And it hit me, it's been four fucking years!

YIKES.

I mean seriously -- it's been four years since I could realistically try and make any claim whatsoever on normalcy for any but the most general details of my life. I've been sporadically employed, I've suffered various differing mental afflictions, my social life ... honestly, I don't even know what I can say about my social life. I've just been an absolute freak. And not in the "hip" sense of freak here, you know with tats and piercings and an actual subculture behind me. No, I mean like freak in the pure sense of the word, as in, "Gee, that's not something you see happen too often. S'good thing, too, because it's maladaptive."

And it just staggered me. Because -- if we went back four years and some months? Okay, admittedly even then I probably wasn't the poster child of normalcy. But I did feel like I was, in the end, more or less like everybody else, and like the world ticked on in its natural order.

So something happened, and I lost it. The original thing that set me off is today really kinda irrelevant ... I had no idea at the time, when I began to "lose it" exactly how long that would take, or exactly how much I would lose. And it was a lot, really. My entire concept and view of the world, myself, humanity, and the universe has had to change. In the intervening years, probably every aspect of my previous life that was still available has been turned inside out and upside down...

That's what I'm on about when I'm saying four years, here. Suddenly I look around and I realize that, for good or ill, things seem to have settled. I'm actually not crazy, at least not anymore. My family is fine, but beyond that I've definitely dismantled everything else. That is, career-wise -- you know, I actually had one for a while? -- and certainly in the personal realm. I'm close to no one, and my instinct of late is to alienate rather than connect.

So as I say, for good or ill. Oh, I've also grown horribly lazy and self-indulgent. Complacent, even.