But I can't help the feeling I could blow through the ceiling

Another small window has presented itself today, and so crawl through it I shall. The question now is: how shall the crawling be done? Servilely? Joyously? Grudgingly? Gratefully? On my knees, at the very least — that much is certain.

Ahhhhhhh, but to find that enviable vertical base for even just a moment... that is such as dreams are made on. Imagine! To even have a shot at proceeding through life one step at a time, one foot in front of the other. As things currently stand (a misnomer, perhaps, in this instance), I must make due one handful of mud after another, pulling ahead with hands and forearms while dragging my body behind me like a slug. Live ammunition zips by overhead, hovering barbed wire nips at any patch of hair, skin, or clothing that foolishly aims too high.

Or does it?

In your head, in your head, they're still fighting with their tanks, and their bombs

And their bombs, and their guns

In your head, in your head, they are dying

These could be bullet fragments, but they could also be fragments of a shattered psyche. These rows of wire and these whizzing projectiles, potentially made of as much paper as the proverbial chains that bind two people in holy matrimony. This battle, this entire war in fact, may well have been manifested by a military of my own making. Maybe it has been my own masochistic hand mashing my head into the muck and mire of this meltdown.

Or maybe I just like the letter 'M'

But I am not the only traumatized troop in this combat zone; there are two of us, hunkered in our bunker, taking turns leading each other with our eyes closed. And it is not a matter of level — most days, my depression digs to a deeper one than his. As much as this is a disease, I suspect we could find a more accurate distinction in the recognition that his is only a different strain... one that leaves the sufferer less functional.

Not so in my case! Dysfunctional, yeah. Malfunctioning, sure. But nonfunctioning?? "NEVER," I gasp, wide-eyed, as I clutch my pearls. Guess you can just consider me your friendly neighborhood Weeble. The very picture of an adequately productive member of society, while an utterly unproductive and unfulfilled member of the IFF.

Yup, I will shed it all like dead weight if it comes right down to it, but I am incapable of surrendering my ADLs. It is as if every morning begins by posing me a question: are you going to kill yourself today? And if my answer is "no," I will pick my ass out of bed, brush my teeth, and get on with the day almost every single time. And if I also answer "no" to the follow-up question (are you going to kill yourself this week?), you can bet I am carting myself to work, too.

So, what do I forfeit instead?

That inexplicable inner spark that makes a man more than a machine. There is a clear and present danger in the discovery that — whether it be a person, place, or anything between — a cause can only have an effect on you if you allow yourself to care about it in the first place. At the alarming rate I have been shrugging them off, I seem almost destined to be a rebel without one. To wake up and recognize that the quants have overtaken management to such an extent that, before I know it, anything that poses a downside risk will be rebalanced out of my portfolio. Once autopilot has seized control, what purpose does the captain serve in the cockpit? Why occupy an autonomous shell?

Hence, on the day that dawn crests the horizon to hear me answer "yes" for the first time, it is not because I am full of despair, but because I am so full of apathy that I simply cannot find the point of persisting to exist anymore.