My thoughts this weekend are random and wispy and disjointed. I can't or just don't want to wrap them up into one tidy little cohesive package. Perhaps letting them float like this keeps them from being too real and thus having any power over me. There was too much reality in my world this week as it was anyway.

In this state of passive suspension I'm hoping a clarity of mind will return that will help me make sense of the chaos. That and I just don't want to think about any of it. And I hate that. Things have to get really bad for me not to want even think about them. I mean, my god, I live to think. Obsessively, meticulously, thoroughly, quasi-religiously. Even when I've exhausted the most tenuous and tenacious of topics, I can still think about how I think too much. It's sort of a hellish little personal playground up there in my head.

All that brain activity often acts as a nice little emotional buffer. As my wise and similarly angst-addled friend Cyndi once said, "Once you've over-analyzed them, problems become quite small." Experiences and emotions get put through the dissection process and often come out almost completely unrecognizable, so probed for meaning that it's pummeled right out, and the ghastly thoughts and potent memories that threaten to overwhelm me lose their clout. It's an incredibly effective diffusion tactic.

That is, except for when those carefully packaged thoughts and feelings and memories sneak up on me all stealth-like and deliver that sucker punch right in the region of heart+gut. And oh, bloody hell, does it hurt; wind knocked right out of all that lofty logic and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. All I can do is recoil into the recovery posture and search my mind for reasons, for rationale, and -- oh boy, here we go again....

(And for those of you who know exactly what I'm talking about here, I urge you to take Poe's song "Terrible Thought" for a spin -- always nice to give the afflicted a theme song.)