V., Salt Lake City, Utah, September 26, 2012, 4:30 AM

I am half-lucid, should be asleep.  I am as usual thinking about my impending disasters: unpaid taxes, legal disputes with the ex, a daughter who didn't come home this weekend and I don't know where she is, etc., and as I lie here thinking these near-fatal thoughts of shit about which I can do nothing but which is of course endlessly compelling, each impending disaster takes on a cinematic [though somewhat fragmentary and kaleidoscopic] image, a sort of visual theme.  For example: my back-taxes take the form of, or my thoughts of it are accompanied by, an image of an immense groaning black-iron dirigible, its trusswork backlit by coalfire, its riveted ironplate siding leaking black smoke, venting enough heat that the entire skyfilling sun-eclipsing monstrous mass is coming down.  It is lowering above me and is too vast to outrun.

And the legal nonsense with [or against] my ex: she and her pitbull attorney have hybridized, or sort of violently combined into one malformed carbuncular asexual sort of butch matriarch wearing the battle fatigues of the U.S. Marines.  He/she/it is standing above me with a wet towel.  I am in something like a dentist's chair, totally immobilized.  He/she/it asks me, in a tone of hostile contempt, a series of demented questions, like this one: Can you prove, with documentation, that these groceries [it holds up a receipt] benefited the marital children? and as soon as I try to answer, or to express my outrage, this monstrous virago slaps the dripping towel over my mouth and nose and I lurch from the brink of sleep gasping and adrenal. 

So go my nights.  My days are somewhat less dramatic and sometimes less lucid.  I think that my planning brain has been routed.  Too much stress.  Too many demands on my time made by people with needs I can't begin to meet.  I can't get myself to sit down and rationally and systematically plan my life these days.  I have so much happening and the stakes are so high and my needs are so continually unmet, and my life here in Salt Lake City Utah is so muted and pointless that it takes an act of will to even list what I need to attend to, and for six months now I have not got beyond a simple list.  I just deal, more or less, with whatever current crisis.

All of which is dreary and, dream-imagery aside, so colorless and typical of the human condition as to be unworthy of note.  Which is why I want to tell you a story: