Update

During times like this if for whatever reason, you can't get at the root of the problem, it's best to just to keep your mind off of it and keep busy.

During work days this is easy. I just pick the hardest, most physically demanding part of the day's jobs and just go with that. You tire yourself, in the moment and for after. I'm probably shaving weeks off of my life and reducing the good years I'm getting out of my back, but for now it suits me and gives me what I need. If there's only tedious small stuff to do it's a little problematic, and the mind inevitably starts to go to places I'd rather not have it go. But the real trouble starts when I get home, the second I walk through the front door, from a still glaringly sunlit street straight into a dark and cool corridor.
It should feel nice, but instead it feels like a death-knell, like I'm slipping, as if there's horror ahead, and I have no way back to the real world except right through the heart of it, and I can't get away from it and I'm afraid it's going to swallow me whole.
From being busy, being in the noise and a part of the movements of others, into a quiet time in complete immobility that's open for whatever I would want to do. The possibilities are endless.
Problem is though, besides my rampant introversion and the white-hot label of Aspergers, there's nothing I want to do. I look at my days, and the joy has leeched out of all of it. Books aren't interesting anymore, games are childish, trite and vacant, movies are just the flavour of the month and they won't last beyond their run-time, credits roll and I'm back in hell. I don't want to eat, I don't even want to drink. Alcohol, I mean. It's not just the loss of self-control, sometimes so comforting, so blissful. It's just... it's gone stale.

It's all gone stale.

As usual, I don't want to go anywhere. I don't know though, maybe I'd like to see the ocean, or just the sea. Come out on top of a dune and just see it ahead of me, salt on the wind, surf in my ears. It's nostalgia, maybe. Maybe it's the power of the thing itself, an unending strength and a complete indifference.

But mostly I just want to sit here and churn out scenarios, pleasing and enabling. But the rhythm of my thoughts turns into endless self-denial, and then comes the darkness. The teeth of despair grind and masticate, and all they needed was just the tiniest reminder. A pebble bouncing into the gorge of my loneliness, and soon the gentle click-clacking of momentary comfort turns into the hellish din of multitudinous needs and wants.
So, besides even taking into account what it does for my sanity on the whole, these days there's no lasting comfort to be had from this type of stuff.

Imagination is good and well, and it can help, but this particular brand of it, insidious as it is, constantly there, constantly handing you the perfect lifeline, it's all you want and it's so enticingly easy, so perfectly tailored for you, flaws and all, the flaws that heighten, the flaws that make it sweet: this will ruin you. If it hasn't already.

Is this indeed not already besides the point? Why argue, why reason; It's not as if I exert control over it. I rage in denial, but scant seconds later, there are the eyes that stare and the voice that beckons, and I can't hold off and it's impossible not to give in, to the trap of perfect comfort, to this infinitely gentle assuaging of need.

Your mind is your best friend, or it should be, and what it suggests, what it gives you, is your reality. Deny that too long and you'll go crazy. To argue with it, deny what it suggests, over and over again, is tantamount to physical self-harm. But it is actually worse, because your mind is your foundation, and if that starts to crumble, there's not a wall that'll be left standing.
The mind too aware of itself becomes insane. It is, inevitably, an entity at war with itself. It shakes itself apart, and all that can stop it is a joining, a unification of thought and action. Or, you just blot it out, however you can.

So you need stop thinking about it, and you try. You keep your mind off it, and you keep busy.

So here I sit in silence, and here I sit alone. Writing about it instead.

Shit.