Fuck.  Will I never learn? Or will I keep on sabotaging myself, drinking that salt water simply because it's right outside my canoe, when a few hours of paddling and a 1/4 mile hike would find me in the river's lap—fresh, cold, clear.  It's an idiot thing, scuttling longterm satisfaction for immediate comfort.  It's infinitely more idiotic when comfort doesn't even enter into it, when you do something that's plain old painful, just because it's there to be done.  Like taking a nostalgia bath.  On a Sunday night (hate Sundays), after a long, nothing day (hate boredom).  But that's what I did.  Didn't set out to–was trying to find a photo to use here, as the image for a Procrastionation support group (want to join?), and before I knew it, I was looking through old emails, specifically, a tranche dating from between four and two years ago.  By then, I was already "depressed," and yet, what a different person I was.  So much more productive, ambitious, articulate, witty, reliable, generous, healthy, to say nothing of better looking.  How many people were in my life, and how confidently and unaffectedly I dealt with them.  Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all skittles-crapping unicorns back then.  I was a self-reproaching spaz then, too, but nothing like this.  Nothing like the person who sits here now, aching to change but too cowardly and clueless and tired to go about it.   It's as though I've hit an invisible vein and my life's blood has drained out.  I feel collapsed in and really, really scared.  And yet, part of me just shrugs.  Like this is it and that's for the best.  But that can't be what I mean. We're here to persist; it's the animal way.  Am I such a faulty animal?

And now the atheist says: God help me.