"So, have you heard?" I ask.

"Hunter S. Thompson is dead. Yes," B answers.

B is a literary device invented by Andy Warhol, who has been dead for years. Now that Thompson is dead, I have only Vonnegut left for my living plagiarism: Once he kicks, I will be strictly a grave-robber.

"How do you feel about it? I'm remiss."

Remiss is a word that means something entirely different from what I think it means.

"I don't know," B answers. "I guess it's unfortunate. I wish he'd left a note, or if he did I wish they'd publish it. I'd just like to know more what this really means."

"Suicide notes are the last place you should look for meaning."

"I know."

Hunter S. Thompson ended his life by shooting himself in the head with a gun. It is one of the messiest and least considerate forms of suicide available to man. It is also one of the most convenient.

"Maybe," B suggests, "maybe he isn't really dead. Maybe he faked it. To increase his book sales, or something."

"You fool," I say. "You have no idea how the literary industry works. That would never work, and he would have known it. Nobody wants to know what a dead man has to say."

"But the Beatles, and all the rappers... Tupac is a bigger sell now than he ever was when he was alive."

"That's music," I explain, "that's a different industry. A whole different thing entirely. Music you listen to, you approach it, you know? The written word is different. Written words are all about getting inside the head of the author, seeing the world through his or her eyes. And no one wants to get inside the head of a dead man. They are afraid of what they might find."

"Like Hamlet?" B asks.

"Exactly."

Hamlet has a famous soliloquy about how fucking rape-attack scary it is to imagine what death and being dead must be like. William Shakespeare wrote it, and William Shakespeare is dead. He had to find out, one way or the other. Poor fuck.

"So no," I continue, "he didn't stage it for sales. If anything he staged it to hurt sales, but that makes no sense because he'd get less money, and that's something no man would ever want to happen."

"No man or woman," B insists. "You should speak with less gender bias."

"Fuck that," I say. "Women have ovaries. I do not presume to know the first thing about what they would or wouldn't want. They are an alien species, and probably hostile."

"True."

Science tells us that the ovary is a nightmare world in which human eggs reside until their presence is needed in the womb. From there, their fate is unknown.

"Hold on," I say. "I have a sore in my mouth. I need to take a pain-killer."

"A sore? What from?"

"I don't know. I bit my cheek, I think, and then it swelled and so I ended up biting it more, and now it's very bad and painful."

"Yes," B says, "I've had that happen. The mouth is very poorly designed is that sense."

"God really didn't think that one through," I say.

"But there is no God," B replies.

"I know. That is why He is the perfect scapegoat."

I go and take my pain-killers. I worry that I am taking too much, because I know that too much will cause liver damage, but fuck it. This sore in my mouth is clearly infected, and will probably kill me before my liver is ever an issue. And then I will have committed suicide, too: I will have bitten myself to death.

"I'm back," I say to B, when I get back.

"Oh, good," B says. "I waited."

"Thank you."

"You know what I was thinking while you were gone?" B asks. "It occurred to me, I don't actually own any of Thomspon's books."

"You're lucky," I say. "I own four or five."

"Lucky?"

"Yes," I say. "It's like I said before, they're terrifying. I picked up my copy of Fear and Loathing earlier, and it was like picking up a firecracker. Those words, you know, they convey the conscious essence. And what I can't decide, is, are they just records of consciousness, you know, or is that consciousness actually real, like a real preserved chunk of it, in chunky book form?"

"I don't follow," B says.

"I guess what I'm worried, I guess what I'm worried is are the books, you know, haunted in some sense?"

B laughs.

"Of course not, silly! Ghosts do not exist!"

B is correct. Ghosts don't exist at all.

"You're right," I say. "What the fuck am I thinking?"

"You're just a case. You can't help it. It's okay. We love that about you."

I'm not sure who the we is that B refers to. B is not even a person, after all, just a literary construct. Could there be more of these literary constructs? And do they really have emotions about me, one way or another?

"See!" B says, reading my mind. "You can't just hear a thing and let it go. Jesus! An author is dead, and this means what in your life? Nothing at all! Hop on the bus and go downtown, look at some pretty girls, and some not-so-pretty girls. You won't talk to any of them, I know, but at least you will have shown your face. At least you will be on record, you know?"

"You're right," I say. "Again, you're right."

"I know," B says. "I know."

I was having a cigarette at the time, and talking about how I should quit smoking and everything, when it happened. We came to this street we needed to cross, and D went ahead, trying to beat past this slow old lady in her big brown Chevy Monolith. But his timing was wrong, she went right into him, and she wasn't going all that fast but it was fast enough to pick him up, carry him by the belly on the hood of the car. The old lady panicked, swerved too late into another lane, ran head on into another car that was moving at speed, and poor D got pinched in half at the middle.

