hung. It’s no longer there. But that’s where I stand to snap the shudder.

Actually, I have a digital Polaroid that cost me seventy bucks at Target. I don’t think it has a shudder. I don’t know anything about digital photography other than to say that it captures what I see when I press the button on the top.

Regardless, the view from my sofa is now exhausting. The yellow walls smother me. The sound of the fish tank is deafening. I like the green, though. In the tank. I don’t believe that the average keeper of fish can hone the talent of nurturing green algae like I do. It’s a delicate situation. That requires patience. And tenacity. Sunlight helps, too.

I assume, much like the former one thousand and one times I have issued a notice on being lost, I will look over my shoulder after having passed this way, and realize that the content upon which I base my negativity, is the very essence of my life. Not the sofa. Or the yellow. But the rest.

Every Saturday morning, I woke by nine and left the house by nine-thirty for gymnastics practice. I returned home at one to the crack of my parents’ work whip. I begrudgingly cleaned the bathroom with one eye out the window; I could hear the muffled grind of my friends’ dirt bikes grazing the terrain. But upon bathroom-cleaning inspection, my mother would scowl that I had missed the base of the toilet or that I had left hair in the bathtub drain. I hadn’t cleaned to the level of her expectation.

 Next was the kitchen floor. I sloshed soapy water from one end of my mother’s industrial-sized kitchen to the next. Missing patches here and there, hurrying to finish, wanting to have been at the creek by then to spy on the boys’ newly constructed hideout that perched on a nearby rock ledge. But again, upon inspection, my work did not make the cut. My mother would stand over me, pointing out those missed patches of dirty flooring. I hadn’t achieved what she was expecting.

From the kitchen floor, I was ushered outside where my father methodologically split thick chunks of wood that he and my brother had hauled from the hollow. “Get the wheelbarrow, Sissy,” he’d say. “This wood needs stacked beneath the porch.” On my fourth trip, the sun would begin to set, casting splintered orange rays through the branches of the walnut trees. I couldn’t see that the stacks were not straight. I was blinded by the silent alarm of the day coming to a premature end for me. My father, disappointed in my ill-shaped wood pile, scolded me for my shoddy workmanship and shooed me away with his gloved hand.

I still had time. It wasn’t yet dark. I ran to the barn for my bike. I could still make it to the creek. My friends still might be down there. But lo-and-behold, my mother would call for me through the kitchen window, waving a wicker basket in her hand. She needed blueberries from the orchard. Wouldn’t it be nice to have muffins after supper? I would pick the berries, but eat most of them. And then take the verbal lashing from my mother in the kitchen when I would return her basket with no more than a few handfuls of berries rolling around at the bottom. Not enough for her anticipated muffins. “But I mixed the batter while you were picking!” she’d say to me, her voice shrill and crammed with utter frustration.

The sky would be dark by then.  Saturday would officially come to an end.

I’m certainly not scarred by my childhood Saturdays. I don’t often think of those days in the perspective in which I just described. Growing up on my parents’ farm has blessed me with endless stories of old that fill me with warmth and a longing to return.

But today I recalled those Saturday afternoons under a cloak of failure. It’s the same cloak I’m wearing right now.

I slipped it on this morning in BJ’s just after turning into the new produce section of the store. Because I am in one of those mind-sets in which I am unable to execute anything to the fullest extent. Nothing ends in proper completion, nothing turns out as expected, and everything involves an intense and internal frustration that randomly erupts from me without prior notice. A quality cloak of failure is required for times like these. It enhances the degree of self-loathing necessary in walking that jagged line of martyrdom. Not everyone can take failing to such great heights.

But we all go through it. I hope. Times when it feels like everything we have tried has ended in failure. And then there are those really special times in life when we keep trying, and we try so hard, and for so long that resources become exhausted. Innovation dissipates. Strategies fade. Passion ceases to thrive. Emptiness consumes. At which point I pull my cloak of failure over my head and mope. Sometimes I cry.

Hence, the explosive success of the anti-depressant niche.

I don’t take the pills. I was asked to take a prescription twelve years ago by my doctor. Knowing better, I declined.

