I feel I've (been) left well enough alone.

On my front porch there are eleven little cigarette ends standing straight up in the snow-covered ashtray like headstones with epitaphs that read "Here lies seven minutes of William Joseph Crook's life. May they rest in peace."

I haven't left the house since it started snowing on tuesday night. I've been staying up each night until it is no longer night, until I can no longer force my eyes open, afraid of what the new day may bring. At night I'm safe. Days these days bring one of two things: bad news, or nothing. Each night I hope the next day will bring the latter.

So, I don't know. I wrote that last night, and I still haven't left the house. I've been acting rather odd, talking in strange accents and such. Cabin fever, most likely. I just want to get drunk. I don't get it, I mean, I don't think of my life as particularly painful, but whenever I drink it feels like I'm drinking the pain away. I'm drinking something away, I don't know what. I just want to forget something, but I don't know what it is. Or maybe it's everything.

In the early twentieth century, Marcel Proust developed the idea of, and coined the term, involuntary memory. Involuntary memory is the phenomenon wherein old memories are dug up and dragged onto your cerebral stage. It occurs, involuntarily, in response to some stimulus that triggers the recollection of the memory. These memories, for me at least, can be often times rather unpleasant, or even painful, to recall. As one gets older, one accumulates more and more of these painful memories and their subsequent triggers. Eventually one could become petrified by the constant recurrence of involuntarily recalling painful memories.

This happens to me, almost all of the time. I'm so afraid of everything, nowadays.