And the afternoons, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And, in short, I was afraid.
                         --T.S.Eliot, "The Lovesong Of J. Alfred Prufrock."

99.
        And he apologizes for being such an ass and asks very humbly for my forgiveness-- and that's a nice sentiment but he doesn't have to be so humble about it.  Bending his head and all like a shamed child.  And at first I think that he's joking and laugh, and he laughs too, but then I realize that actually he wasn't joking and that maybe he was laughing only because I was laughing and he's interpreted my laughter as accepting his apology-- which, on one level anyway, it was.  And so he apologizes, which is cool.  And then he apologizes again.  And again and again and again.  And before you know it he's apologizing for being such an ass, like, ten or eleven times a day.  And then he's apologizing for apologizing.

98.
        Then he starts asking me if I'm angry, if I'm mad at him, if for some reason he's done anything to upset me.  And, okay, this stuff is utterly unprovoked.  We'll be walking along and then he'll ask me if I'm angry at him.  And I'll say no, because I'm not (at that point anyway) angry at him.  And then in a few minutes he'll ask me if I'm sure I'm not angry at him.  And I'll say no, again.  And then he'll ask me, maybe a half hour or so later, if I'm angry again.  And I'll say no.  But he'll keep it up all day, every few minutes asking me if I'm mad-- until, of course I really do get mad-- because there's really only so much of that a person can take.  And then he'll start apologizing for making me mad and he'll apologize so profusely that I'll get even more annoyed with him and then eventually he'll just sit quietly for a while.

97.
        He's very supportive, too.  He always asks me about my day and he seems so interested in how my life is going.  And he was always like that, to be sure-- he always did care about what I did during the day even if (I admit) sometimes I didn't really care too much about his day (and I have the gall to call him self-absorbed)-- but now the way he cares, just totally and completely CARES about every aspect of the life I lead when I'm not around him-- it's kind of wearing.

96.
        And sometimes in the evenings he'll ask me if it's okay if he goes for a walk so he can think about the day and stuff and I'll tell him okay because he really doesn't need my permission to go out for a walk.  And then he'll say thank you and then usually he adds something like I hope I didn't do anything to make you angry today.  You'll tell me if I did, right?  And I'll say something like no you didn't make me mad at all today and rest assured I'll tell you if you do.  And then maybe we'll laugh a bit-- but the laughter will be awkward and strained.  And then, before he leaves he'll thank me again for letting him go out for a walk.

95.
        And you know, honestly, this new Bob is actually more annoying than when he was walking around pretending to be a Zen Master babbling about distance and disconnection.  This is actually more tedious and frustrating because he is honestly trying to be nice and he's being totally supportive and considerate, but he's doing it in a way that's driving me fucking mad.  And I'm left wondering did I somehow manage to accidentally break his brain or was he just always this much of a weenie deep down inside?

94.
        At the bookstore, I stand at the counter watching people pass me by.  Then later I tidy up the shelves.
        I'm one of the only people who actually knows anything about books, here.
        Most of the employees tend to file Voltaire's Candide under "Candide."  They put The Satanic Verses in the New Age / Wicca section.  Or sometimes under Horror or Poetry.  That kind of thing.
        I'm the only person working here who actually reads anything.  I think.  Probably.
        When did bookstores start hiring people based on their levels of illiteracy?

93.
        And of course, the sex.  To say it's been bad lately would be, well--
        Well, actually, there hasn't been any.  Nothing at all.  So, even bad sex would be better than this.
        To say our sex life has dried up would be an understatement.  It's vaporized.  It's been annihilated.  All in one motion.  Eradicated utterly.  It's like being married to a monk.
        At first, back when Bob decided he was "detached," okay, he stopped touching me, he stopped coming on in public.  He stopped groping and mauling me at random.  He stopped ambushing me with ice cubes down my pants in public places.  He stopped snapping my bra.  He just simply stopped.
        And, initially at least, this was refreshing.  I mean, there's only so much molestation one human being can take before she rebels and turns inwards herself.
        Signs of affection or not, sometimes too much is too bloody much.
        But then, to go in the opposite direction.  And so suddenly.  And, like I said, for about a week of his "detachment," this was fine.  It was a nice break.
        But, then, I actually started missing it.  Okay, maybe after two weeks I started missing it.
        By the third week, I was starting to get kind of agitated.
        And then I started getting lonely.
        I mean, he would just lie next to me, utterly unemotional.  Or he'd stay up all night and come to bed when I was getting ready for work.
        I was aware that this was all an act.  A kind of war of sexual attrition.  He was holding back to see if he could break me.
        And, he was the one who couldn't last a day without checking the porno on the newsgroups.  So, maybe it was actually kind of hard for him-- maybe even harder for him than me.  At least that's what I thought.
        But then, eventually, it dawned on me that this detachment shtick was more than some sort of war of abstention.  Somehow, something had curdled in Bob's brain.
        Maybe.

92.
        But, then-- then he got all apologetic out of nowhere.  And then, well, he got worse.
        And still, no sex.
        And now, even when he lies next to me he won't even touch me.  I mean, before, at least when he was lying next to me, at least our bodies touched.
        Now he just stays on his half of the bed, and he won't come near me.
        And even if I try to move towards him, he sort of... not shrinks away, exactly... but he somehow flows away from my touch.  It's like he's not even moving.  I come close to him and he moves away from me at the same rate.  Kind of like two magnets repelling.
        I can actually make him slowly slide to the floor in the middle of the night.
        Or at least that's what it seems like.
        He flows away from me like mercury.