If I didn’t smudge my way through these standard life-lesson pitfalls, against what would have to measure the joy when it comes? Don’t we need the bad parts of life to cultivate the good parts into something beyond our wildest dreams?

Sometimes I fail because I’m distracted; I’d rather be doing other things, like being a kid and wanting to play rather than work. Sometimes I fail because I lack interest in the things I’m doing. But most of the time I fail because I have no patience, tolerance, or acceptance for the circumstances with which I am dealing. I have destroyed more than I’d like to admit merely because I did not have the patience to wait for the miracle to happen on its own.

I know that I fail not because of the heaping pile of failure at my feet, but because I am informed of my failure by those whom I have failed.

When my mother yelled at me for not cleaning properly, I remember thinking, “But you asked me to clean, and I cleaned. You never told me how you wanted me to clean. You just told me to do it. So I did it my way.”

Or when my father muttered words of distaste over my inability to properly stack wood, I remember thinking, “You never said the piles had to be formed in even rows. You only said it went under the porch. And that’s where I put your wood.”

As an adult, I whisper similar statements in my mind when under fire. Sometimes I want to ask people if they’d like to have my job? Or if I’m doing such a terrible job, why are you still here?

But rule #1 in the Guide to Becoming a Martyr states, “Martyrs do not question verbal abuse. They take it as it comes and politely smile in response. In some cases a Martyr may inquire if he or she can offer any further services to the abuser at hand; however, getting a word in edgewise may be impossible depending upon the circumstances and the decibel level at which the abuser is offering criticism.”

So I smile. I crack a joke. I well up in BJ’s. I argue with people in my head. And I eventually find the way out of my self-obsessed maze. I fold the cloak and place at the back of the closet until next time.

I am convinced that Blue Cross should issue me a stipend for the amount of cash I am saving them on monthly prescription refills.

[sigh]

I am currently enjoying my annual week in Stone Harbor, New Jersey with the family. Spanky seriously needs to get a foot into stand-up. The Chairman needs to step down from corporate management and initiate a house keeping start-up. Dr. Deb’s trauma in the ER stories have changed me forever. Keyser has been on his best behavior ever. Mom made the switch from red to white. Aunt Pap has deemed imortality.

And me? I stumbled upon a patch of reality that has both haunted me and released me at once.

Unfortunatey, the Chairman is sitting next to me right now confessing his secret desire to go mummy hunting. He his humming the theme to Indiana Jones and asking me if I think there are germs present in ancient Egyptian tombs.

My own revelation will have to wait.

I feel like I am standing in an empty stadium, facing no one, and talking to myself. I can hear the crickets.

I’ve been wanting to return to blogging for weeks, now. I’ve been lying awake at night, running posts through my tired head. Manipulating the language. Finding just the right words. Wanting to be amazing. Still.

Among my multiple nervous breakdowns I suffered throughout my college career, one of them specifically hinged on my inability to be great. I had fallen into pieces on my friend’s kitchen floor one morning just past 2 a.m. Crumpled and covered in snot, I howled that I had never been amazing at anything. And that, regardless of what anyone believed, I was not going to be amazing at anything in the future.

My friend kneeled down beside me and said something relating to how he knew my father had made me to go away to college while my siblings were left at home for community college, yadda, yadda, oh the pressure of expectations, and so forth, yadda, yadda. My friend, although at Penn State with me, was also from my hometown. He understood the expectation of amazing and how I was assumed a shooting star. But I’m not shiny. And I hate to fly.

Finally, still sitting with my friend on his kitchen floor, he had asked me, if I had a choice in the matter, what would I have chosen as a path in life.

“A refrigerator repair technician,” I answered.

“Oh.”

It was an honest answer to a genuine question. To date, I’d still like to know the inner workings of automatic refrigeration. I’d like to know why my food heats within 30 seconds of exposure to microwaves, but I have to put ice in a glass if I want a cold drink.

Don’t get me wrong, as always. I don’ t use ice in my beverages. I prefer to drink my soda at room temperature. Which might lead you to believe that I have no reason to acquire an understanding of automatic refrigeration. And if that’s what you’re wondering, you have just, on your very own accord, validated my response to my friend when asked the question while sitting in the dark on his kitchen floor in the wee hours of a morning 20 years ago.

