I have for some time now thought that maybe I am one or two major catastrophes away from leaving the country. Outside of the cold comfort of being alone, I can’t really think of anything that feels good anymore . . . and even being alone isn’t much of a thing to do so much as it is the only thing to do to stave off ruin! If you have read this website for any length of time, then maybe you are fatigued from hearing me complain about this so often. To which I say: yeah man. Well: try living with this inescapable dread of everything! I’m so dumb and so numb that I can barely even describe it. I don’t know how to articulate this big fuckin black hole I got in me! How many times can you colorfully describe your displeasure with Existence Itself?? I guess we’ll find out~

You get old enough and you rewatch or listen to things you had once watched or listened to before, and you feel real weird about everything when you end up hating it. You wonder what you even saw in the thing to begin with. It was always pretty bad. It had to have been. The thing didn’t change: your perception of it did. Having been exposed to so many thousands of other better and worse things in the interim, the thing you loved initially falls squarely into the dumpster of mediocrity you hide inside your head . . . that one that is filled to the brim! and spilling over day by day! You think, well, I never need to watch that again! What a sadness. I hate that feeling. I feel it all the time. I finish watching a movie and I’ll think: “That’s it. That’s the very last time I’m ever subjecting myself to that. I sucked it dry, and vice versa, and now it is empty to me, and I am empty to it!”

Well I’m here to tell you that after 30 years of joylessly filing away so many experiences and memories, and on and on, my revisiting of the world on a daily basis leaves me with the same rotten aftertaste. I am tired of everything because I am tired of seeing and hearing and being anywhere at all. I get that awful feeling: that I could walk away from everything, including people and places and things I like very much or even love. I really mean it. It would be OK because it’s going to happen to us all sooner or later whether we like it or not. “That’s it. That’s the last time I’ll ever hang out with X . . . or go to X” . . . or whatever the hell else. At least if you say that to yourself you have some degree of control over an inevitable crushing sadness.

I went to Virginia over the weekend for my grandmother’s funeral service. The whole time I kept thinking that I will probably never go to my hometown again. My grandmother was the very last person who made it worth visiting. She’s dead and so I have no reason to ever go back. I wouldn’t even have a place to spend the night. I’d have to get a hotel to stay in my hometown. To visit . . . no one! And to do nothing! I sucked it dry, and vice versa, and now it is empty to me, and I am empty to it!!! The night before I left I drove my rental car around all the places I used to go and now they are all as dark and dead as I am! No new thing will happen to me there. It can’t show me anything I haven’t already seen or make me feel any way I haven’t already felt. It means nothing to me now. I hate to say it! because it sounds so dramatic. But I really do feel like it may as well have never happened to me. What was the end result? The person I am right now? A lot of good that does me! It was all just another dream I had a long time ago.

Moving to another country won’t make me feel any better. It might even make me worse. But at least I wouldn’t know anyone, and couldn’t hurt them, and have them hurt me, cuz ya can’t hurt or be hurt by something that isn’t anything . . . and I could lay low until it was time to go, and then I’d get on with the thing. In the aftermath of injury, this is where it all leads! There is no doubt in my mind that it can be anything else. It has to be this way. My destiny isn’t anything other than to limp on into the darkness . . . away from everyone and everything I know! At my grandmother’s service, everyone kept describing her life as a “victory”— and yes! that is absolutely true. She was great at triumphing over sad and hurtful things. That is not true for me. I know it deep down as well as I know anything else about myself. I’ve known it for so long, man. I read stuff I wrote many years ago and this very same feeling was with me then! A barb of sorrow lodging in my heart! No escape! No path to victory! There is only the one way. I must go to it! I stopped having fun a long time ago. I think when it’s not fun anymore it’s time to go. It ain’t coming back. I’ve given it enough time and the fun ain’t shown. Nothing getting in, and nothing getting out!

My friend and I were walking around the other night, and we were talking about this girl I kind of dated a few years ago. I said I missed her . . . not because I was ever in love with her, or would want to date her again, or anything like that. I don’t even know that I’d want to see her now because I like thinking about that time and I want it to be frozen in my mind just like it was. Seeing her would do nothing to add to it. In fact I think it would take away from the thing that came before. And he said, you know: Aw man, you’re at that age where you’re reminiscing. And I thought, hell, I reckon I am. She was real great. She was funny. She grew older, up and away from me, long gone now. She might be completely different now. Maybe she would be sad to see that I am exactly the same.

I used to have so much fun here. I think that all changed when she went away. Not because she went away, but because it coincidentally ended, all that fun, around the time she disappeared. And now we’re both hundreds of miles away doing little else than paying bills and metabolizing food and sleeping and so on. It will go on like this until it doesn’t. Yeah? I don’t know, man. I didn’t know the shape of the thing before because it was new to me. Now that I know what I had, I can’t get it back. I’m talking about Oakland and all those days I had here a long time ago. I feel like I’m watching the movie twice. I need that novelty! And new faces! Where is it?? Where are they??? What happened to the romantic shabbiness of the world I used to know????

Cain’t tell you what I’m going to do. I don’t know yet. Maybe I should just start writing fiction again so I don’t have to keep repeating the same “I can’t feel anything” diatribes over an over. We’re all tired of them! And me most of all! Before I go, I will leave a copy of my novel with my lawyer, who I haven’t spoken to in almost five years, with loose instructions about releasing it into the wild. Maybe I’ll have him wait a certain amount of time, or something. It isn’t very good. I made the protagonist crazy. I gave him a fake eye and had him see the end of the world. The novel ends with mountains of skeletons. Y’all can have it. I don’t want it anymore. Joel, if you’re reading this: give it to these fine people at some point. Don’t charge a cent! What the hell do I need money for anyway??

I started studying German again. Should I go home to Austria? Should I go to Germany or the Czech Republic? Today I applied to work at a post office in Antarctica again. I did this seven years ago right after I graduated from college. They turned me down because I wrote them an insane email. I concealed my insanity this time around. Who the hell knows. Maybe they’ll take me. Hey, I sure would like to go down there, I’ll tell you that much.