91.
        In a drugstore, a "friend" of mine-- notice the quotes-- started yelling at me because I was wearing leather running shoes, today.
        She's given up any and all animal "exploitation" because of the pain the animals feel.
        Granted, I'm sure that animals feel pain, sure.
        She's also given up eating meat because of the pain, also.
        She's getting very thin.
        Unfortunately, I tried to tell her, life is hard and it's a lose-lose situation.  We need to eat meat and meat byproducts because that's what keeps us healthy.  It's a fact.  We may not need much meat-- and we as a culture do eat way too much meat-- but we still do need some.
        I told her this and she started yelling at me, calling me a murderer and irresponsible.
        She yelled at me until she started coughing.  Then she coughed and coughed.
        And, eventually, she said that no matter what she tries she just can't manage to shake this damn cold.
        Then I left.

90.
        There were four lightbulbs in our bathroom.  They are in a line above the mirror.  One burned out.  There are now three lightbulbs in our bathroom.

89.
        And he used to tell me all the time to blow on the shower nozzle because water would get trapped in there and when you turned on the shower you'd get a blast of ice water no matter how hot the water from the taps was.  And he used to tell me this, over and over.  And so after I showered I'd blow on the shower nozzle to clear it out.  (Weird how blowing into something will make water pour out of it.)  And this worked.  There would never be a blast of cold water whenever you pulled the little metal valve thingie to make the shower work.  Also, the nozzle would stop dripping incessantly all night long.
        This morning, however, I pulled on the little valve thingie and got a blast of ice cold water on my back.

88.
        Today: another cold blast of water.

87.
        More cold water.

86.
        I mention the cold water coming out of the nozzle to him, and that he used to be so obsessive about blowing out the nozzle, and I ask him what's changed-- has he just gotten sick of blowing the water out of the nozzle or is he just forgetting to do so?-- and of course he immediately starts apologizing.  Profusely, obsessively apologizing.  And, naturally he asks me if I'm mad at him, now, because lately he just hasn't seen any reason to clear the nozzle of water.  And I tell him, no I'm not mad, just curious, and he asks "are you sure you're not mad?"  And I say: "I'm sure."  "Are you sure you're sure?"  "I'm sure."  "You sure?"  "I'm sure."  Etc.

85.
        I've got an American cousin who's been called into action.  He joined the military because he felt he had something to prove, or maybe because his father browbeat him into it.
        Everyone's got an American cousin, it seems, these days.
        And, almost in variably, they're all in the military.  Either that or they're trying to stay out of the military.
        Not that anyone's drafting them, but just that there's a lot of peer pressure to join the military in the 'States these days.
        Needless to say, this cousin of mine, his parents are pretty freaked out.  Every day another couple of Americans are killed in suicide bombings.  And so, the parents are really, really worried.
        Apparently, my cousin isn't that worried.
        He just wants to get in, bag some Iraqis, and then get out.

84.
        I saw my Vegan "friend" in the mall this evening.
        She just said "Nice shoes" and walked on like a pompous cow.

83.
        And so I came home today and Bob is sitting there on the couch with a gerbil in a cage.
        "I bought a gerbil," he said, "to keep me company when you go to work."
        My first instinct was to yell, but I didn't.
        "A, a gerbil," I said.  Pretty much in a flat voice.
        "I'm calling him Yog-Sothoth."
        I walked over to Yog-Sothoth and looked in his cage.  It was immediately obvious that Yog-Sothoth was a girl gerbil, but I didn't say anything.
        "How did you," I said, "uh, get the money for Yog-Sothoth, exactly?" I said, once again, in an overly even voice.
        "I collected bottles."
        Great.  I was married to someone to wandered around in ditches, collecting old bottles, so he could buy a gerbil.
        I sighed.
        "What?" he said.  "Are you mad?  Did I do something to make you angry?  I did, didn't I?"
        "No, no," I said.  "No.  No, I'm not mad.  I'm not angry.  No.  Don't worry.  No.  Fine.  I'm fine.  Really.  I'm fine.  I'm not mad."
        Etc.

82.
        I asked him why he won't let me touch him any more.
        He just said:
        "I'm sorry."

81.
        All night, now, Yog-Sothoth runs on a wheel in the next room.
        All night.
        All.  Night.

80.
        He wants another gerbil.
        I said no.

79.
        An argument.  The first real argument in a long, long time.  It actually felt good.  Nice,  Refreshing.
        Of course, it was about whether or not "we" need another gerbil.  But, still, it was a fight.  A long, angry, bitter, knockdown dragout fight.  I haven't felt this happy to yell at someone in ages.
        Of course, again, it was about whether or not "we" need another gerbil.
        I won.

