White Heat in These Flames

My oldest blog friend wrote me earlier, saying, among other things, that I didn't owe it to anyone to explain anything.
And immediately, I saw she was right, for which I thank her. I have said so many times that I was going to try and write to explain what must look like a madness, or a maddening enigma.

The plain truth is, it seems beyond me now.
But I have decided that I want to use this space to write to myself. Anyone with access is free to read it. But bear it in mind that, from now on, I am writing to me, for me, to try to encapsulate where I am, and how I got here, in this terrible month of August, in this awful year of 2007.

I think it is better this way. This way, it is easier for me to be open, as if I was writing a private diary.

I have come a very long way; and I have next to nothing to show for it. My mind has little lucidity, my memory is getting worse and worse. I need loads of things. I can't have them.
If I lose my capacity to care - MORE THAN MY CAPACITY TO WORK - then I lose everything that remains. Sadly, i know that I have already stopped caring about a lot fo things that used to be of pre-eminent importance. It as if my edges are going blunt, because my head feels like it is locked in a vice that is sqeeezing me and my existence more every day. Particularly when I wake up.
You have all seen pictures taken in the context of my old life. Well, that is just what it is: my old life. And the photos that had done so much to sustain me, as well as the taking of them, in that wonderful old life in that poetic city increasingly have brought me pain, instead of joy. Because I see everything that is lost with that past. "Always something there to remind me - dah-dah da da da..". My past has entered into an unholy alliance with my present to simply intensify my torture. There is no beauty, no photo ops in my everyday life anymore. So, if the past, where the beauty is, cannot comfort me, I will do all I can to stop seeing it in its lifeless, one-dimensional form. I have already done it ad nauseum over the past 15 months, as a defence. Now, when I go to the city, it tells me: "Ha-Ha-Ha! You don't belong here anymore. It is no longer yours. You are an outcast. Get back where you came from! The dream's over".
And what a past! Whoever thinks they know me through these random, selective posts mostly has no real idea, nowhere near the full picture. It is an illusion, through snapshots, fragments of who any of us really are.
It is the fault of the internet. Recently, I have developed virtually an aversion to the web, to e-mails, to blogs, to photo sites, and to a lot more besides. It ain't 3-D, is it? You can't see your people, hear your people, hug your people, kiss your people. It is all a next-best surrogate.
But I - and some of my closest friends - are in desperate, urgent need of much more. They make do. I can't anymore, because I am hanging on to my life by my finger-nails....and they are breaking, one by one...............

I didn't want the photo to be at the top. I thought of this old acquaintance of mine as I wrote the previous sentence, and I immediately wanted him here with me.
Why? Becasue I learned something beautiful from him, or rather he consolidated something I had witnessed in other places in the world.
The people with the very least to give are the first to give whatever they have. He is a warm, generous, unwashed, homeless man. I have seen it many times. Here he comes, sits down with his bags, takes out his bread and first, as every time, he feeds the birds with it.
I would give him bread, biscuits and he would always instantly offer me his bottle of wine. I don't drink, so it was easy to decline the offer, but that isn't my point.
My point is about safety nets and just how easy it is to fall through them, when they aren't very large, or their holes are not small enough. There is the State (in Europe, Australia, Japan and Cuba, at least) to offer some protection to the weakest who fall through, due to misfortunes beyond them. But that isn't enough. Oh, I am not talking about thopse who choose to live on the outside. Besides, believe me, there are moreways than one to live "on the outside" of society.
I am stopping my diary entry now; but I will finish this with the words of Dostoevsky that I have never forgotten and always agreed with:
"Everybody is responsible for everyone and everything".