Last night I did a dangerous thing, which was to think about stuff. It went like this:

• Part One: I have a secret plan. I can’t tell you or anybody else about it just yet . . . cuz then I might blow it! This is not last-ditch effort, but maybe it is the next up from that. It is a very good thing and I desperately hope it works. I will make it work because it has to work. It is very important to me . . . maybe more than most things even! And this thing involves MY ENTIRE LIFE, and all the things in it. This thing will happen in the next six months. I think it’s going to rule. (Man, it sure is obnoxious to read something vague huh!!!)
• Part Two: I am accustomed to tragedy and failure, and on and on, and anticipate its cold hateful hands tightening around my neck at any given moment. In the event that THE FIRST PART OF THE PLAN fails, even if it is many years from now, the next part involves me changing my name and maybe going off to Germany or Austria, where my distant family is. (I don’t know them very well, but they’re nice people and I wouldn’t mind seeing them every now and then.) Hell: I will get a nice overcoat and live alone above a bar or a bagel shop or something. I will develop an opium habit and lose all contact with my family. I will make money by gambling and by selling counterfeit luxury handbags. I will speak in complete paragraphs to any stranger who does not immediately run away from me. I will fall asleep in movie theaters and cemeteries and read in the last pew of 13th century churches on weekday afternoons. I will stay in Europe until some part of my body begins to disintegrate, probably my mind, and give the 700-page novel I have been writing to my lawyer before jettisoning whatever life I have there to proceed to THE FINAL PART.
• The Final Part: I move to Antarctica and get a job driving trucks or running a post office or cooking for scientists. If I am still completely insane come January, I will suit up and leave whatever facility I’m living in at midnight on my birthday and point myself in the general direction of the South Pole. I will walk until I die. Probably that thing will happen where you think you’re overheating when really you’re extremely cold and you end up taking all your clothes off. I will die facedown in the snow in a pair of black long johns. In the inside pocket of my discarded jacket will be a brief suicide note and a copy of my will, which stipulates that I be buried in an icy tomb wherever I fall. I’ll try to make it funny. Hopefully I will be no older than 42 or 43. My funeral will last thirty seconds. A priest will scream something unintelligible across the dead earth and fire a single shotgun blast into the ground where I lay. My tombstone will be a pile of rocks I had been collecting and storing beneath my bunk.

Thanks!!!!!

Have a great day!!!!!!!!!!