78.
        Watching tv:
        Commercials where young couples are portrayed as arguing about where to invest all their money.  What interest rates should they invest all their hard earned money under.  Which banks should they place all their heard earned money.  We have to all save for the future.  We need to know where we should put all our hard earned money.
        So there are all these commercials where couples argue about where to invest, and what to invest, and for how long should they invest.  All that hard-earned money.
        We argue about gerbils.
        And there are all the commercials about buying new cars.  Which brand, which colours, do you want a satellite hookup, do you want access to the Global Positioning System (which actually doesn't work if you drive under trees, or into parkades, or near tall buildings anyway-- so, no), do you want screens in the back seats so you can show your kids dvds, a cd player, sun roof, central air?  Good financing available.  Always.
        We fight about buying new gerbils.  Because we can't afford another gerbil.
        Let alone kids, or a car.  Or investment options.
        Commercials about houses and mortgages.  And I don't even make enough money to scrape up a downpayment, and even if I did-- that would be it.  One downpayment, no other payments, and so on.  Of course that's where the mortgages come in.
        And Bob just sits there and looks at that fucking gerbil, now.  He feeds it, puts water in its bottle, cleans its chips.
        But we have to spend money on gerbil chips and food.
        He collects bottles so he can afford gerbil chips and food.
        It's like being married to a 12 year old boy.
        He says he's putting out resumes.  He says he's looking for work.
        But, so far, nothing.
        Just that goddamn gerbil.
        At least he didn't apologize for three hours after I won the fight.

77.
        Fresh off the fight with Bob I run into my Vegan "friend" in the bookstore.
        She's looking at self-help books books about crystal therapy, and Vegan cookbooks.
        She asks me if I'm still eating meat.
        I say yes.
        Then, it begins:
        A wall of screaming and invective in which I am called almost every foul thing imaginable.  She yells and rants and bellows and people start to cluster around us.  At first I think that I'll have to defend myself-- either physically or at least verbally-- but soon I realize that she's actually doing herself in with her own behaviour.  She rants and yells and waves her hands and starts looking at the crowd for some sort of support-- or something-- and then she explains to them in a loud, shrill voice that I eat meat, that I'm part of the problem, and that it's people like me who are going to pollute the world and ourselves into oblivion.  Unfortunately, she's not really getting much support from the crowd because, well, I'm pretty sure that most if not all of them are in fact meat-eaters like myself.  And so she turns on the crowd and starts haranguing them like a preacher.  A few of them cringe away from her, but most laugh nervously.
        Eventually, she drags her hand across a shelf of self-help books for no discernible reason, scattering them on the floor.
        Then she starts coughing and gagging, sputtering and turning red.
        Then security comes and takes her away.
        She tries to struggle against the grip of the security officer but, having eaten no meat or meat byproducts for a very, very long time, and thus being more than a little short of muscle and protein, she's pretty weak and can be dragged away with little difficulty.
        As she's being cared off, coughing and weakly struggling against the security officer, I (seeing my chance) roll my eyes and say:  "Vegans."
        Everybody starts laughing and then she starts screaming: "FUCK YOU!  FUCK YOU ALL!  MEAT IS MURDER!  MEAT IS MURDER!"

76.
        That night, I tell Bob what happened and he bursts into laughter.  And it feels good, for a minute there, watching Bob laugh.  It feels like the old Bob is back.

75.
        Night.
        The gerbil isn't running it its wheel.  It's as if the gerbil doesn't even exist.
        And Bob is lying next to me, breathing deeply.
        And I can actually feel him.  Feel the warmth of his body.
        I roll against him, and he doesn't roll away.

74.
        Another encounter with my Vegan "friend."  A brief one, this time:
        I was walking downtown and she was talking to a kid who's always hanging around panhandling.  I've seen the kid in the bookstore occasionally.  We think he's stealing from us, but so far no one can prove anything.
        Anyway, I walk past her and the kid, and she turns towards me and says:
        "Nazi."
        And then she turns back to the panhandling kid.
        What the hell did I ever do to her, anyway?

73.
        A bit of an aside about the panhandling kid.
        He wears a sign around his neck that reads:

72.
        I walk on after being called a Nazi.
        I turn back to look at them-- just for a second.
        I see her giving him a bunch of folded bills, and he gives her a small packet filled with some kind of powder.
        Oh well, as long as no animals were killed, harmed, or otherwise abused....

71.
        Been thinking about space and time a lot.  How they're connected, or maybe how they're not connected.

70.
        Can't sleep tonight.
        Lying awake next to Bob.  Bob, snoring like a goat.
        Yog-Sothoth running on her wheel in the next room.
        You get to a point where it feels like maybe you're asleep, but your eyes are open and you can still see the little bits of halflight coming in through the blinds.  Lights from outside.  There's a streetlight outside and it's got amber plastic.  The amber plastic makes the light from the light amber.  Got to try to sleep.
        But sleep doesn't want to come, and Bob is snoring like a goat.
        Sometimes he thrashes and kicks a bit.  But not too much.
        The amber light is creepy, makes everything look creepy out there, everything outside.  If I was walking, outside.  If I was walking outside under that creepy amber light I'd feel creepy, creepy.
        God, I wish I could sleep.

69.
        Space and time.  How they're connected.  Or maybe not.

68.
        I don't understand, exactly, but I still sort of do, somehow, sometimes.
        Space and time are separate things.  But still kind of connected.
        Time is not the fourth dimension, though-- although in a certain sense maybe it can be seen as the fourth dimension.  But there is a fourth spatial dimension, or so that's how the theory goes.  And, probably, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, and so on.
        And, presumably, time functions in those dimensions, also.  So time can't be just the fourth dimension.

67.
        And, also, there's a kind of dimensionallity to time, too.
        Time isn't just a straight line.  It doesn't just go back and forth.  It also has a kind of "side-to-side" "motion," as well.  This is, as I understand it, called "sideways time" or "imaginary time.  Or something like that.
        I don't get how time can have a "sideways," but somehow it does.  Or, that's what the theory says, anyway.
        The implication is that time somehow has as many "dimensions" as space.  And so, if there are three dimensions to space, there have to be three dimensions to time.  Or if there are more than three spatial dimensions, maybe there are more than three time dimensions as well.
        As I said before, I don't really get this 100%, but I think I can intuit some sort of... something... not an understanding, exactly.  But something.
        It has something to do with alternate universes, parallel worlds.

