I could eat rocks right now, bite into steel girders. In this early morning, the poisons swirling, the acid in my belly roiling, I’m trying to concentrate, trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

In this maze of doubt, this labyrinthine maniacal madness enshrouded by the fog of despair, I am running down corridors, trying to find a way out, as my soul catches fire, I’m trying to escape before it all burns down.

The words come tumbling down like boulders from an avalanche, with no rhyme or reason. I am frothing at the mouth, trying to make sense of the senseless. I don’t know whether I am coming or going, whether I have trod this narrow path before, if I am running around in circles crying out that the sky is falling.

I don’t know what to believe any more.

Six years ago I started this harebrained odyssey, inadvertantly charting the decay of the Republic of my birth, this beacon of Freedom that was falling into decadence and metastasizing into Empire. Amidst the tumult of a nation coming crashing down around me, I burrowed into my little worries and cares, my small personal battles, the silly advances and retreats of the armed forces fighting for control of my soul. I had grown tired of scrawling my raving madness into notebooks that no one would ever read. I demanded that at least Google would become witness to my evolution (or my unraveling—the end of this story still remains to be seen.)

Six years and now, after the bitter loneliness, the aching hurt of being betrayed by my own country, six years of being exiled without ever leaving the land of my birth, I have hope again.

In the big picture, what does it mean? I know that in the end, it doesn’t matter. Whoever has the power hoards it unto themselves and I will never get a taste of the pluripotence. But there is something, to see the dark mischief, the diabolical schemes of those who would sell our country to the Devil and those who would defecate on the Constitution, to see all those things burn away. I’m not ready to believe it. It’s like almost waking from an endless nightmare, with the terror and the madness clearing with the coming of the sunlight touching my face.

I am ranting and raving, and I feel like I’ve spent the whole six years wandering around in circles, treading paths that I had long ago trodden, spinning mindlessly, looking for something that I am perhaps destined never to find.

Looking for something I had lost, something that I had never had. Looking for squandered potentiality, I suppose. Chances that were inadvertantly discarded and given up for lost. Opportunities overlooked. Hopes forgotten. I’ve scavenged through the rotting scraps of what I used to believe in, what I used to hope for, and find nothing but thin wispy thoughts evaporating at the touch of my hand.

What is the use of hope, when destiny has already doomed you?

And yet I fled into the night, feeling that I was chasing something of my own volition, that no matter what dark, desperate Fate is in store for me, the time in the interim was mine to use as I saw fit.

I am unbounded, and that scares the living shit out of me.

Or I could just be going completely insane.

Either way.

Oh, the violent emptiness seething with infinite possibilities, spacetime roiling and foaming like the inchoate rage of some savage beast. My soul rocks and shudders. Like electric sparks tingling through my soul.

Where do I go? What do I do next? Give me direction for just the next moment. Leave the end out of my sight if you must.