unfortunately for me and just about everyone i know, i have of course greatly romanticized my self-destruction and inevitable self-annihilation. i got a real problem is what i’m saying. i think a person ought to be horrified by a bone-deep desire to wipe themselves clean off the face of the planet at any given moment. truth is, i think about killing myself pretty much all day. it’s true! i got some things i gotta do, so i can’t do it yet, probably not for another decade or so . . . but it sure don’t stop me from thinking. i just sit there thinking and thinking, man. the world keeps on moving around me, all these people doing things and saying things, sometimes to me, but i’m on a different planet. i’m on planet ogo, man. i am mentally divergent.

i recall my hero gritt calhoon:

. . . Gritt’s penis didn’t budge a millimeter; it lay there like a dead boa constrictor. Though he was flaccid, there was still some juice flowing through it, and any reasonable person would have mistaken it for a little league baseball bat that had been pulled from the swamp. The only giveaway was the howling wolf tattoo on the left side of his shaft, badly faded now but still visible to those who knew what they were looking for.

The wolf was silent now. So was Gritt.

“You are magnificent lover, Greett. Never have I felt such pleasures in my body before.”

Gritt flicked at the roof of his mouth with his pierced tongue. He stared down at his penis as though it were the corpse of Ernest Hemingway. He snorted and felt disgusted with everything just then. He wanted to die and he wanted the world to rupture like a pumpkin full of rat turds left out in the sun.

yeah. how bout that!

don’t be afraid: i’ve always been like this. since i was 13 years old, even. they say that’s when someone’s brain changes so far as mental illness goes, don’t they? i think i read that somewhere. i got a bad case of type II bipolar disorder. it’s so bad i can’t hardly stand it sometimes. my entire life is a test of endurance . . . if i slip up, i go right down the tubes. and then i spend months crawling up it again, and for what anymore i don’t even know. i have no home to return to and no family. i have my cat-friend / little brother dante, and my human friends of course . . . but i worry about dante dying and i worry about my friends leaving me for one reason or another, all of it paranoid delusions. but what if it all came to pass like i fear? it would absolutely crush me into oblivion. and then what do i got? i got nothing, man. there is no backup plan! i’m living on borrowed time, you know? as soon as a few cherished things go away, people and animals and institutions i rely on, and so on, it’s lights out for little starsailor. it’s gotta be that way. i remember thinking when i was 15 years old that i was probably going to kill myself in california when i was in my late twenties. did you know that? i’m serious as a heart attack. i really did think that. except i figured i’d be in los angeles for some reason, and i figured i’d be living alone (the housing market was more accommodating to deadbeat losers back then, you see).

d’ye see? i can’t escape the idea that it is my destiny to die on purpose. i feel like my expiration date was five or six years ago . . . what good am i anymore? i don’t care about my own life at all. i’m about to sell my car, for god’s sake, which i bought in may. i don’t care about it anymore. i don’t care about the computer i’m writing on right now. i don’t care about anything at all in my room except for my grandmother’s paintings, which i will cart around the world with me until i really do die once and for all. and even then i only care enough about them to make sure my little sister inherits them so that they keep on existing in this three-dimensional hell we all share, though i wonder if that even matters anymore anyway. my grandmother is not the paintings she left behind, after all. she’s dead, and these are just things she owned that i have attached sentimental value to because i miss her. but she’s never coming back to get them, so hell, they may as well be buried in the earth somewhere, or in a landfill. it’s not like anyone else other than kendall and i would care.

when i really think about it, and i think about it all the time, all i really care about is my cat and a handful of people who i love so much it makes my chest hurt. you can burn the rest in a fire for all i care. i don’t need it. nothing is going to keep me on this planet for much longer anyway.

well . . . i’m off to the wolfhound to write some letters. jesus god almighty, what the hell else could i possibly do tonight?