66.
        An old boyfriend once asked me a completely stupid question:
        "How can there be other universes when it's the 'universe'-- when the word we use to describe it means there's only one thing?"
        That's one of the most idiotic things I've ever heard.
        I told this person that the idea of the "universe" is just outdated terminology, and that just because someone in ancient Greece called this section of spacetime in which we inhabit a small part a "universe" because he couldn't comprehend anything larger than this section of spacetime in which we inhabit a small part, doesn't mean that this section of spacetime in which we inhabit a small part is all there is.  Just because some Greek who lived 2000+ years ago couldn't see beyond the confines of the "universe" and so used an exclusionistic term that was adopted over the centuries by other small-minded exclusionistic peoples doesn't mean there's only one "universe."
        Just because some ancient Greeks said something doesn't mean it's right.
        Just because we call something something, doesn't mean we're right.
        The word used to describe a thing is not the thing itself.

65.
        The sound of that gerbil running on that fucking wheel.

64.
        The Radiohead guy lent me a cd today.  And, surprisingly, it wasn't a Radiohead cd.
        He lent me Stoner Witch by the Melvins.
        I said I liked the picture of the swan on the cover of the cd.  I said it looked kind of classy.
        I was just making conversation.
        And then he said, "Here you can borrow it."
        So, I borrowed it.
        I don't usually like this kind of thing, but it's actually pretty good.

63.
        Night:
        He's moving away from me, again.

62.
        No cold water spraying out onto me from the shower nozzle this morning.
        Bob must be clearing the pipes, again.
        Good.

61.
        On the computer:
        Sometimes I feel like the computer's watching me.  That it's gathering data on me.  But not just that it's gathering data on me, but that somehow it's gathering me.  That, as the lights on the cable modem flicker and wink, bits of me are going into the computer.  Every time I stare at the screen I leave a little bit of myself behind the screen.  That somehow I am being watched, studied, copied, absorbed.  It's not just my reflection looking back at me faintly in the desktop and the windows.  It's really bits of me.
        And then when I'm done, for a while I feel a little bit thinner.  A little less present.  Like somehow I exist a little less.  Somehow.
        Of course, the feeling eventually goes away and everything returns to normal.
        As it should.
        After all, the computer's just a tool.  A device for gathering and presenting information.
        Nothing is really going on.

60.
        I decided to burn myself a copy of Stoner Witch.  I gave the original back to The Radiohead Guy.
        I like these guys.  They're slow and heavy and loud.  When you're slow and heavy you seem a lot more weighty than when you just thrash around like children with Attention Deficit Disorder.
        Bob doesn't really like them.  Oh well.

59.
        I wish I could remember The Radiohead Guy's name.  I knew it at one time, I'm sure I did.  But I've been calling him The Radiohead Guy for so long that I've forgotten.  And he never wears his nametag.
        And, everybody else in the store calls him The Radiohead Guy.
        (I think it's my fault.)
        And I'm too embarrassed to ask.

58.
        At home.  Had to take the day off because of a migraine.
        In bed.  Eyes closed.  Door closed.  Windows blocked out.  No light must enter this room.
        The feeling is above my right eye, and deep.  So deep it goes beyond pain.  If it was only pain, I could deal with that.
        But this feeling.  It can't be described in words.
        Here is an approximation.  It's the best I can do:
        Like a knotted muscle inside my eye.  But behind the knotted muscle is a white hot light burning into me.  And the pain is sharp and dull at the same time.  It's severe and pointed, and yet also a spreading ache.
        And in and around my sinuses it feels like something is chewing into me.
        And my brain is filled with this dull... sensation... that can't be described, except that it makes me want to vomit and vomit and vomit.
        And any and all light cripples me, makes me want to pull out my right eye.  If I could just pull out my right eye, maybe the pain from pulling out my right eye would override the sensation of this headache.
        And behind my eyes, lights pulse.  And each time a light pulses I either feel calm or violently ill.
        And every sound makes me want to puke.
        And every smell makes me want to tear out my eyes.

57.
        And he's been listening to the Clash a lot.  He's been listening to "Lost In The Supermarket" over and over and over and over and over and over.  And he's taken to humming it, too, when the cd isn't playing on repeat.
        And the thing is he's so obsessive about that song that I can't escape it.  The only way I can escape it is to go to work.  Because at home it's always playing.  And it's getting into my soul, now, too.  I can't shake the song either, now.  And it's starting to bring me down, little by little, dragging me into its melancholy.

56.
        Maybe if I leave it alone, everything will repair itself.  Things have a way of working out, if you let them, right?
        The postmodern world, the late 20th and early 21st Century world, the Western World is a self-monitoring structure.  Nothing will fall apart, right?  Things get bad but they don't ever get that bad, all we have to worry about now is domestica-- if, if, if we're in an upper stratum of the social sphere.
        So I just shouldn't worry, I should just let things take their course.  Things fall apart and then they repair themselves.  There is no more entropy, only a shifting between parameters.
        There is only entropy if you actively pursue entropy.
        So I should just leave Bob alone and he'll come back together.
        Things fall apart, and then they come back together.
        Things have a way of working themselves out-- that's what Mom always says.
        They fall apart and then they come back together.
        The pendulum swings.
        It's like a cycle.
        Things fall apart, then they put themselves back together.
        Collapse / Rebuild.
        Collapse / Rebuild.
        Collapse / Rebuild.
        Collapse / Rebuild.
        Collapse / Rebuild.
        Collapse / Rebuild.
        Collapse / Rebuild.
        That's the way it works.
        Things have a way of working themselves out-- that's what Mom always says.