It was awful, and I forgot all about the cigarettes, even though I should have been thinking that there was something off about that, about worrying about what might kill me in forty years when there were things all around me just begging to kill me right now. But I didn't think that. I didn't think much of anything. There was only dumb awe.

I had a phone on me, and so I called for an ambulance straight away. I told them to hurry, because I couldn't imagine he'd be in any condition to be saved for very long. The woman on the other end told me that they were running on a fifty-two minute cycle, whatever that meant, and that the earliest an ambulance could arrive would be in fifteen minutes. I thought about telling her not to bother, in that case, because I couldn't imagine he'd last that long, but I figured what did I know? So I let them come.

I remember being worried that I might get billed for the ambulance, seeing as I was the one who called. I was also worried when I was talking on the phone that she might ask me to touch him, to render aid or check for vitals in some way that might involve touching him. But she didn't say anything about that. I was relieved, because he was all messy and he had these clown-colored innards hanging out everywhere, and I really didn't want to touch that, even if he was my friend and I wanted him to live.

Anyway, I tried talking to him at least, to keep him calm or something. He was still a little conscious it turned out, and although I couldn't understand what he was saying, it sounded like he was laughing and joking. Then the lady from the second car, the one that was going fast, came out and started laughing and joking around too. She clearly wasn't at fault, so what should she care? She was just trying to be a good sport and not get angry about the delay, is all.

After a while D stopped making any noises, and it was just me and the lady. I kept checking the time but the ambulance never came, and eventually I was pretty sure it didn't matter, and eventually I just woke up. New day.

I was relieved, a bit, but I haven't talked to D in years and years so it occurred to me that he might be dead anyway. But I didn't have to listen to that lady any more and I definitely didn't have to touch his body, so I guess I came out of the deal ahead. I guess.

Some time later, I went outside for a cigarette, as is my custom on these nobody days. There was a hawk out there, a pretty small one, standing on top of something dead and unidentifiable and just eating away. When it would yank away a bite, that thing would look a lot like what D turned out to be made of.

The hawk let me walk up and get pretty close without making a fuss or anything. I was mostly going through the motions, really: I mean, I know people who would find a hawk sitting there eating and everything to be pretty fascinating, to be an Event. But I was just imitating them, I really didn't see anything more special about it than the normal empty space I look at when I have my cigarettes. Eventually I got too close and it jumped away, behind some dead bushes where I could still see it, but not that well. I used that as an excuse to drop the act and turn around, and start looking for something else to try and care about.

Anyway, it's at a factory, and if I got that job I could call myself a factory worker. People would be like "what's your job" and I'd say "factory worker!" I would get big and hairy and eat sandwiches.

And drink coffee from a thermos.

We got to watch a video. People wore funny suits and moved things from place to place. It was very interesting.

Those funny suits, they're the real reason I want the job. My ideal job is any job I can go to and pretend all day that I'm an astronaut. You can do that in a funny suit. One hundred percent.

When I say "we," when I say we got to watch a video, I mean me and the thirty or so other interviewees. We got the real livestock treatment, took some goofy tests, and then were pulled out one by one for an actual real interview, which was actually really more of a pretend interview.

There was a lot of waiting. I was the second-to-last one to be pulled. The last one was this Mexican guy. I hope he doesn't steal my job.

But anyway, after all that waiting the interview was total crap. My interviewer was this super white woman, who obviously went to a college to study the godawful, psychology probably, and ended up in human resources because no one ever told her she could do better, and they were probably right. But it was clear that whatever she was, she didn't give a good god damn about factory work or factory working. All she was interested in was smiling and nodding pleasantly while she waited to go on break. Every once in a while she acted like she was taking a note, but I'm pretty sure she was just drawing pictures of dragons with dicks.

So anyway, once she was done asking me her scripted questions and behaving in a manner that resembled listening to my scripted answer, she led me to the front door. She was done, you know; the Mexican guy was someone else's problem. I tried to make just the right amount of small talk, you know, not so little that I seemed creepy, or not so much that I seemed creepy. I think she bought it, I mean, I really think I might have tricked her into thinking I wasn't creepy. Score one for me.

It occurred to me that I could probably get away with flirting a little. I mean, I am neither charming nor attractive, but after the string of supertrolls she had just been interviewing I must have seemed downright young and hot and holy. But I let the thought go. There was the nightmare thought that she might take it seriously, and once one of those trains starts going, you know, I have no way of stopping it. If things really went wrong, I could end up in bed with this nightmare human resources chick, her human resources pussy leaving wet human resources sauce all over my cock and tongue. And how could I refuse? She had me by the job. She owned me.

I let it go, and made my way home. It was cold and my ears felt like they were going to burst, so I bought a pack of cigarettes and a hamburger. Not at the same place. I knew a place in San Diego, once, where you could buy cigarettes and hamburgers, and other food as well, but the food was terrible and the cigarettes were stale, so it wasn't as good as it sounds.

