Hazy Crazy Days of Summer

I've been in a funk for the past few weeks now. It crept in, well, like a San Francisco fog (coincidentally, it did so at around the same time as my recent trip), took hold and has not let go. For once in my life, though, I know exactly where this funk is coming from. It would make a fantastic blog entry, except that it's way too long and involved and includes metaphors on life and shit like that.

The worst part is that, try as I might to keep my life on an even keel while I ride out these feelings, I feel like the universe is conspiring against me.

My work is (apparently) suffering, as reflected by the fact that my boss has been riding my ass unusually hard for several days now. (I'm not even in the mood to make an anal sex joke here; besides, the fact that it would involve my boss makes that particular joke ew to an extreme.)

Even my luck at trivial pursuits has turned irretrievably on me. My online poker games have met with an incredible losing streak. I lose at board games with friends. I lose online Scrabble games, despite some killer plays.

And the worst part? The other night, while flipping through uninspired television programming, I set upon a four-minute scene from a movie -- one I had already seen before, no less -- that set me on a crying jag that lasted for an hour. (I'm too embarrassed to even mention the title of the movie. Suffice it to say that it was on the friggin' Logo channel.)

My world seems to have been turned upside down as deep fissures develop in the walls I've spent a lifetime so carefully building up around me. I've reached my own Stephen Dedalus moment.* Yet instead of rejoicing at the prospect of liberating myself from the prison which I have so delicately crafted for myself, I find myself frightened, like a puppy dog who is all too used to being smacked upside the head with a rolled-up newspaper.

The last time I reached my own personal epiphany was when I finally decided to stop living my life so deep in the closet. I felt clean, refreshed: I felt a burden taken off my shoulders even before I decided to tell any of my close friends of my long-harbored secret. I was a new person.

Intellectually, I feel like my newfound personal revelation should be resulting in the same feelings of emancipation as my determination to come out did. After all, epiphanies** such as these can only be good for me. They clean out the emotional baggage, they clear the soul, they clean out your aura.

That's not what I'm feeling right now. I'm scared as shit. Far from feeling that all is and/or will be right with the world (and my place in it), I feel a foreboding sense of doom, that the world will never be right again, and my place in it will never be defined, settled, or even pleasant for me.

It's getting harder and harder to deal for some reason. I feel like I'm being some major drama queen,*** yet I can't help it.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

* For the record, I detested Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and yet I'm having substantial high school English class flashbacks right now.

** See what I mean about English class redux?

*** Holy crap! It's made the Merriam-Webster!