55.
        At least he's not listening to Coldplay.
        My God, every time I hear Coldplay I droop.
        Chris Martin's voice is just so sad.
        And, I know it's self-consciously sad, that the music is specifically designed to tug on your heartstrings and make you sob like a child, and that it's utterly and transparently insincere, but that doesn't change the fact that it is sad music.  And that it does make me want to sob like a child.
        And, I mean, I kick myself for falling for Chris Martin's schtick.  But it's still-- while I'm hearing the music-- very affecting.  If, again, insincere.  An arty lie.
        So thank God he's not listening to Coldplay.
        I should maybe place a ban on Coldplay.
        But no, that might just encourage him to go out and buy a cd and play it all the time.
        And that's the last thing I need.

54.
        Although, after having to listen to it today over and over and over in the grocery store, making myself desensitized to Coldplay might not be a bad idea....

53.
        Heard some Hayden on the radio, today.  Boy, that takes me back.
        (Talk about artificially sad.)
        I started thinking about the time, it was 1995, when I had a headache, a complete and utter migraine, and I'd taken a whole bunch of pain pills.  And it was summer, and where I was, it was so hot I could barely breathe.
        And the headache was so intense I was on the verge of blacking out.  And Hayden's first album was playing in the background.
        And I felt nauseated and dizzy and the music felt so old and worn out and tired.
        And then I went outside and looked up at the sky and as if on cue the pain pills kicked in and a summer shower came out of nowhere.
        And the music was so sad and tired and I don't know if it was the pills or the music or the sudden rain but suddenly everything was so beautiful.
        And the rain was coming down and wetting the street and my headache was replaced by this lifting feeling, this euphoria.  And the sky was a weird tinny yellow colour because of all the dust in the air.
        And I felt, then, back then, like I'd arrived, like I'd made it, like I'd found somewhere I belonged.  I felt so solid and present to myself, so locked in time and space and purpose.  I felt like I'd finally started existing and it felt so good.  So sudden and good.
        And then the rain stopped, and I went back inside, and I felt so happy I thought I was crying.  But it turned out that it was only just the rain on my cheeks.
        And eventually the cd ended.
        And the painkillers wore off.
        And the headache went away.
        And days passed.
        Then months.
        And so on.

52.
        There was something comforting about those days.  Something comforting about the ennui, and the sadness, and the complete lack of effort and concern everyone displayed about everything but themselves.  We all had our own little ideas, our delusions, our petty narcissisms.  And we were all sure of our own slackerdom.
        There wasn't a problem that sleeping in, dropping out, going on welfare, slouching through boring minimum wage jobs and feeling superiour to the rest of the general population, couldn't fix-- and by "fix" I mean put off for long enough for us to, through inertia and age, become so distanced from the problem that it no longer applied to any of us because by the time the problem managed to catch up with our indifference we were all too old to matter anyway.  And, besides, by that time usually our parents, boyfriends, or girlfriends picked up the tab.  If you do nothing long enough, eventually someone will pick up the slack.  Even another slacker.
        So we could all do whatever and listen to our favorite detuned guitar troubadours moping and whining about lost love, loneliness, the sadness of being confused small children in a harsh uncaring world, and crappy day jobs.
        And, as long as we were still in the media, and inertia was expected of us, we could all be sad little Gen X-ers, unable to find work, living on welfare, going to school forever without actually graduating, dropping out of school because something as bourgeois as "daily attendance" was beneath us, living with our parents, doing the absolute minimum to get by.  And it was all so sweet because that was what was expected of us.  It was like a party.

51.
        Of course, because of all this, we're all totally and completely and royally fucked.
        We did nothing when we should have been doing something and now we're all too old.  There's a new generation behind us doing nothing in our place.  And now that nothingness isn't fun for us any more we can't actually latch onto something.
        There are a few of us who've managed to get some sort of office jobs, and some others who've set up small companies.  But, for the most part, we've got nothing.  Some of us made comic books that won awards.  We either spent too much time in school, or not enough.  And we're all too old.
        And so, 95% of us set ourselves up as "artists" because an identity as an artist is an identity that's difficult to dispute-- art being subjective and all-- and so we all work minimum wage jobs while we struggle at our "art."  (Our writing, our drawing, our music, whatever.)  And, because no one pays attention to us, this frees us to really be able to experiment.  And that's actually pretty good.
        Of course almost none of us want to experiment, we just want to repeat someone else's success and get rich so we can continue slacking comfortably into middle age-- but you can't hardly blame us, can you-- after all, we're only human.

50.
        And, some of us are actually successful at our chosen "art"-- but success is also something that's subjective.
        So, we have nothing grounding us, no centres.  Just our own opinions of ourselves.
        Which, again, is total and utter freedom.  And from a sheerly existential point of view that's actually a pretty decent place to be.
        But you need the opinions of other people to really be able to flourish, too.
        And, if nobody's paying attention any more, just having your own opinion of yourself, your accomplishments, your place in society-- when you've spent a formative, crucial decade or more in the subconsciousness of the mass media-- being told over and over that your futility and the emptiness of your life is worthy of notice-- if not The Greatest Cultural Phenomenon Since The 1960s-- suddenly realizing that nobody cares about what you've been trained to be any more... well, that more than just kinda sucks.