In my defense, I didn't know he was schizophrenic at the time. Or at least, I'd kind of forgotten about it. I knew him in high school, and at the time he seemed sane enough. Not eminently sane, you know, I mean he was pretty out there, but in that acceptable sort of way where you wouldn't expect him to go all wrong.

The last few times I've seen him, on visits, he's seemed a little bit more out there. He was paranoid about God, and a lot of other things. Like he saw a train in a toy store, and admired it, and thought that God was angry with him for admiring the works of man. But I just assumed it was all the weed he was smoking, or something. I didn't know.

But anyway, now he calls me about eight times a day. I don't answer. This doesn't stop him.

I have a bad history with crazies. I seem to attract them, for whatever reason: Maybe just my willingness to put up with them. I'm not a big believer, I should mention, in sanity or insanity or any of that. If someone strikes me as peculiar, I assume it just means they are peculiar, and perhaps interesting because of it. I do not assume that they are fundamentally damaged, like they don't know any better than to call you eight times a day, or whatever. In my defense, this is usually correct, and I would have probably missed out on several interesting people had I not been so accepting. But still, it saddles me with those exceptions.

This fellow I knew in college used to come into my room when I was asleep, and ask if I wanted to go get something to eat. Granted, I was awake and hungry often enough that dropping by at all hours could be seen as pretty reasonable, but the fact that he'd find me asleep and still think that maybe I was hungry was a bit excessive.

When I finally told him he shouldn't wake me up to ask me that, and I should admit that it took me a while to do that, because I couldn't help but believe that eventually he'd just figure it out on his own. But when I finally told him he shouldn't do that, the next time he found me asleep he just went and waited in my living room for me to wake up. It creeped out my roommates, who were all foreigners and already confused enough with what was normal for me, anyway.

Fortunately after that he got involved in some incident that got him kicked out of school. No one ever knew what exactly had happened, but the prevailing rumor had a lot to do with guitars, nudity, and the beds of strangers. Whatever it was, it saved me some grief.

And now there is this high school fellow. I broke down and answered last night. I was on my way to buy cigarettes, a long and thankless walk, and I figured it would pass the time. It was late enough that it was free, the minutes were free, I mean. And obviously, my not-answering plan was doing little to deter him: It had been about three weeks since I'd answered, and he hadn't slowed down a bit.

We talked like it was just a normal phone call. He didn't make any comment about the fact that I hadn't answered his last hundred or so attempts to call. Of course not: If calling so often strikes him as no big thing, why should not answering so often seem any different?

He insistently recited several poems at me. Most were about this girl he used to work with, at a pizza place. He wrote one poem about her vagina: He called it "the root," for some reason. I don't know that he's ever been involved with it enough to write a poem about it, but I guess it's possible. Some pretty crazy people have gotten involved with my dick. I can't judge her.

God, it occurs to me there might be poems about my dick out there, somewhere in the universe. The thought would make me feel special, if it weren't implicit in the idea that they were written by total crazy motherfuckers who referred to it as "the branch."

In an earlier conversation he had mentioned that, for some reason he totally didn't understand, she had asked him to stop calling her. This didn't mean anything to me at the time. I should really know better by now, I mean, I should really be on the lookout for things like that. But it just flew right by me, it just seemed like some normal disagreement between two normal people, nothing that should have ever involved me enough to be read as a warning.

He told me how many cigarettes he had smoked that day: Thirty-two. I told him how many cigarettes I had smoked that day: Two. He told me that was pretty good. I told him that he was doing pretty good, too.

In his defense, he smokes lights.

When our conversation ended he told me he'd call me later, in a couple of weeks. For a moment, I got really hopeful, like maybe he really would wait a couple of weeks before he called again, like whatever fuse of his had blown was finally replaced. It had only been on back order: It had finally arrived.

But no. He has already tried to call twice this morning, and it's barely noon. We live in different time zones, so maybe you can blame the discrepancy on that.

But anyway, in one of these cabinets there's a family picture, three years ago, I think, but maybe more. I'm in there, back when my hair was ridiculously long, which meant it really matched well with all my other causes for ridicule. My brother's in there, but he's old enough now that he looks the same for years at a time. The crucial thing is what he's clutching: This girl, A, that he was living with at the time.

They lived together for years, I think, but they're all broken up now. She decided to move to Arizona or something, I don't know. But they've been broken up now for years too, or at least a year, or a year and change. However long, long enough that it's old news, that she's old news, one of those people where you really have to struggle to remember their name, and when you do you wonder if it was really worth the trouble. She's not a bad person, but she has nothing to do with anything, any more.

And yet, there she is. If there weren't enough reasons to fear dating already, there's another big one. The thought of my picture ending up forever in some strange family's curio cabinet, while I go off and live my own life and do the other thing... It's disturbing.

