What the hell is real?  And will it hurt me?  The answers, respectively, are nothing, and yes. 

What does it matter what's real, anyway?  I mean, it's either nothing, or everything.  Or nothing and everything.  It is a superfluous question.  Doesn't matter.  And hurt?—that's a subjective thing.  If I'm addicted to pain killers and suddenly stop taking them, then just being awake hurts.  If I have attained a modest enlightenment around the issue of pain and suffering, then my injuries, though they hurt, serve to expand me rather than diminish me.  In the latter case, hurt is a desirable thing.  In fact, at some point beyond the fear and panic it might otherwise cause, hurt becomes a gratifying gift, the mark of an attenuated sensitivity to conscious life.

These are practical questions for me.  I have not gotten beyond the fear and panic yet to whatever it is that we call 'real'—the true story of me playing itself out in my absence.  I'm missing it.  Though I am in this story, I am not present to it.  I get glimpses of the story of me when people, usually strangers and usually in response to my writing, make observations about me.  This is like catching a distorted reflection of myself in the chrome of a passing car.  To say the least, this is a rather eclectic and remote way of appreciating the art of my own story.  But it proves I have not vanished.  Not yet. 

I am addicted to unconsciousness.  No drugs for me, thank you.  They are not strong enough.  They just leave me groggy, but still connected.  What I want is to completely disconnect; what do the shrinks call it?—dissociate.  That's what does it for me.  In the tacky personal exposes, and in the Readers' Digest versions of life, dissociation is described as being pushed out of your own body and floating ghostlike above it, beside it—somewhere nearby—and watching like a spectator while this horror or that is being perpetrated upon you.  I described it once rather aptly (if I do say so myself) in this snippet:

...and that's just it, disconnecting hurts.  It's the only drawback.  Otherwise I could visit and observe life comfortably, like an oceanographer in a glass sphere, visiting a shipwreck.  Warm, dry, ...breathing.  As a tool for oceanography, this works.  As a tool for living life, it is an unweildy contraption requiring most of my effort just to cart it around.  It obstructs every touch and whisper, and it imposes upon anyone who would communicate with me the need make cryptic gestures in an impromptu sign language.  I am the boy in the bubble.  The only problem is that there is no goddamn reason for the bubble.  It's worthless.  It's useless.  And it is now causing more pain than it ever protected me from, once upon a time.  In panic now I cling to it, remembering how it saved me once.  But the quality of disconnecting, which was salvific decades ago, is rapidly becoming fatal today.

I can't wait to see what happens next.