It's probably an understatement to say I have issues. I have issues upon issues, growing, festering, metastasizing—a Hydra head of serpentine issues that, try as I might to stamp them out, keep rearing their ugly heads. One might argue that life is as complicated as we choose to make it, but I believe this view of things is too simplistic. Being “the master of my fate, the captain of my soul” sounds good on paper, Walt, but I’m too much of a Calvinist and part-time Darwinian to believe it. So I take only partial blame for the aforementioned “issues.” There are some things in life that you just can’t resolve. Either way you turn is a dark, lonely street. Resolution is nowhere in sight, and resignation is the only game in town. I can only withdraw into myself, the dilapidating fortress of solitude—not the refuge of a man of steel, but a last holdout against the winds of emotional pain and “what could have been.”