I mean, say for instance some kid in the family looks at it, and asks like "hey, who is this guy?" And some older member of the family has to step in, look at it, say "oh, that's this one guy," and then try to remember my name. God, they might actually speak my name aloud in this strange strange house. And after speaking it, they will feel a miscellaneous regret at having gone to the trouble, that he, being me, wasn't really worth it after all.

And God, that's the real hell of it. It's one thing to have some people who never really think of you: There are plenty of people in the world like that, I can deal with it. When people actively do think of you, however, and it doesn't really make a difference, that's just, hell, that's just bad. It doesn't matter if I don't know it's happening. Hell, that may even make it worse. It makes it more insidious, you know? A terrible blemish on my universal psychic vapor, and I don't even get to know about it.

This girl, A, though, I don't think she's the sort to worry about that kind of thing. She seems more like the "I want to make a decent living and enjoy my free time" type, a very American girl. Still, I don't wish her this kind of harm, this death by indifference, by obsolescence. And so I will think well of her.

Here's to you, A. You listened to good music... Hell, you're the one who got me into David Bowie, and Iggy Pop too, I think. That deserves gratitude, probably. And while I never found you personally attractive, you were dating my brother, and so I totally wanted to fuck you. And that is kind of like being loved.

So, of course, going to sleep I expect it to be a long sleep, one of those successful sleeps. Anywhere a firm, solid eight hours, to one of those mutant fourteen-hour sleep episodes that leaves you to wake up feeling like a foreigner. Like too long out of waking life to really cope with or comprehend it immediately. You stumble around nervous and naive, afraid each step or word or jam or jism, that it might be some terrible faux pas.

Today, though, it's a less-than-six-hour affair. I wake up to go piss about a gallon, and once that's through, I'm just, shit, stuck. Locked in awakeness, no chance in human heaven or monkey hell of returning to sleep.

I try for a while. Aim my mind at a zero in the infinite, breathe softly. And it seems to be working, I'm pretty much ditching the awake entirely when some pissant part of my consciousness, one of the last ones up and running, manages to squeeze in one vicious, nasty thought:

"What if I don't wake up?"

Followed by:

"I did eat a lot of pizza, after all."

It's the sort of thing that only makes sense when you're halfway to sleep, but Jesus, it makes a difference. Now, understand that, neurotic as I am, this isn't the sort of thing that I genuinely worry about, that genuinely worries me. But regardless, once you have a thought like that in your head, there's no sleep coming. It seeks out some mound of survival tissue in the brain, sets it off, regulates your chemistry all wrong and awful. Anyone who can sleep after a thought like that is a traitor to the species. A freak sinner even in a world of freakish sin.

The worst of it, of course, was the dream. I was in the middle of some terrific dream, watching some terrific Japanese sex movie. There were three girls engaged enthusiastically in wide varieties of mutual stimulation, while meanwhile they were being ejaculated upon ferociously from off camera from every side and from all four corners of the globe. Which is not special at all, in itself, but there just more to it than that: There was this indescribable undercurrent of just everything, this hidden meaning or infinitude of hidden meanings there, just beneath the surface. Watching this, for sure, with the right wits about you would reveal the most profound and sought-after secrets of philosophy, religion, politics, whatever. It was all there, the Fundament of the Human Motive was there, if you were willing to dig.

I had only understood a small part of it, barely caught a glimpse of it really before the dream ended, before I woke the fuck up. It is a loss that will haunt me, I'm certain, for many long, long years.

It's worth noting to note that I do dream often of pornography. Not sex, much, or cinema either, for that matter. Just pornography. I think it must have made a stronger impression on me, when I was first introduced to it, than real live sex ever did, when I was finally introduced to it. In fact, I'm sure it did. Try as I may, for the sake of the species, I can't help but find sex cumbersome and boring, too messy and greasy and ultimately awkward to call fun. It's like washing the dishes, and particularly it's like washing other people's dishes, like at a restaurant or when you're a guest in a home or something. You run into all this crap that you find confusing and distasteful, sauces you would never eat sticking in thick layers to plates, releasing dizzying nightmare odors when broken by the sponge.

You need a shower after sex, and anything you need a shower after is by definition gross. Otherwise you wouldn't leave a shower, you know? It's not like you hop in there because you're not caked with festering, reeking ex-fluids. You know?

If it can't be fried, it definitely isn't worth eating. This is one of those things I've really come to understand, and at my funeral, which will happen, nobody will stand up and say I didn't understand that.

I like to drink coffee with my fried eggs. There aren't a lot of foods that go well with coffee, in my experience. Definitely nothing too sweet, or sour. Salty is okay, but not so salty that you get thirsty, because coffee makes you a little thirsty anyway. That's part of what makes it so sexy. It's a drink, but it makes you thirsty, it's a liquid that you can feel leeching out the other liquids from your throat. It's a succubus. It is a demon drink.

Fried eggs go well with coffee, because they have this rich and peculiar non-flavor that can hardly interfere with anything. A little salty, mainly because I add so much salt to them, but not salty enough to cause problems.

