stream of consciousness

I feel like writing but I am not sure what to write.
I am sick :\ and so foggy and unfocused.
I have about three Patrick Wolf songs stuck in my head at the same time.
I was reading Joyce's Ulysses but I found out that I can't really take Ulysses while being sick so I tried some Jane Austen and then a book on eclectic spirituality and finally settled on The Blue Castle for around the eleventh time.

I feel in a bit of a rut with my short story collection
It's going to be a collection of odd slightly surreal stories tied together by a common theme of things that are lost, broken, or forgotten.
These past few months I have spent a lot of time in the land of the lost, in the dark, in the empty place below the heart
So I thought it would help to catalogue the experience in words, the medium I'm most familiar with
To make a map of the nightmare so I could climb out of it.
Like Yeats: "Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."
Nightmare cartography would be building a new ladder to climb.

However, the feeling of being empty, at the end of a rope
doesn't lend itself well to story-writing... There's only so much I can do with it.
The worst feeling lacks texture and plot. The scariest feeling is entropy.

Maybe the solution is to write each rung of the ladder
Not just the state where there is no ladder.
It's very difficult
to celebrate the light and honor the dark.
But I think that is the way to go.

If I lived in a world where anything is possible
Where all your decisions are the right decisions
And only you pay for them
What would I do?
Drop out of school and fly to London
Ride the night train up the coast
Call for ghosts on the moors
Find an abandoned cottage to live in
While writing the stories of my heart and learning to play the violin
And scrabbling together artwork from lost scraps?

But there's the matter of responsibility
of needing a degree to get an interesting enough job
to cover the rent and the groceries
So I can enter the world
and my parents can retire and buy a BMW and travel the country.
I've been thinking a lot about economics and whatnot
And what Thoreau said that "most men lead lives of quiet discontent."
I decided long ago never to be one of them
But have I not been quietly discontented for a while now?

Perhaps this is all just adolescent whining
which I should be too old for because I don't have much longer to be a teenager, comparitively.
But I am puzzling over how to make a fantastic life.
I hate that it seems so difficult and complicated.
Maybe I am overlooking something.