"True! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad?"

My ever-slackening grasp on lucidity has recently been paired with a mounting sense of paranoia. Everyone from store clerks to infants seem to be lurking just around the corner, vying to enact their most gruesome of justice. Who is it this week? Why none other than the management and maintenance staff of my very own apartment complex.

In a move intended, so far as I can grasp, to illuminate the piss stains on the carpet, they've installed a new light in the hallway. To anyone else, this would seem innocuous. What danger could come from a light? But this is no ordinary light. This is the Aston Martin of fluorescent glows. An oppressively bright wave of metallic rays, steadily sapping my spirit. With my apartment lights off and a full reclining of my trusty man throne, a single beam of light finds it way to the side of my face. Add a constant stream of visitors to my ethnically-ambiguous neighbor and you have an illuminated form of the Chines water torture, a la Poe. I swear, if I start hearing heartbeats, I'm bound to start pushing down the elderly...