Fried eggs, it should be mentioned, go well with cigarettes. Another one of the rare foods that does. It's sort of like the coffee situation, except really totally different, because sweet things actually go with cigarettes sometime, like chocolate shakes and stuff. It's kind of just a mixed bag what odd thing will go with cigarettes. Fried eggs, chocolate shakes. Pizza, if it's a good aggressive pizza, not some floppy vegan shit. Some of the more savory curry dishes, too.

Rum goes with cigarettes, as do most hard liquors, but rum stands out as the best. Beer does not go with cigarettes in terms of flavor, regardless of how often it goes with in terms of circumstance. Really it's one of the big big tragedies of this world that beer does not go with cigarettes. But it doesn't. It really doesn't.

Meat goes with beer. Bratwurst is the king of all meats that go with beer, of course. That's something everybody know and it's good that they do, or else there lives might be less. Pasta, so long as your sauce isn't too rich or too tangy, pasta can go surprisingly well with beer. Seafood goes well with a thinner, sharper beer, Corona, for instance. A fuller beer or an ale or a lager does not.

I don't like seafood, so I don't drink Corona. I don't know what lamb tastes like, but I imagine it would go well with Sapporo. I imagine. And I don't like red wine at all, and I can't remember how white wine tastes. There's a fucking laundry list of things they hypothetically go with, but it's a list of things that are not my fucking problem.

And it occurs to me to wonder what might happen if the government, that thing, were to realize that I really am more dangerous alive than dead.

Stare! At! Mirror!

And at the heart of another dismal morning on the way to another hopeless afternoon: Where the hell is all of this heading to? Anywhere at all? Can this really just be it, the end result of everything leading up to it, every choice and every call and step outside and every shoulder cried on and every sentence writ and every drug and every dollar, and every handshake and every thoughtful answer and every straining muscle and every headache pounded, and every raised voice, and every raised eyebrow, and every bill split and every shot taken and every note left and every story titled and every pussy fucked, and every pussy not fucked. Does it really amount to this, from meal to cigarette to meal and sleep, then back again?

Well shit, why not? When was I ever promised better than this, and who's to say this isn't the good life, anyway? Hell, who said any of it was ever leading anywhere? Not me, really. I don't recall thinking even once for a second that the future was being shaped, not in any meaningful or definite way, at least.

The taste of cunt goes well with the taste of cock. I love to think of myself, in fact, as some terrible waypoint or proxy in some other child's parentage, but I don't think it really works that way. Biologically, I mean, I just don't think it could ever really happen.

It was not a nightmare.

And so this is how this the two thousand and fifth year of our common era begins. Some of us obsessed with the terror on the screen, "bodies swelling in the baking sun" and other white poetry; the rest, just fattening themselves on and on like always, nothing ever happened. Nothing ever does.

I'm fall into the first category: I can't get enough of those screaming waves and crashing foreigners. I feel guilty whenever I'm not staring slack-jawed at piles of bodies, tragedy television, enormous forces of nature and misleading human drama.

Would they show American children, I wonder? Being piled into mass graves, looking like dolls, plump with drowning and stiff with rigor mortis. I want to see American babies in the mouths of bulldozers. It is only fair.

If our bodies are too good for the national news, then who does deserve them?

There's one phrase that keeps being repeated, by the tourists, at least: "I just kept thinking, this can't be how it ends." And they were right; but if statistics tell us anything, a number of those who died were probably thinking exactly the same thing.

That's a heartbreaker: To end, to die, to totally and completely die while you're centered on something so arrogant and small. "How it ends," like it's a fucking book or something; "this can't be," like your book is too good for that, somehow. Too much like deus ex machina. It probably doesn't make a difference, but still, it's fucking tragic. Maybe not because of how arrogant and small it is. Maybe more because it shows how arrogant and small the rest is.

Anyway, if I've ever heard a good reason for religion, that's it. If it means my final thoughts are going to a be a bit more, oh, dignified than whimpering disbelief, well hell, that's a pretty heavy comfort. People who can really believe in something enough to accept death, or even just enough to feel a real righteous fear of death, are damn lucky.

I'm not one of them.

Whatever I may try, I'm still pretty sure that my last act of consciousness will be so petty. Maybe not "this can't be how it ends," specifically. Probably more like "holy moly" or "oh no." Something that rhymes, for sure.

But hell, fuck disaster. It isn't my disaster, after all. My disasters are small, and generally involve the supermarket. I have nothing to do with this.

Today at the supermarket, I couldn't find any hot sauce. I really just wanted cigarettes but the gas station was closed so I had to go to the supermarket, and I get too embarrassed to buy just cigarettes at the supermarket. I mean, it makes it look like I smoke cigarettes and that's it, like I'm this does-nothing-but-smoke-cigarettes monster, so I always have to get something else, so that the cashier will know that there really is more to me than that.

