It's been a day, friends and congregants. The more stressed I am in general, the more prone to dissociating I become. So I swing wildly between violent emotions and utter disconnection from reality. It tends to make stressful events rather harder to manage and thus aggravate stress, as you can imagine.

I guess I perceived my trajectory a long time ago, and got comfortable with it. That's kind of what I meant when I said "they slaughter the runners who finish this race," back in this poem - I saw the white-picket-fence reward they wanted to give me for jumping the usual hoops, and it didn't seem worth it. They won't let you turn back once you start, so... I've spent my life trying to hop over the fence, metaphorically speaking. Trying to define success a different way, measure my value by a different standard. And to people trying to succeed in this system, trying to win the race, or even just trying to keep up... I realize that what I'm doing looks very much like trying to lose.

I've seriously considered the "born to lose" knuckle tattoo - but I've promised my wife not to do it unless I've already tattooed more than 40% of the rest of my body and am thus fully committed to frightening squares and old people.

Check out the rest of the 100 Sonnets