49.
        Of course, there's always irony.  And, as we all know, that never goes out of style, gets stale, becomes corroded with age.
        Maybe, somehow, in the future, maybe one day, I'll be able to step into sideways time and go back to the desperate and depressing comforts of the Slacker '90s.
        The days of Ball-Hog Or Tug-Boat? and Girlfriend and Evan Dando and the Saturday Morning Cartoons tribute album.
        Would that I could.
        To sleep, perchance to dream....

48.
        And I just noticed: he's no longer looking at porn on the Internet.
        And I discovered I actually find this more disturbing, and sad than when he was looking at porn on the Internet.

47.
        A new guy at the store, today.  His name is Jerzy and he comes from Slovenia.  He said he saw Laibach perform with Slavoj Zizek back in the golden age.  He said that Zizek and Laibach worked good together and that it "was like the best Industrial sex."  He said it in a strange, but oddly compelling accent.
        He also brought his book.  He wrote a novel and it's called Two million seven hundred sixty four thousand nine hundred twelve instances of the word "Fuck".  And, indeed, it is 2,764,912 instances of the word "fuck."  It goes on for page and after page after page.  No paragraphs.
        Jerzy then explained the book.  And, the bast part is he gave a thorough, sensible, and intelligent explanation of why and how he wrote it, how each "fuck" plays off the last "fuck" and how each "fuck" represents a different time in his life when he either said or thought "fuck."  And each time he said or thought "fuck" was for a different reason.  Some of the "fuck"s were happy and some were sad and some were angry.
        He also went on to talk about how Two million seven hundred sixty four thousand nine hundred twelve instances of the word "Fuck" is a reaction to the possibly real, or possibly fictitious book Ford that may or may not have been written in obscurity some time in either the late 1980s or early 1990s by someone who may or may not have been either a highschool or university student (if indeed he was even real) somewhere possibly behind the Iron Curtain or potentially elsewhere in Europe.  The story behind Ford is that this person (who may or may not have even been real) had written a book that was just the word "ford" repeated over and over again, and had used ballpoint pens.  For this person's purposes (if he'd had purposes, and if he'd actually been real) the word "ford" had to've been written by hand, specifically.  Of course, the conceptual reasoning behind this novel has never been made clear-- possibly because the story of the book itself may be a fabrication.
        Regardless, Jerzy had never actually seen a copy of Ford, even though he'd tried to track one down.  As far as he could tell, it had never been published-- even though the news story he'd seen on tv had implied that it was going to be published-- if only by an obscure, arty, independent publisher.
        And Ford had haunted Jerzy through his teen years and into adulthood.  Always in the back of his mind.  The ultimate piece of unreadable art-- and yet, somehow, because of the simple iteration of one word, Ford was also very meaningful.
        "Ford"-- did the word it refer to the car?  Did it refer to crossing and protection?  And if it meant the car, the word still had infinite implication: the multiplicity of the word itself representing the assembly line processes of automobile manufacture and the ever proliferating encroachment of capitalism, and America.  Among other things.
        Or was it a reference to Gerald Ford, John Ford, Henry Ford?
        Or did it refer to crossing bodies of water-- trudging onto war or safety-- or just simply moving is a crosswise way against a current-- either real, imagined, or metaphorical?
        Or did "ford" break down into the cryptic dichotomy "f or d"-- some sort of choice-- and, if so, what did that mean?
        Or did it mean all these things, or none of them?  And why did the human mind, when faced with something utterly strange like Ford want to explain it, make up reasons and potential meanings, or dismiss it altogether as insane junk-- which is also part of a reason-making process?
        The word "ford" was both meaningful and meaningless.  And there was no plot or characterization in the novel, but so what?  There was still a narrative-- because a series of words immediately creates a narrative, even if it is a meaningless narrative.
        But, still, the mind associated each "ford" with something specific.  And, each "ford" changed its meaning, too.  Partially, possibly because the novel worked directly on and with the processes of memory?  A text is not the same when it repeats because there is already a version of it stored in your mind for the repetition to play off of.
        And why did the novel have to be written by hand?
        If the stupid book even existed.
        The spectre of Ford haunted Jerzy for years.  And then in one burst of inspiration he produced Two million seven hundred sixty four thousand nine hundred twelve instances of the word "Fuck".  But he used a computer.  He used cut and paste.  This was partly because he was (he admitted) slightly more lazy than the possibly fictional author of Ford, and also he didn't want to cramp his hand.  But, also, it was a nod to Warhollian mass production.

46.
        And on and on he went, explaining Two million seven hundred sixty four thousand nine hundred twelve instances of the word "Fuck".  And it all made sense.  And it really was a brilliant piece of conceptual art.  And maybe one of the coolest book of the new century.
        But it still was only 2,764,912 instances of the word "Fuck."
        Am I the only person left on the planet with even a shred of sanity?