And there really is more to me than that, barely.

But today the only thing I could think of that I needed was hot sauce, except I couldn't find any hot sauce. I looked in pretty much every aisle, even the baby care aisle, although not there for long because I got worried people might think I actually had a baby and then I'd have to act really responsible, or else people might think I was a bad parent. But anyway, eventually I found some hot sauce, on one shelf in the condiments section where I'd already checked twice. But it was all like, Louisiana hot sauce, except for the Tabasco sauce which is only like Tabasco sauce. Both have their place, but what I really needed was more of a Mexican hot sauce, Cholula or something. And there wasn't a single bottle of that.

I considered briefly just getting some salsa, which would fill a number of the same roles, but all they had was the crappy name brand kinds. The stuff that tastes like marinara sauce with battery acid thrown in to give it a kick, you know? So I just said fuck it and bought a soda, which my receipt ended up calling a "pop" because I live in a goofy motherfucking state like that.

I still felt conspicuous: I mean, I'd been in the store for what, half an hour, and here I was buying only pop and cigarettes? Clearly I was up to no good! When I handed over my keychain, for the scanny beepy makes the price go down part, the cashier held it up accusingly.

"What's this?" she said.

What it was, was the white ring from the cap of a bottle of Robitussin. It had made its way there during my days as a syrup fiend, and I hadn't so much as thought about its presence for years, until she pointed it out.

"Um," I said. "I don't know."

Had I played it off better, she may have thought nothing of it, but she'd caught me by surprise and left me with a totally unmasked, untethered look of guilt upon my face. She knew, she knew it all: I was nothing more than a cough syrup junkie, a cigarette-smoking pop-drinking cough syrup junkie. Who couldn't even find the hot sauce. Jesus, she must have been disgusted. And rightfully so: What are these things if not God's honest truth?

So hell, whatever it is I think when at last I die, that cashier will be a part of it. I know it, and I know it with certainty. I am, surely, doomed.

Furthermore, you're nauseated, but you have some eggs you want to make sure you use before they go bad. You or one two chapters away from finishing a book you've already read, and so you already know that they're the best chapters, and so you're intimidated. You haven't had a drink for ninenty-nine days and your gut feeling is that the third digit will be the one that breaks you.

Your mother is either going to die any day now or live for another twenty years, making it either critically important or entirely unnecessary to be awake and spend time with her. In either case you are pathetically neurotic for even thinking such a thing.

You have a job application you've been putting off filling out for too many days now and it's becoming a habit. It's a good job plenty of money and if you get it you'll be able to finance your movie come summer, but won't be able to get time off to shoot it until winter. By that time your cast and crew will be lost in Canadian graduate schools and shooting rice-paddie documentaries in China, only to be disappeared at some censor's whim.

In addition God has been knocking on your door for months now, even though you are interested in neither religion nor doors, and the ensuing corresponding feeling of mortality is starting to give you a genuine headache.

You have a deck of cards, but you already know how to win every game that you know how to play. You think you're missing a seven, anyway.

Absently you worry about people who don't use the term "sour grapes" properly, and more absently you worry that the wrong one is you. You believe it is only supposed to refer to times when someone insults something they've failed to attain, be it victory or a wealthy lifestyle or grapes or whatever, but other people use it in reference to any complaining or bad attitude held in failure, as a general thing. What worries you is, they might be right to use it like this, and so you are afraid to correct them.

And let's say you turn on the television, but all you can find are programs about people who make you angry, which cut to commercials about people who make you even angrier. So you turn it off and you are angry at it and you are angry at yourself, for being like this.

You can't remember which day of the year is your favorite. It's possible that they're all pretty much the same. For a while it looked like you could count on getting laid for Halloween, but then this year you couldn't, and you've grown more and more lonesome for the past ever since.

Meanwhile there is evidence of light outside. This may awaken the supermarket but you don't trust it enough to make a trip. Meanwhile the closer it gets toward morning the more and more it sinks in that you are tired, that you do want sleep after all. But only after you at least eat eggs.

If you went to the supermarket first you could get bacon, sausage, potatoes, and other things. Then you could make an omelette and put all those things in it, and cheese. You're getting better at cooking eggs and just maybe you could pull off an omelette. But shit, do you even have a frying pan?

Chocolate milk and omelettes remind you of college. Everything reminds you of college because before you went to college you didn't do anything, and now that you're done with college you've done nothing since. When you were in college you didn't really do anything either but you saw so much less of the do-something world that you didn't notice it as much.

Finally, you really want to shave, but your acne is so bad that you'd end up a bloody mess if you tried. Which may be a good thing; on the other hand, you'll be showing up at the supermarket soon, and don't want to give them any more excuses to refuse you service. No more than you already have.

So given this, at six in the morning now, hypothetically speaking, just what the hell do you do?