For no reason at all. Just to know. Just to do. Just to be.

So, today I opened this page, and started typing. For no reason at all. Just to know I’m still here. Just to do what I like to do. Just to be me.

Maybe next week I’ll hoist that second leg over the saddle.

My initial observation of this divide relied on growth as the source of my new, structured self. I had grown, of course, from being a silly-hearted youth to a purpose-driven adult steered by targeted expectations. In folly, I tossed recommendations to those still caught up in being young and carefree that one should remain as such for as long as possible, as this grown-up world grabs us by the balls in a throw down. Wise advise.

Later embarrassed of being a jackass through the awakening that I am clearly not wise, nor purpose-driven by nature, I assumed that this growth theory was more so a mere deviation of the life from which I had emerged. In essence, I convinced myself, I was born an artist of sorts and donned bright-eyed perspectives for most of my life, but then, for reasons unknown, I deviated or changed course to compensate for an altered lifestyle or the need for assets. I examined my motives and unearthed a desire for financial security and a love of the money game. If I worked hard, I got paid. Through this second dose of self-analysis, I barely recalled the days of old when all aspects of the world surrounding were comprised of endless dialogues in my mind and stories soon to follow. Everyone was a character. Everything was a set.

With my stage far behind me, and my mind slowly decreasing along the horizon, I took a third shot at the circumstances of my life as the scenarios, most recently, have weighted me in a malignant and suffocating stillness.

On the heels of this self-definery, the death of a dear friend struck a blow that knocked on the threshold of places I have long since forgotten and people I promised never to forget.  Me, being one on the list; a face in a sea of blurred images.

In the absolute form of existence, we can say these things. We place blame on memory for gray recollection. We place blame on lifestyle for neglect.

In my abstract form of existence, the one that enabled a dear friend to recently remember me as starry-eyed on the streets of New York City with the world extended before me, I have officially deemed my life and that wedge of which I spoke earlier, a form of procrastination.

I have not grown away from myself. The theory abolishes the sense of self in its entirety. Growth is identified by expanding our spirits in alignment with adaptation to surrounding environments, events, and emotions cultivated by the presence or absence of human contact. To grow away from who I was is to say that I have not grown at all. It is to say that I have left myself resting stagnant and without care. Above all reason, to say that I have grown in a direction opposite of who I once was, or from who I thought I’d be, is a poor excuse prompted by a fear heeding warning that life may not occur within the calculated format we often record in projection. It is easier to pretend I love money or have altered my path than to say that this did not turn out the way I had planned.

I am not purpose driven. I do not love money, and therefore cannot say that money or any form of monotary value has driven me to fulfill desire. I cannot be deviated by cash nor by the success with which socialites and corporate executives associate it. My theory of deviation dissolved quickly when I, without a resigning thought in my mind, easily relived myself of work for 10 days with reason being that I simply did not want to talk to strangers for a week. I am clearly not a professional success.

With two theories in the toilet and a withered sense of direction, clarity nearly deafened me upon awaking one morning with the realization that I am procrastinating.

Procrastination, like cancer, comes in varying degrees of size, shape, and effect. Sunday Morning ran a segment on the psychological components of procrastination the week I neglected to work. Ironic in nature, the feature reported that procrastination can be considered a tool of productiveness. While avoiding the demands of deadlines and expectations on one or more projects or areas in need of attention, an individual can delve into adjacent projects and become productive at accelerated paces. Simply put, I can neglect my inner need for self-expression and compassionate desire to touch lives in a positive way while moving mountains across arenas in which I never imagined to exist. I’m buying time. I’m doing great things in place of the great things I promised to myself as a starry-eyed youth.

The wedge hasn’t budged since my epiphanotic morning. I’m still moving the wrong mountains. I’m good at it and my ego is a well-fed monster. Upon returning from my 10-day leave, instead of focusing on tasks that have lain dormant in great need of attention, I returned to churning dollar amounts in my head and picked up the phone to call a stranger. It’s that easy to forget that I meant to be different. It’s that easy to forget to be true to myself.

As I run in the circles with which I am surrounded, encompassed by good things and good people, I confront myself in secretive whispers, “What would they think if they knew who you are.”