45.
        Jerzy is also a graphic artist.  He wants to do an illustrated version of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land which is a book that, while apparently very difficult because of the gnarled, archaic style in which it is written, is something I should probably read.
        The book takes place in a far, far future world, millennia-- if not billions of years-- after the sun has either gone out, or been put out by forces of unspeakable evil.
        And then, over hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of years, the Earth gets invaded by all kind of unspeakable, and in some cases indescribable horrors-- aliens, demons, monsters, whatever.  They infest the world.
        And the few million remaining humans live in a gigantic fortress shaped like a pyramid.  And the pyramid is constantly under attack.
        It's a quest story.  The main character, who narrates the novel, is unnamed and he travels through the darkness to find and rescue his true love, who is in a smaller pyramid an unknown number of miles away, in an unknown direction.
        And the imagery in the novel is fantastic and grotesque.  There are huge, towering, mountainous "Watchers" who sit almost perfectly still and stare at the pyramid-- and they, over the course of tens of thousands of years, slowly move closer to the pyramid, readying for attack.  There are weird "hounds" that come out of nowhere, and things known only as "The Silent Ones" that walk along "The Road The The Silent Ones Walk" doing whatever it is they do, silently.  (And, "The Road That The Silent Ones Walk" leads to "The Place Where The Silent Ones Kill.")
        And there are other weird things out there in the dark, too.  Far too many to go into right now.  So says Jerzy.
        And, most of the action in the book takes place in a mysterious, moody halflight where the main character is perpetually menaced by inexplicable, shadowy evils he can only dimly perceive.
        It's, apparently, both very, very spooky and very, very cool.  Unlike most modern "horror."  Even though The Night Land is more like some kind of "dark fantasy" horror/fantasy/science fiction hybrid.

44.
        Also, the book is a dream.  It was written in 1919, back before fantasy evolved and people could get their brains around completely artificial worlds, back before the evolution of fantasy tropes.  And so Hodgson (like people like Poe and Hawthorne and Eddings and Carroll) had to find a way to situate the reader in a weird environment.  So he tells a story of a guy who meets a woman, falls in love with her, and then she dies.  Then he starts dreaming of the earth of The Night Land, and has his adventures.
        However, it's not as trite as it sounds because the narrator is well aware that the him in world of the Night Land is a real guy, who really exists, and also who dreams of the narrator's present.  They are literally the same people in different times, each with different life stories, etc.  And the narrator's lover also exists in both times.  It's a kind of strange reincarnation motif.  So he remembers having two identities that are utterly the same and yet different.  And he remembers being a young man in the future telling weird stories of himself in the past, living in a world that actually has a sun.
        And it gets weirder from there.

43.
        In many ways, says Jerzy, the book is an exercise in extended mood.  A kind of ambient fiction.  The plot itself is a straight love-quest and there really is no characterization.  The thing that drives The Night Land is sheer weird ambiance.  The strange monsters and bizarre settings, the things outside the pyramid, are all utterly horrific and weird and otherworldly-- made even moreso because they cannot be fully glimpsed, and the things they do to you are so awful they can't even really be described accurately because they're too hideous for the mind to fully grasp.  And the world inside the pyramid is so very alien and removed from any kind of reality we understand, it manages to be both unrealistic and utterly plausible.  Part of this is because the pyramid has been there for so long even the people who live in it don't really understand how it works.  And the evil outside is so omnipresent and has been there for so many millions of years everyone accepts it as normalcy.  And, having a narrator that is simultaneously used to the world of The Night Land, and at the same time a fish out of water, only heightens the epic strangeness of the book.

42.
        Jerzy told me all this because I told him about Yog-Sothoth.
        "Oh, you like Lovecraft, then?"
        I said I thought Lovecraft was okay, but that it was really Bob who'd named the gerbil, and it was really Bob who was the big Lovecraft fan.
        "Oh, then you must really read The Night Land.  Lovecraft liked that book and it inspired him, I think.  There are lots of arcane images in its text.  Your husband, he would do well to read it, too."

41.
        "But the language that it is written in is very strange.  It's kind of Victorian and yet not-- sometimes it is barely English.  This might mean it is not a well-written book, but I think it is very well-written because the weird writing makes the book even weirder.  But, then again, sometimes my English is also sort of weird."

40.
        "My illustrations will be better than Phillipe Drullette's.  Although he is good, his illustrations are far too clear.  But he does have a good eye for the size of the horrors in The Night Land."

39.
        There are three lightbulbs in our bathrooms.  One just burned out.  There are now two working lightbulbs in our bathroom.

38.
        That.

37.
        Goddamn.

36.
        Gerbil.

35.
        Has.

34.
        Been.

33.
        Running.

32.
        In.

31.
        Its.

30.
        Goddamn.

29.
        Wheel.

28.
        Since.

27.
        One.

26.
        A.

25.
        M.

24.
        And so when I complain that that fucking gerbil kept me up all fucking night all Bob does is apologize profusely and then he goes and listens to "Lost In The Supermarket" and I've got a dull, deep headache because I finally got to sleep minutes before the alarm went off and then it took me a half an hour just to get out of bed and now I don't even have time to shower and Bob's listening to The Clash and I barely have time to comb my hair and I'm out the door and off to work.

23.
        Thinking about what Jerzy said about Hodgson.  About how he had to frame The Night Land as a dream because it was difficult to situate the narrative in his fantasy setting.  And, if the book is anything like what Jerzy says, the framing sequence works and makes the novel even stranger.  But, still.  He made it into a dream because either he couldn't think of a believable way to place the story in the far far future, or he knew that people just wouldn't read the story if he simply said it was set billions of years in the future-- because readers in the early 1900s couldn't get their brains around a story that didn't have any sort of ties to contemporary times.  In other words, in large part they lacked the imagination to be able to deal with either extrapolation, or the idea of a completely self-contained fantasy world.  And so, it had to be a dream because a world like he describes in The Night Land is just not "sensible."