So I've started smoking again. I've come to the decision that, all things considered, I'd rather have bad habits than no habits at all. Plus it gives me an excuse to go outside.

Outside is a good place to go because it is so big. It stretches on and on forever and to the infinite, or close enough to it that it suits my purposes. Inside, however, is just a box. And no box is ever big enough.

In addition, cigarettes help me manage my weight, which is important. Because I am Categorically Backwards Man, smoking actually seems to help me gain and retain weight... Which is important, at my end of the spectrum.

I am six-foot-two, six-foot-three if I'm happy to see you, and weigh something short of one hundred and fifty pounds. This is up from a recent low of one forty, when I was trying to live on my own like a real human being. I failed at finding a job and ran out of money and failed at deserving food stamps, is why. Which goes some distance toward explaining why I find myself living in my mother's basement, today.

She, for her part, is convinced that I have an eating disorder. She is an enormous fatwoman, which only highlights the discrepancy, and gives probable cause. It bothers me, but not enough to explain the truth of the matter. She's really better off thinking it's an eating disorder. I don't want her to know that I really failed at being a human being that bad.

So anyway, now she's set her husband on hunger watch, or something. He insistently invites me to lunch, reminds me that there is plenty of this or that in the fridge, offers me pie, and so on. It's really kind of charming. It's really kind of cute.

I think that ultimately my mother just wants for there to be something going on in my life, even if it just a fucking eating disorder. And I appreciate the sentiment, I do. But at some point, not too far in the future, it's going to get stale. Sitcom stale. Running-gag stale, you know?

So anyway, cigarettes help me keep my weight up, help me keep my appetite. I don't understand why, exactly, except for knowing that they should do the opposite, and that I fail at everything else so why not this, too?

But god, all this talk of eating disorders and the other thing has made me hungry. The word "appetite" looks damn tasty in this font. I am, pray rain, still stuck in this basement for some time.

Early morning: I must wait for my mother and her husband to go to work, where they have jobs which I do not, before I can go upstairs, where the food is. They are both puffy-faced people by nature, understand, and when you combine their native puffiness with the puffiness of morning, you arrive at some sort of terrible falling-face monster, which frightens me to my core.

My face is like that, too. Monstrous with morning. Except it's not just with morning. It's pretty much just in general.

But anyway, once they leave, I will eat their food, watch their television, shit in their toilets, so on... Scour their newspaper in hopeless, perfunctory search for the words "help wanted" and "no experience necessary," under the vague and hollow pretense that I could ever be of any use to anyone...

I want to go back to college. I miss the sense of purpose, and the actual lack of purpose. It was a much more compelling way to live a life, you know? "Today is okay, and tomorrow will be even better, because there is such a thing as momentum, and I have it, and I will continue..."

Ghostly jumbo. If I accomplished anything in college, it was only in creating enough of illusions about myself that I could ultimately let some people down, and even that unlikely. Honestly, I think everyone who could have cared one way or another was on the same page I was: Understanding that this way of life was all a hoax, but willing to bear it out just to see what it might ultimately bring.

And what it brings has been unsurprising. What it brings is nothing at all, which, being what every other endeavor in human history, great and small, has brought, is exactly as expected, whatever may be hoped.

And whatever may be hoped is anything at all, anything at all. No more specific than that: I don't know words for anything more specific than that. Anything at all.

But I want to go back to college. Because it was an okay fake. Because it really looked and sounded like something that actually mattered. Because their fake people were better than real fake people, and sometimes you got to have sex with them, too.

As far as I can tell, life is just one big, long dick joke, anyway. So what the fuck? Why not that or anything?

If I go to the supermarket, there will be a pretty girl and she will check my identification. If I go to the gas station, there will just be some boom-mouthed lardy mammal, and she won't check anything.

I'm not sure what that says for my decision.

When I call her pretty, when I call the supermarket girl pretty, I'm speaking out of mouth, a bit. I'm talking more the hypothetical pretty, the "I suppose this is what pretty looks like" pretty, not anything actual or subjective, you know? On a personal level I find the girls at the supermarket unremarkable. Honestly, it's been a long, long time since I've found anybody personally pretty.

There's this girl who rides the bus here, who I see every now and then, on the bus, you know? She's dark-skinned and summarily dressed and humorless and dazed, Indian or Iraqi or something. For a while, I thought that I thought she was pretty, but then later I found out that I really just thought she was quaint.

None of which answers the supermarket dilemma. To be quite honest, I'm not sure at all what drives this sudden, weak impulse. Boredom? Loneliness? Nicotine craze? I haven't smoked a cigarette for two days now, or something like that. Maybe that's what I can blame. Maybe there really is an explanation for all of this.

It's fair to blame loneliness, as well. I should come clean about certain points of context, as they may be somehow important. Point one: I live in my mom's basement. Point two? I don't think there is one. If any way of life could be summed up by a single phrase, I think "I live in my mom's basement" is that life. It's one of the few perfect things in this world.