I call it my Spider Man theory.

On a lighter note, I have yet to decide what to become when I grow up and Spanky’s car is in the shop. Dad couldn’t get her on her cell, so naturally, he called Spanky’s corporate headquarters. When she came back from a bathroom break she found a sticky on her monitor: CALL YOUR DAD.

Yesterday, after screaming over my shoulder at Claire to quit thrashing around the the family room, I realized there was an opossum loose in my house. I then armed Claire with a broom and ordered that she flush the ferocious vermon from behind the couch.

Claire: And then what?

Me: [in a huffy whisper as to not let the creature know we were in the room] SHHHHHHH! He can hear you!

[Insert the sound of claws against my hardwood floor.]

Claire: AHHHHHHH!

Me: Damnit! He can hear you!!!!!! Quit making all that noise or he’ll know exactly what direction to plan his attack. He’s in this for the kill. I can tell.

I grabbed the cat, Emily, and tossed her behind the couch to ensure a thorough opossum flushing.

Emily swaggered to the left. Froze. Then sauntered to the right, dropped to her back, and executed a back roll under the couch to show off for her new friend. I expected a more advanced approach from an animal who spends her mornings hissing at the fish tank.

As it turned out, the opossum was a squirrel, small enough to squeeze through a radiator pipe space in the floor and make its way into the basement.

Don’t start on me about having a squirrel in my basement. I grew up in a house populated with bats, wolf spiders, and snakes. Yes, snakes. I will forever recall the evening I was watching television with my mom and Spank, only to witness a large black snake emerge from between the bricks on the wall and slither along the baseboard heating component. 

I was in second grade when I pulled a puppet out of the toy box to find it filled with eight baby snakes. Momma reptile had found a perfect place to hatch a crew of six-inch offspring.

And we all know the bat sagas, as they continue to reach new heights. Like this summer, when I was accostedby a bat in my bedroom while sleeping over at Spank’s.  I slowly crawled out of bed, a stealth maneuver, and tip-toed to Spanky’s bedroom doorway.

Me: [standing quietly, planning my approach to waking Spank]

Spank: WHAT.

Me: [now startled] There’s a bat in my room.

Spank: Where.

Me: Between the floor boards.

Spank: What?

Me: I heard it scrambling around in the wall and now it’s floundering back and forth between the floor boards.

Spank: Are you asking me to remove a bat from inside the floor?

Me: Yes.

Spank: Get out of my room. Now.

I, still in stealth mode and humming the “Mission Impossible” theme in my head, slithered across the hall and climbed back into bed with Hazel and Andy. I laid there for another 30 minutes and listened to the bat slam around inside the floor. I assessed that Edgar Allen Poe, too, had experienced something similar to the insanity ensuing beneath my wooden floor boards.

Finally, the bat located the ever-handy radiator pipe entrance hole that houses  hot water pipes running from the basement furnace throughout the house.

Me: Andy!

Andy: [garbled snore]

Me: Andywakeup!!!!

Bat: [sound of bat appendages scraping against aluminum radiator parts]

Me: [covers over head] ANDYGETUP!!

Andy: [muffled snoring noises]

Hazel: [sitting up in bed between Andy and I]  What’s going on?

Me: There’s a bat in the heater. Get down. I’m going to get Aunt Jess.

I army-rolled across the floor, slithered across the hall, and addressed Spank.

Me: I really need you this time.

Spank: Are you kidding? Because you must be kidding me if you think I can get a bat out of the floor. How exactly do you think…..

Me: It’s in the heater now.

Spank: Jesus.

Me: I’m serious. It’s going to get me.

Spank: There’s nothing I can do. Go back to bed.

I returned to bed.

Bat: [continued body parts on metal noises erupting from the heater between the wall and the bed]

Hazel: [from under the covers] Can I come out yet?

Me: Aunt Jess won’t help us.

Bat: [THUNK. flapflap. THUNK. flapflapflapflap. THUNK.]

Me: OMYGOSH. ITSUNDERTHEBED. ANDEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!! The bat is UNDER. THE. BED.

Bat: [THUNKflapTHUNKflapTHUNKflapTHUNK]

Andy: What in the…?

