Ecce homo

It snowed again last night, heavy, petulant teardrops from a black and starless night onto the falsities of this entombed curtain of an existence. It snowed - as I mused then - post-ironically, belatedly, when snowfall could feel romantic and yet so untoward and banal. "Black night/White snow/Wind, wind!/A man could hardly keep his feet.

Freedom! Freedom!
Hey, hey, without a cross!
Tra-ta-taaaaa."

I suffer from frequent nightmares. If they don't come every night, it's at least five times a week. I can't describe what it means to see harrowing visions for just under half of my existence, conscious or no. My dreaming mind is a dick; it knows just what buttons to push, and does so. All night. [Every/Almost every] night. Consider that.

Once I woke up, 3 am, the dark night when the empty bed feels like a frozen grave, and heard a girl crying. Must I admit to hallucination? Or just that I'm a coward? If I were the man I wanted to be I would have saved Katie Genovese. Maybe I'm another apartment whisperer. Sometimes I feel like it must be so.

Sometimes it feels like that nexus of bundled contingencies that is, in Agnes Heller's reckoning, the postmodern individual, points in too many concretized, yet transient, options: a, b, c, ... aleph-one. Is there a tightrope? If there is, it swings. My foot treads as heavy and misguided as the snow falls.