Somewhere around 9am I awoke lying in a fog again at the bottom of blackness. Momentarily disoriented, I had to look back up to see what had happened. There he sat at my desk, in disgust, dismantling my code as if it were a virus. "It's taken you 40 hours to do a 3-hour job, no - since it is you - a 6-hour job ... and it's STILL not done."

That was the point where slippage merged into this fall. I will not argue that it has indeed been a failure on my part. Mud and fog have blocked every neural path in my brain so that there is no way I can chug out even one decent block of code.

After physically removing myself from the facility, my eyes gutted themselves for about five hours straight as I worked to sort out this latest meltdown.

Looking back, the tension at work had been building for over a week and was inevitable but I did not see it. The blindness had overtaken me again to the point where I could not recall the last time I'd eaten or slept a whole night. Except for a half-quart of expired milk, a tablespoon of butter, and something resembling potatoes, there is nothing in the fridge and the cats have one can of food left as well. I can't imagine how I am going to drag myself out to not only buy but eat something.

Forty-three days after the divorce and I've got tanks shooting from places I did not know existed. This divorce I can deal with but these things are ruthless.