Me: Go get Jess. There’ s a bat under the bed.

Andy, who had been sleeping in the spot against the wall, climbed over Hazel and me, not hearing the bat and not really caring about much of anything other than the anger ensuing over the wake-up call, walked to the darkened doorway of Spank’s bedroom.

Andy: Um…..eh-hem….I don’t mean to bother you….but….uh…

Spank: Why do I feel like you are standing in my bedroom wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts?

Andy: [scanning the dark room] Do you have a tennis racket in here?

Spank: Please tell me you are at least wearing a t-shirt.

Andy: Sara thinks there’s a bat in our room and….

Spank crawled out of bed, armed herself with a racket and handed one to Andy. They clumsily returned to my room, where I was naturally dying a slow death due in part to the lack of oxygen I was sharing with Hazel under the bed covers. Spank turned on the bedroom light.

Andy: See, I knew there was nothing in here. She’s hearing things. I’m really sorry that I got you out of bed.

Spank: God damnit. I can’ t believe you. It’s always something with you. [to Andy] She claimed it was in the floor earlier.

Andy: [to Spank] Yeah, I know.. [chuckle] I ignored her the first two times she tried to get me up. I should have kept going with it.

I don’t know exactly how it went down. I don’t have accurate details because it happened in a flash. But it also happened in a freeze-frame motion that chiseled in my memory the image of a bat’s silhouetted wingspan against the backdrop of Spank’s white t-shirt.

Andy took a swing. Missed. Spank hollered encouragement. Then an order to get out of her way. This one was hers.

Rackets swooshed through the air. Grunts of great effort released with every swing until I felt a pelt to the back of my head, still buried beneath a quilt.

Silence.

Spank: Um….

Andy: Sara, don’t move.

Spank: Um…we should have moved them first.

Andy: We are never going to find it in those blankets.

But they did. And they tossed the departed into the front yard where the cats probably ate it.

So don’t give me shit on the squirrel in my basement. Unless you can produce a statistical analysis report on the number of squirrel-related deaths in Philadelphia. Because I know you want to warn me of the plague-like diseases squirrels spread to small children.

And I don’t need the crap about how squirrels chew on things. I know how they chew because I have to call Comcast Cable every six months because the squirrels living in my backyard tree regularly chew through my cable lines.

My basement is comprised of boxes sealed almost a decade ago and representing a life from which I was stripped. And later cleansed. If the presence of a squirrel in my house means that those boxes will be chewed and soiled and ultimately destroyed. Well then, so be it. It is most likely high time that I get on with my life and quit thinking that it exists in brown packing boxes whose contents have long since disintegrated from memory.

As for Andy’s multimillion dollar tool bench, work area, surf boards, and multitude of electrical equipment? That’s on him.

Payback for issuing fake snoring noises during a time of genuine crisis.

W. T. F.

I have, to date, only seven days into the new year, managed to establish and destroy four resolutions. My latest salvation is a meager attempt to accept that acceptance is the answer to all of my problems.

Except….that my level of acceptance is at .05 right now and my desire to be RIGHT about EVERYTHING is blowing the roof to the moon and back, waking my greatest weakness –  anger.

Anger is all-consuming. And useless.

Yet, as useless and non-productive as anger is, I will allow it to rob me of entire days, and, at times, whole weeks or months on end. I will grind around in my mind, shout-talking my way through imaginary arguments, cat fights, and boisterous triumphs over idiot people who piss me off.

Anger is my ego’s drug of choice. Anger makes me right all the time. Anger feeds my need to be heard. Anger enduces obedience in others via the threat of unclassified and unexpected rage. Anger, like all good drugs, makes me believe that I am in control. Anger tells me I am big and loud and I rule the world.

And, then, when the vial runs dry, anger leaves me desolate. Defeated. Deflated. Destructed.

And finally, anger leaves me the fool. The person, place, or thing from which I cultivated anger remains unchanged. Unaltered. Untouched by my fury.

It is exhausting, cyclical daemon activity. One that, on resolution number four, I hope to conquer. I’ve never battled a more useless addiction. Even cigarettes make more sense than short-circuiting over that or whom which I have no control.