I am alone in a city no one is from, and so everyone went home to be around people they know—which doesn’t really affect my own personal aloneness since I am alone in a city where I don’t know anyone at all.

When I drove Matt to the airport, he said: “Man, you’re gonna have the house to yourself, have my car . . . I’m kinda jealous!”

And I thought, hell, maybe this will be pretty cool. I’ll have Dante and we’ll have ourselves a good ol time. When I got home I found that Matt had left me a huge bottle of wine and fifty pounds of firewood in the basement. I screamed: “Heck yeah dude!!!!” and went upstairs and took an hour-long bath.

Uh, well listen: It’s been a few days, I can most certainly confirm that this sucks real bad!

I have realized that aloneness is OK as long as you can flip the switch and go back to the other thing every now and then. Years ago, when I lived alone in Baltimore, I somehow go to a point where I didn’t know anyone in the city. My girlfriend had gone away and suddenly I was alone in my house and alone in the city. I would walk around at night and, when I ran out of places to go, I knew the only place I could really go next was right back to my aloneness at home.

Heck, it may as well be five years ago, because here I am in the exact same situation!!!

I’ve been driving around at night thinking, you know, if only the useless things in my brain burned like the useless things I had in my room. In the last month I have burned letters and I have burned pictures. I found a letter my girlfriend in Texas had written to me around Christmastime years ago, and at one point she said I made her happy. I had to laugh. And I thought, man, that’s definitely the first and only time she said that to me. I felt bad about it but I had to go ahead and burn the damn thing. I sure can’t scrub her or the words from my brain though!

She’s not a bad person. She’s a great person. I knew a lot of great people who I don’t know anymore. I’ll probably never see any of them again.

I really do walk around at night and mutter to myself. Maybe I need to find something new to occupy my time. Were you to go to the streets and neighborhoods I have written about on this very website at the times in which I go, which is between midnight and 4 a.m., you would see me there and you would hear me calling myself an idiot over and over again. You really would hear mw say, “For God’s sake, what the fuck am I doing here,” or “Nice job, Ryan. It’s cold as hell out here and you ain’t got anywhere to go, buddy.”

I come home and put on a movie so I don’t feel so alone. It’s going to go on in this way for some time . . . and maybe even longer than that!