I count the days from now to when I have my Social Security Benefit deposited into my checking account. Ten days, from the 18th to the 28th.

I’ve been up about ninety minutes, staring at the railroad tracks on the Ashland Railfan You Tube site, reading obituaries, the popular biographies of everyday people, reading Word Press blog posts, and wondering why I am awake.

I can’t bring myself to go to Mass. I feel more “sinful” than usual, caught up in anger and lust, impure thoughts and selfish thoughts. I need to go to Reconciliation and lay my sins bare.

I worry about my son.

I can’t express to my wife the depth of my loneliness, so it comes out in inappropriate singing.

How do I rid myself of books I will not read? How do I mourn the loss of a self-created fiction that my life is? Maybe we all present characters to the world, whom we hide behind, such that our authentic selves, that soul who answers to God is but the shadow to the world, but the substance to God.

Overthinking is one of my specialties.