The Fog

The fog rolled in last night. It didn’t leave. This afternoon it was still there. Not heavy, just enough to blot the sun and lower spirits. Nobody was cheerful, and perhaps it was a hangover and maybe just the lack of sunshine.

I walked through the market. No one was talking. Nobody was in a hurry. Starbucks had no line. Cashiers were not swamped.

On New Year’s Day in the 70s, everything was closed. Driving through Glen Burnie with Dave Lowman, on our way home from buffing floors at a warehouse office my father owned, there were high winds blowing the traffic signals horizontal so you couldn’t see whether it was red or green, made the scene surreal.

I’d rather have the fog. Or a blizzard. Anything but just the wind by itself, especially after dark. I hate windy nights in winter. I don’t know why, but outside of a metro area, they scare me. But then, I’m also scared of metropolitan districts. For different reasons, of course.

But somehow, fog doesn’t bother me. One night I was in an 18-wheeler, dragging a 48 ft. Trailer full of paper towels and toilet paper through the Pocono Mountains. I was following another B.Green & Co. driver, but it was so foggy that I had to keep his rear clearance lights in sight or I’d have been in trouble. I didn’t know the area, which exits to take, nothing. And I couldn’t see worth a damn. If I’d lost him I’d have turned off my headlights. Just the marker lights would have been sufficient and they didn’t offer up the glare feedback that had led so many drivers before me to their doom.

But it was the worst fog I’ve ever seen, even to this day.

There’s a different kind of fog.

The kind you get in your brain when you mix mental illness and chronic somatic illnesses with too many fucking pills.

They keep me alive. Sometimes I wish they didn’t. Sometimes the fog facilitates dissociation or runaway thoughts. And dissociation always takes me through time to the source of my mental illness: severe child abuse including brutal beatings, torture, both mental and physical, rape and other sexual abuse.

It’s inescapable. It sucks. And the pain crushes me. The blue pills, Klonopin, are for my nerves. I take it twice a day, but sometimes anxiety hits me so hard that I can’t breathe. So I take one extra dose. That calms me but if I’m not in the fog, I soon will be.

I have to go. I’m fogged up and coffee didn’t help.