Not tonight...

...I have a headache.

And my eyes are having trouble focusing. They hurt like hell, too. I suspect my blood pressure is in a place it ought not be, and there's little I would appreciate as much as a month or two of uninterrupted sleep.

I ascribe all of this to stress, which is present in far greater quantities than I can handle. I'm feeling much as George Armstrong Custer must have felt, with people on all sides ready and eager to do him in.

No details. Too depressing, and more than I want to face at the moment. And for once I won't toss blame around; there are plenty of people who have done their bit to screw up my life, but I've been something of a co-conspirator more often than I'd like to admit..

One thing that bugs the daylights out of me: my parents, particularly the paternal one, never taught me that brand of self-assurance, bordering on arrogance, with which one can face down adversity. No, my father simply walked away from whatever bugged him; I learned by example, so to speak.

But he had my mother backing him up. She labored at her job, day in and day out, for most of my childhood while he sulked at home when a job took what he considered a wrong turn. She tried to make the future sound good, though I doubt he believed her.

We had one conversation many years ago that now seems a defining moment. An employer asked me to do a job I wasn't sure about and I asked him for advice. He said, "if it was me, I'd quit."

I didn't. Not then, anyway.

So what I'm left with, absent any kind of support mechanism, is simply to grovel, ask for favors and, if necessary, beg. I have answers for a couple of the problems I've run smack up against; but if they meet resistance, I'll have to be pretty abject about the whole damn thing.

Damned if I'm not ready to hang up the whole mess, Jim.

I hate this. Hate it.

I simply can't project the kind of force that makes people do what I need and agree with me about what should be done.

I have tried to avoid acting in the ways that made my father, in many respects, a pretty unpleasant and unhappy person.

Some of them, though, must be genetic.

I hate that, too.