I have got to get rid of my psychiatrist. To please him, or at least to keep him from reaching for the phone and getting my ass committed, I told him I “write therapeutically,” which is a god damn lie, though whatever. I bring this up because I hope he doesn’t read this website, though honestly it wouldn’t bother me because who the hell cares, and also he has no idea that for 95% of my life I operate under a pseudonym that I consider my real name, but which is hidden from people who I want to keep from knowing how stupid and insane I am on the world wide web.

Anyway: This guy sucks. I’m sorry, guy, but you’re real bad. (Lord . . . I guess I don’t even remember his name. And actually I never even knew it to begin with, so there you go.) I mean no offense to the guy. He seems like an all right guy, and probably has friends and hobbies and doesn’t hurt anyone, and so on, but as a doctor of the mind he is an abysmal failure. He accuses me of being “flippant” about my nightmarish daily-suicidal-ideation hell-existence, to which I tell him: Hey man, you try living with this without a sense of humor!!!

I should mention here that this dude talks to me like he’s a kindergarten teacher and I just spilled apple juice and animal cracker crumbs all over my little overalls, or I didn’t wipe my ass well enough, or whatever the hell else. Him and his reedy voice of thinly-veiled contempt, I swear. God is it ever soft-palmed! As soft as a preacher’s belly! This condescending tone is so grating to me that I have not followed up on my last appointment. They told me, you know: Let us know when you want to schedule your next appointment. And I sure as shit haven’t ever let them know, because I’m never going back.

And anyway the only reason this whole thing was foisted onto me was because my general practitioner, who is a real stand-up guy, told me he felt more comfortable having a psychiatrist treating me for this godawful endless brain nightmare, and that seemed reasonable enough, so I got a referral from him. My body doc gave me a number for a head doc clinic, and the head doc clinic assignment me a head doc at random. Turns out that after I got this fuckin dude to write me a prescription for what is supposedly a higher dose of the poison I’ve been ingesting daily for the last seven years, I don’t really need any of the rest of it . . . which is to say the talking and checking in and disingenuous concern for my well-being. Hey man, I’m just trying to maintain the meat in the time of inevitable decay. I don’t need you to pretend to be my buddy. There ain’t nothing that dude could say to me to give me any sort of foundation to turn it all around now, because this is a one-way ticket to hell and everyone knows it but doesn’t want to say.

I walk all over the place just about every night. I have seen the full spectrum of all possible outcomes for my life, all bad—have been from one side of the wall to the other, which is to say I know I’m trapped inside a room. You can’t deny it’s a room with no door! In PSYCHOMANIA, this dude goes into a room in his family mansion where his father died 18 years prior. He died I guess because once he entered the door, the door disappeared, and he saw visions that frightened and killed him. And so all these years later his dumbass sociopathic son does the same damn thing, and he sees his own visions on the wall: a sinister frog, him as a baby in the tiny stonehenge where he and his motorcycle gang hang out, and on and on. The telepathic messages he receives from this unknown source (Satan??) tell him that if he kills himself but believes he’ll come back, he will. And so the door reappears and he is able to leave this place, and he really does go out and kill himself, and he does come back to life, and, feeling lonely in undeath maybe, he he tells the rest of his gang to do it too. In the fiction of this universe, being undead means you are invulnerable. And of course if you’re the right kind of sadistic hellfreak, you can have a lot of fun terrorizing small British provinces when you can’t be stopped by bullets.

Well OK the reason I wrote all of that is because I too have seen dark visions in a room I will never leave, only I am no wiser and the door has never reappeared. I am trapped inside this room, and there is no telling when that door is going to blink back into existence. I have a sad suspicion that it never will. I mean let’s face it man: it’s never coming back. And here I am with the frog and the baby at the tiny stonehenge and the dread voices calling to me from the deep. It is a struggle to even get out of bed in the morning, and try to pretend like I want to go through the motions of my own life, which I haven’t wanted to do in so long it makes me feel sick to think about. I am worse year over year, despite how much money I might make or how many people I might meet and know . . . and the freedom these things grant me are useless now. I can’t even justify it any longer. I am done being myself. I will not be myself. In this place and at this time? Forget about it. You leave your house and it’s all a prison on the outside. It is my own failure of imagination that as I get older, I underestimate how cruel and hateful it is out there. The only peace I have is in my bedroom, and certainly not in my own head. It is useless chaos and stubborn things I cannot unlearn no matter how much I try to purge it all. I don’t see the point in seeing it through because I already know how it’s going to end.

Oh, god! All I want for Christmas is a lobotomy. I lack the low enjoying power! And sometimes I think there’s naught beyond, et cetera et cetera. Grim Ahab had it right: just go full-blown nutzo . . . madness maddened! Strike the sun if it insults you! And seek revenge on the world, even if and especially if it kills you.

Hark ye yet again,—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?

Hey man! I’ve been thrusting! Hain’t got me nowhere. I’m done trying. What a relief. A farewell transmission is not a cry for help, because a farewell is a measured acceptance of being bulldozed by huge and immovable forces you can never conquer, some of them real and maybe most of them imagined. So be it!

I am so tired, but listen: I will exit the world, not yet but someday soon enough, in a strange and stupid way. My bones will end up someplace cold. And if I could feel anything at all after that, I would feel very glad indeed! Let’s just hope I don’t come back from the dead. I want to stay dead!!! Holy frog of darkness, do not pull me from the abyss! I have earned my right to die on my own terms. Don’t take that from me! (he said, addressing a frog used in some dubious imagery from a 1970s B horro movie)~

Bear thee grimly, demigod! Let us go to that secret place and abide by the the eleventh and twelfth commandments, both of them beautiful: to think not, and to sleep when you can!