What an absolute nightmare, man. I will apologize here on my own website for expressing that sentiment so often, but then I guess that’s what y’all (whoever y’all are) have come to expect. If there were a running theme to all of this trash, or a thesis or whatever you want to call it, it would be this: “Please, for god’s sake, I can’t take this anymore.” Hah!

I am orbiting a black hole, and I feel as though I could be blown off the surface of this planet and thrown into that black hole once and for all at any given moment. I told McCune today, you know, that the two of us are two insane losers . . . real maniacs! Junkyard dogs staring down the barrel of oblivion and all that. I said to him: What are creeps like us supposed to anymore? Where’s the gettin place, man? Where does a fool go when all the sand has finally settled at the bottom of the glass?

I have no great purpose, if anyone can be said to have a great purpose. This is a torturous feeling. I can’t get my hands on the thing and I was a god damn lunatic to think I ever could. I was always destined for the landfill called eternity just the same as any of us screaming bags of garbage . . . but I can’t get comfortable with the thing no matter how hard I try, even though a lot of other people seem to be able to get there. I walk around and I try to touch it and talk to it and interact with it in any way, maybe with a sort of manic desperation, but it’s just layers and layers of shadows in the fog. None of it feels natural to me. Even things I like, or which briefly sustain me here, or whatever the hell else . . . I truly feel as though I could walk away from them forever at any time and never think about them again. I could stand up and leave it all.

Dante was in my window tonight, and telepathically I communicated to him that he was the only reason I’m sticking around this stupid planet. Without Dante I would wander off into a snowstorm in just my underwear in Antarctica and fall face-first into a snow mound and stay there until someone carved me out. And then, as stipulated in my will, they could toss me into the volcano called Mt. Terror which is nearby on Ross Island. Yes, I think that is what I will do someday when the little sadnesses I absorb every day, and which eat away at me like moths, finally get all of me.

For now I’m just pissing in the wind, baby . . . just putzing around this strange and endless nightmare that continues to grow increasingly frightening to me. It is not for lack of trying that I have fallen short of whatever I had dreamed up for myself and ended up in this godawful other place. A decade later and I am the muddled scrambled soupy version of the thing I have always been, and my receptors are all fried and my insides are rotted and lonely and swampy. I had recently gone a long time without the little white pill I need to live, and man, it sure did warp me a lot. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced the sensation of having absolutely zero serotonin in your brain, but it is one of the worst things I can think of. I have been completely drained of the stuff for a month now and I am terrified that I won’t be able to get back to that place I was before, which was also truly awful, but not so awful I couldn’t stomach it. I can’t sleep and I go out there alone every night and talk to people who don’t love me. I told Kerwin recently: “I don’t know if you’re allowed to announce stuff like this, but I was planning on going on an eight-month bender.” Hah!

It all feels so slippery. I don’t know how else to put it. I ain’t got no friction in my life anymore. The closest concrete thing is the hideous grain of living day-to-day. My small triumph is getting into bed every night. There is no thing awaiting me when I eventually have to leave my bed. My faulty programming is sometimes just straight enough for me to seemingly competently move through three-dimensional space and not scare people with my feelings. Heck! on any given day maybe that’s the most I can ever hope for. I just wish someone would grab my skull and squeeze it until it turned to bone meal . . . or at least shake me around a little. The lights have gone out up there and the machines are quiet. It’s driving me insane. Maybe I really am finally losing my mind. I need a jolt!

I have lurched into this great sullen desert and there is no way out. I said I was circling the black hole, but maybe I am the black hole. Like Gritt Calhoon, my hero, I am a black hole with arms and legs. Dry heat upon my brow, and all that. If I were a sociopath I guess I would be compelled to use this emptiness to run for office or start a corporation. Instead I’m just pissing in the wind. I’ll never get my hands on the thing. I had it once, but now I know it’s never going to happen again no matter what I do to try to get at it. And I have convinced myself in the absolute deepest layers of my ancient poisonous DNA that I am undeserving of the thing anyway. What kills me is that I tell myself I don’t want it, but maybe it’s all I want any longer. And now, as the fella said, we are imprisoned in an endless sea of ice. . . . We have told all the tales, real and imaginative, to which we are equal. Time weighs heavily upon us as the darkness slowly advances. Whatever it is, it ends badly. There is no other way. It must end badly because it was begun badly and was bad the whole way through. Oh, god! Talk about a sickness unto death. Life is prison and the only way to escape it is to die inside of it.