This never fails to amaze: when you're at your most despairing, a microsynapse away from not being able to think at all, you believe that your life cannot possibly get any worse, save your being struck by some ailment that paralyses you,  leaves you in intractable pain, renders you cringeworthy--you can see it in their eyes--yet leaves your cognitive abilities as intact as they're gonna be.

Then there is a little shard of hope, a pale thing you can see if you squint hard enough--a promising job lead, the possibility of funds with which to go back to school, some new and unusual online get-rich-quick scheme. These don't last too long; once their lack of substance comes shining through, again and again, there is almost drinking. Someone in the dark gives you a little money, and in an instant, your dearest ideas--haircut, dye job, clothing in increasingly large sizes--are cut off at the knees. A humiliating transaction with the middle Eastern boys across the way at the beer store, and you are here.

Here: your clothes do not fit, you are increasingly forgetful. Naked but for a t-shirt, you sit Indian-style before a 13-inch television with bad color reception, and sometimes snow. With the five dollars left to your name, you have purchased St. Ides in a can, four tall-boys of the stuff, and also have made instant mashed potatoes. When you set the hot pan down on the carpet, it left a burn ring that won't go away.

Everything you own is cheap, ruined, sometimes both.

You swallow a couple of pills--trazadone, Seroquel, a Klonopin to help you sleep--and set off on yet another trip to forget yourself, this life, eating and drinking and going to the bathroom where the toilet rocks when you get off it, until swells of anxiety and sedative fall into something like a regular rhythm. The thing that precedes drugged sleep.

Sleep is what you wanted, and now you have it, until the sun rises to the east and your bladder runneth over. To the bath, again; the toilet rocks you to your feet, and you weave back to the warm, sour-smelling bed.  The mattress squawks beneath your weight. The telephone, miserable contraption, has not yet rung. You fear to turn it off because if it goes unanswered, your handlers will come running. (Handlers: you do not ever wish to contemplate these ppl, they buzz about you like a halo of fruit flies, and they sometimes hum a noise like 'loser', like 'desperation.)

You've read the self-help books, perhaps enough of them to crank one out yourself. One enduring theme: get up and do something. Anything. Take a bath, wash your hair, board your personal jet to Ibiza, soak up some sun and get some lipo while you're at it. Then there is this thought: why bother? What difference is it going to make, I can wash my hair? So? So I can clean my little hole-in-the-ghetto. BFD. I just don't WANT to. You stack two badly used pillows and turn to face the wall, swaddling yourself against increasing light. You are forty years old, your appearance playing catch-up, every day, new greys and smeared glasses and jeans that fit poorly, if at all. In one of your pasts, losing twenty-five, thirty pounds has worked to get you going; it is true, you can't endure the rotten sluice of your thighs, and try to sleep on your back if you can, because you can't bear to lie on your belly and feel them.

Everything the books say might help you involves movement and exposure to a world without mercy. There are a couple of fellow losers at AA that you might work for beer money. Right now, though, that thought aches, recedes. Perhaps there is something to having no money at all, and no food, and a chance to kick off the weight loss that used to work but now threatens not to--you' d just be a skinny mess instead of a refrigerator box of lipid and sorrows.

Believe it, or do not, this all gets very tiring. As much as I hated the sight of the things, I'd jump for joy if a bill addressed to me arrived at an apartment I'd paid two months' rent on, by virtue of some job that I tolerated at best, more often despised. Seems that I create an energy that drains me further. Not an original thought?

Oh hell.