FOR THOSE WHO CAME IN LATE:

My entire life has been a cheap lie, and I have not had any real meaningful interaction with any human beings outside of the ones who swipe my credit card or put a toothbrush in a plastic bag for me in four miserable, soul-sucking heart-in-a-vice-grip weeks.

Also: My lips have been chapped for literally two weeks.

Also: There is too much snow on the ground for me to drive through the backroads and Heal Myself With Speed And Music.

Also: I gave myself a really bad haircut and I love it.

Also: The last person who slept with me, who was otherwise a very nice lady but who was nonetheless not well known to me, tossed me in the great big trashcan called SEEYA LATER IDIOT and the joke’s on her because I have been living in that trashcan for three years.

. . . and now I am spiraling into a lovelorn vortex where I can hear The Hyena weeping in the deep—and I, flailing in the great darkness, weep along with Him.

I should have my own Saturday morning cartoon! Or be hung in a city square. I don’t give a damn anymore to be honest. In five days I will have been here for twenty-eight capital-“D” Disappointing years and the Lego brick structure of my life is made of regret for knowing people, regret for letting anyone in, regret for ever thinking any of this crude matter was worth feeling anything about. The world breaks everyone, doesn’t it? It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. Where lies the final harbor? Don’t ask me, brother. I’m ready to unmoor one last time, I’ll tell you that much. It doesn’t matter what I write or what I say to people. They’re always going to think I’m crazy or unknowable. They’re always going to offer me cheap bloodless sentiments that could be got off a Hallmark card— no action, no love, just words made of milimeter-thick cardboard and an endless screaming eternity of nothing on the other side. This fiberglass Disney castle of a world and all the selfish pricks pretending to feel anything at all. You people, I swear. That I tinker with this screed dozens of times every day of my life, that I lay myself out on a slab ripe for ridicule and inherited shame—that the eyes and secret thoughts of others do not hinder my miserable whining work in the slightest—well, there’s your proof that I have lost my fear of harm from above, and await the gallows or the ghostly harbor! I tried to play the game fair and square but the game is rigged and I lost it all over and over again and now I am trapped in the suffocating darkness of this thing and there’s no getting out and I am alone while love blooms on the other side of me and I have not got one single god damn worthwhile venture to show for any of the many thousands of days I have blinked and breathed and tried to befriend the world. Death by misadventure! A tired old body and a rotten old mind that nobody wants anything to do with anymore. A little skeleton who called the thing what it was and was crushed into bonemeal just the same.