i take the freakin pills they gave me to take. i eat vegetables and drink a lot of water and exercise every day and sleep sometimes. but: i walk around and i feel increasingly alienated by all of this stuff. i’ve gotten real heavy with it. you can’t deny that the amount of trivial / useless / junk information has increased by orders of magnitude before our very eyes in the last few years. there is so much information that none of it means anything anymore. it is automated and endless: a planet-sized klaxon wail of total nonsense that echos out into eternity. what is anyone saying anymore? i wonder. i talk to people and i don’t know what the hell anyone is saying. what are they being exposed to? where do their ideas come from? the dark machine has produced something worse than our worst nightmares, and now we are being crushed to death by it! it is bigger than everything there ever was—big enough to fill the entire universe! and it will live forever, and maybe even longer than that. . . .

what i’m saying is that i can’t feel at home in the world anymore! do you feel that way too? where the hell are you anymore? are y’all gonna take this sitting down? i walk around, man, i really do. and i feel like no one can hear or see me anymore. and were i to yank my thoughts out of my skull, they would flop out onto the sidewalk and die right there in the open air. i can’t even think anymore. i can’t read. this is getting bad. i can’t function like this. i have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. i can’t live without a culture anymore.