Despair Along the Avenues of the Dead

I was born for this; I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.  Charles Bukowski

People seldom do what they believe in.  They do what is convenient, then repent.  Bob Dylan

Fucking maintain, goddammit.  Stop this confounded shuddering.  These panic attacks.  The realization hits with full force in the morning like an ocean crashing down upon you.

Don't let the nervous breakdown win, no matter how many times you glance out the window and see your own blood-spattered corpse lying prostrate on the asphalt.  It's best not to look anyway lest the sight becomes too much for your little, diseased heart to bear.  Identity crises are a bitch, young man.  They strike without warning, but the incubation period is actually quite long.  The seeds were planted a long time ago, and soon enough, you retreat into your head and trace over the slow mutations that led up to this point--this horrible transformation into something you had always considered not only an enemy but a malignant tumor.

Shouldn't you have noticed it years ago?  A little money goes a long way toward compromising a grounded sense of perspective and sacrificing it to the Gods of Convenience as well as that accursed Scavenger Bird, who is probably laughing his ass off right now in one of his many cliff-side palaces and being attended by a harem of fertile demi-goddesses with unquenchable avian fetishes.  He's had this life for eons, and now you are coming into a frightening approximation of it.

Is it greed or stupidity?  Is it disassociation?  Questions.  An idiot's questions, posed only to distract from the inalienable truth:  that you have unwittingly and almost spontaneously buried a part of yourself.  You felt it in the morning, choking back the welling sadness.  No.  Not sadness.  Crippling woe, the feeling of dissolution and a numbness to those passions that still fueled you a few days ago.  What to do when the fire goes out and the hearth grows cold?  When your limbs quiver with a new gravity that will inevitably mutilate you, mold you, twist you into something you wanted to avoid at all costs?  What to do when you look in the mirror and see the Enemy?  You wonder if you'll ever get it back, screaming, "Yes, goddammit!!" with another answer nestled in your brain, whispering. 

The very powerful, after all, speak softly.  Always have.

Fuck.  You feel as if you've aged twenty years in a day, and if nothing else, your inability to use anything but tired clichés must hint at the severed connections.  The slow and ugly death that once gave you purpose has turned into a stinking rot.  Terminal.  Spiritually fatal.  You are groping now for an anchor point.  Some sliver to hold on to even though all the things you once possessed you vowed never to abandon.  And now this.  You fall quickly into Limbo and Waking Death.  Where will you stand when humble earth falls away from beneath your feet and is replaced by a vast marble vanity polished against the teeth and bones of unfortunates?

The gig is up, son.  You burnt out, and now you think you can play the Game.  But the game plays you.  It has already won the critical victory, broken the perimeter.  Slit the throats of your faithful sentries and night watchmen you trained yourself all those years ago to preserve the dirt under your fingernails and allow the organic wasting of your body to continued unabated.  And now, there is nothing more left to do but try to stand as this new foe festers within or just end it all by obliterating the mainframe.  It's your choice.

Or you can keep your wits and attempt to repel delusion and dilution at every turn in the minuscule hope that you might be able to retain some of your old spiritual skeleton.  Not impossible.  Not out of the question.  No.

There is always some hope, and perhaps parts of this fog will lift and level...balance your polarized reactions from last night with those of this morning.  Must be a chance.  Anything.  At all.

Jesus Fucking H. Christ.  Take your Fire back.