I live inside a sleeping bag on the floor which is wrapped in a thick down comforter. I guess I have stopped hanging out with anyone, and everyone has stopped hanging out with me. Mostly I have fires at night and read some books that I am piling up next to my bed to sell. With that money I will by cat food. In the afternoons Kerwin and I work in the living room and talk about how we have no money. Last week we went to Reed and tried to play pool with some college kids, but they were having some sort of fall social in the pool room. A guy with muttonchops asked if we were in high school. I haven’t spoken to my family in any meaningful way in maybe six months. I don’t care if anyone ever kisses me or sleeps in my [sleeping bag on the floor which is wrapped in a thick down comforter] or says a nice thing to me again. The most fun I ever have is when I’m aimlessly walking around a grocery store with no intention to buy anything. Every Wednesday I go to a mental health facility a few blocks from my house and talk to a psychiatrist for the purpose of getting paid to test an experimental antipsychotic medication that doesn’t work on me. He asks me the same questions every week—asks me how I’m doing, and if I’ve had trouble eating and sleeping and so on. He asked me last week, as he did the week before, and the week before that, and so on: “Do you ever feel critical of yourself? Experience any self-loathing?” To which I said: “All you can eat, Doc.” And he said: “Can you elaborate?” And I said: “I cringe at everything I ever say. I cringe while I hear every single sentence come out of my mouth. I walk around muttering to myself about how big of a dumb jerk I am.” For some reason this amused him, and was also maybe confusing to him, and he said: “What exactly do you mean?” And I said: “I have no idea what I’m ever talking about it and I know it, and maybe everyone else knows it too. I feel like a fraud. I don’t know why I ever talk.” And then we stopped talking about that and talked about something else. He lead me to an examination room and a woman came in and had me lie down and she took my blood pressure. Then I stood up and she took it again. She lead me to a cold room where another woman came in and took my blood. I like her a lot and I like talking to her. She’s always very friendly and genuine. (I wish I could ask her to my friend, but maybe that would be considered inappropriate given the context.) She put a butterfly needle in my arm and asked me how I was. I said: “Ahhhh, you know. I’m all right, I guess.” She leaned closer to me and said, in a sad little voice: “I just feel all right too . . . and maybe even worse than that.” And I said: “Yeah.” And then, because there was no better thing to say, I said it again: “Yeah.”