That phrase, I mean.

So anyway, it's probably fair to blame loneliness, and loneliness is a categorical attribute of all mom's-basement livers, in the same sense that celerity is an attribute of horses. The same can probably be said for boredom, really. Oh well.

And I still haven't learned, even though I really should have learned by now, that drinking coffee within thirty minutes of drinking soda is just a terrible, terrible idea. They go at war within you, is what I mean. The hot; the cold. The bitter; the sweet. The carbonated; the sacred-smooth. It would take a wash of alcohol to bring peace between these two great nations, rum, preferably, but sadly I have none. Perhaps I should pick up a brownbagger at the supermarket, and disappear off into the maze of baseball fields to drink in solitary violence.

With my luck, of course, the Families of this mad nation will have chosen to come out and play baseball, despite the disagreeable season. Or worse, softball: It would be all too fitting to have my meteoric rise to drunkeness thwarted by white fleshy mutants throwing underhand.

Oh well, lose that idea. I've been sober more than two months now, which means my next drunk will be a good drunk, a real sky drunk, and that's not a thing to be wasted.

So then, what? Is any of it worth the trouble? Should I just give in, roll my corpse downstairs, and sleep off another day in this red wasteland? Is that really what it comes down to: Have my great life choices been reduced to "go to the supermarket" and nothing? And god, where do the pig monsters at the gas station fit into all this? What if they have emotions too?

It should be noted that none of this really gets to me, which probably goes a long way toward explaining how I've found myself in this situation. My soul is made of nails, and I was probably a pirate or an asswhore in a previous life. The thought that anyone as ugly as a gas station clerk might feel certain ways about things does disturb me, at core, but the rest of it strikes me as more or less inconsequential: They are all existential questions, and considering where I fall on the vast spectrum between "exists" and "otherwise," it's just hard to really relate to them.

But anyway, I've pretty much finished my coffee, and something in the air has pretty much lit a charge, somewhere. Maybe I'll grab a bus, go downtown. Or to the university: Show those fresh-faced lingerers what a Bachelor's degree really means.

I'll give you a hint: It sure doesn't mean you've got a big dick!

The wind doesn't thwart your lighter so much. Your lighter has a picture of an American Flag on it. You know?

So anyway, sometimes when I'm out there at night, or on the way out there at night, there are these neighborhood kids who have a laser pointer, and when I'm out and about they like to hide in the bushes, point it at me, and laugh. I don't know if it's just me, I mean I can't imagine they sit out and lay in wait for me especially, but they really enjoy doing it to me.

I don't pretend to understand it. I haven't gotten a good look at them, but I think they're high school age kids, which just makes it harder to follow. Younger kids I could understand, there isn't any logic to what entertains the younger kids, but high schoolers I can't follow. I mean, when I was in high school, you couldn't have paid me to sit in the cold, wait for some jackass to show up, and shoot a light at them. I was too busy trying to get sex or love or a good flash of underpants, and a whole lot of other things I wasn't sure about entirely. That whole clumsy mess that gives making the sweetest girl smile and fingering the suicidal chick a fundamental sameness: That carefree hell.

I was terrible at it, I should mention. Making smiles and fingering chicks, both. I was ugly and awkward, as I am still but less, but that wasn't the killer: What killed was, once you looked past my being ugly and awkward, things only got worse, as they still do and more.

But still I tried, is the point. These laser children aren't, and that bothers me. I think I'm jealous, really. They get to care about other things, and I didn't. No fair, you know?

No fair is a laugh and a half.

So anyway, as best as I can imagine, these kids are just doing it for the attention. I mean, they're old enough that they have to want something, and attention's the only thing I can think of that they get out of it. Of course, they hide in the bushes while they shoot lasers at me, so hell, they can't want too much attention.

Maybe they have some weird pathos, some attention complex. They desire attention, as is the human condition, but still some thing, some weird sick thing in their past, an unclefuck or whatever, some thing just cripples them with fear. Crippling fear of attention. But they desire, still, and so they seek their attention vicariously. Vicarious through a dot.

I makes fucking sense, I swear it.

But anyway, I understand it completely. I feel the same way. I mean, obviously when people are hiding in the bushes and laughing at you, you can hardly call yourself an equal participant in whatever's happening, especially when you don't understand it a bit. But whatever's happening, you know, I'm still getting the attention, I'm still getting to a star, you know? I don't know what to do with it but it's still enjoyable, it's still exciting and a blast, you know? That pathos-laden kids are out there, using me for pleasures I will never understand...

If that isn't the American Dream, then shit, what is?

But I've quit smoking now. These weird fuck kids are out of my life, and worse I am out of theirs. But for the best, really. Honestly I think I was starting to turn into a primadonna, and I don't want to be like that, really. I just want to be normal and like everyone else.

You know, superevil?