Must we simulate every need?

Yesterday endowed me with adequate time for an entry, but not so much as a scrap of will to type it into existence. Today's meter of willingness produces nearly as weak a measurement, but the needle hovers just enough above zero to perhaps eke out a meager post... I suppose you will be the judge of that.

5am comes far too soon on any given day, but especially so when the alarm is not set to ring for another 3 hours. There in the darkened stillness of the early morning, his head cradled in my arms, I do my best to soothe the spasms between his sobs and soft whimpers. Without the light to distinguish facial features, I feel more like I am holding tight to his silhouette — some shadow of the man behind the melancholy. What exactly is it inside a person that finally breaks? Where, specifically, is the weakest link within the framework of a human being?

And, God! if only I could track down that broken link and rewrite the code... if only I could find the faulty wiring and solder away the shorted circuits.. if only I could pinpoint the hole in the hull of this sinking ship and weld it shut. Yes... if only I could, Lord knows I would, but the multitude of worldly skills I possess, for all their imagined worth, mean less than nothing in the face of a problem I can neither touch nor see.

Sensory inputs, failing us in the hour of our greatest need, tend to devolve into intolerable intrusions, each sound a sonic reproduction of the end of the world, each sight the equivalent of a retinal colonoscopy. These warped perceptions become an unbearable reality, and while beset upon by ethereal torments, there seems no escape from it. But that certainly never deters us from longing for one, and it takes embarrassingly little desperation to temporarily find one... we are free to pick our poison, be it chemical, spiritual, or otherwise.

Me, I throw myself into my work. You elect to throw yourself down a well of insobriety. And he, well he may just dream of throwing himself under the wheels of a car. So many methods by which we can indulge our escapism. But here is the trouble with transporting yourself to a pocket universe: one fateful day, it inevitably collapses.