22.
        Humans tend to just repeat themselves, and other things.  They are mimics, creatures of extreme repetition.  They are comfortable only doing what has been done before.  All you have to do to prove this is listen to Punk Rock, Blues, or Country Music.  Those are genres that have very little actual innovation in them.  People just tend to follow the patterns that have been laid down before.
        Actually, people do this in Techno, Jazz and Classical, too.  Actually, people do this in all music.  So, maybe it's unfair to single out a few genres when all music is virtually crippled by repetition.
        By the same token, though, in many cases if you like one band you will more than likely find more bands that sound pretty close to the one you like.
        There are a few exceptions, because there always are, but in general the idea holds.

21.
        But people, they just follow formulae, they do what's been done before.
        Hodgson had to set his novel in a dream because few people would be able to get their brains around it if he hadn't.  And even earlier quasi-Fantasy stuff like, for example, this book I once read called Vathek, by William Beckford, something that's even earlier than Hodgson-- Vathek's an 18th Century book.  When William Beckford wrote it in France, people framed it as an "Arabic tale" meaning that it was just some sort of fairy tale and, and shouldn't be taken seriously as art.  And even Beckford had to concoct a story that it was a manuscript that he'd found and translated, thus distancing himself from its reality.
        And William Morris who wrote before Hodgson and after William Beckford, okay his books took place in made-up fantasy worlds, but they were still all kind of mediaeval and so had Morris had a very direct anchor to some sort of reality, even if it was only an idealized "reality" that existed in people's romanticized visions of a bygone age.
        And even stuff like Swift, when he wrote Gulliver's Travels it was a "satire," not a novel, and certainly not a Fantasy novel.  Gulliver was a parody of the 18th century Travel Book genre combined with pointed political satire, and it had to be framed in such a way that the readers of it knew it was a send-up, and not a Fantasy novel, and also that Gulliver was in fact insane, thus distancing his narrative (because Gulliver's nuts you can't take the book seriously as a real environment) and at the same time grounding it in a type of reality (everybody knows what a Travel Book is, everybody knows what a nut is, etc.).
        It's amazing that someone like Tolkien came along and created a world that was, while still sort of rooted in myth, something that was more or less a self-contained universe, highly detailed, with its own languages and customs, that have little to no bearings on the "real" world.  He broke the mould.  And even though there were others that broke the mould before him, he still did it in the most sustained and detailed way.
        His vision was something new that didn't just repeat what was before.  And he was a writer who didn't feel constrained to frame his story as a "dream" or as the ravings of a madman, or as some kind of odd found manuscript.
        And then, naturally, everyone imitated him.

20.
        It's almost like we're conformable to repeat the past, over and over-- that whatever we do, we're just rehashing what someone did before us, except that maybe we're modifying it a little bit-- but generally not too much.
        We're herd animals.  We follow.
        And when we try to break away, we still do it in a way that can be still construed as safely following a common path.  We try to break away, but we don't stray too far.
        Or, maybe, it's just difficult for us to think of anything new.  We get in our patterns and we can't think outside them.  And so we make "new" things that are just slight modifications of the things before us.  Not because we're scared of the new, but just because we find it hard to access the new.
        And then one of us occasionally gets a weird random flash of genius and actually thinks of a new way to do something-- and even these new things are usually just recontextualized, radically modified old things-- but they're still more recontextualized and more radically modified that the other things before them.  And so, to us, these "new" things seem truly new.
        And then everyone latches onto this random bit of "original" genius and copies it ad nauseum, until the next random bit of "original" genius accidentally, randomly, appears.

19.
        Unless, of course, the random bit of "original" genius seems too new, and not familiar enough.  And then, in that case, it becomes threatening and "incomprehensible" and so is quickly forgotten.

18.
        There are two working lightbulbs in our bathroom.  One just burnt out.  The bathroom is getting dimmer and dimmer.

17.
        I decided to buy myself a copy of Stoner Witch because I realized I wanted to have a real copy of the cd.  I like the packaging, and I want to support the Melvins.
        I also bought Bullhead, Houdini, the album with the Fantomas (Millennium Monsterwork), 26 Songs, and their trilogy The Maggot, The Bootlicker, and The Crybaby.
        I dropped a lot of money that, frankly, I can't afford to drop-- but who cares.  Sometimes you need to let go.

16.
        I replaced the lightbulbs.

15.
        I think Bob may be jealous of the fact that The Radiohead Guy got me into The Melvins.
        Of course, if I mention this, he'll just apologize to me all night for making me think that he's jealous when really he's not-- he just doesn't see what I see in The Melvins-- or he'll say something to that effect.
        And then he'll keep on apologizing, and then he'll start apologizing for apologizing.  And on and on and on.  Until I get really angry.
        And then he'll start apologizing for making me angry.  And telling me that he can never do anything right.  That no matter how hard he tries he just can't do anything right.
        And he'll do this for a while.
        And then he'll go look out the window at the stars.  For a long time.
        So I'm just keeping my mouth shut.

14.
        Maybe I just simply like The Melvins because they're loud and that way I can't hear Bob asking me if I'm mad at him every three to nine minutes.

13.
        Bob is sick.  And it's all his own damn fault.
        I wasn't home today to share supper with him (I was working late), and so he didn't cook anything (he's been living up to his promise to help around the house because he's unemployed and he's actually a really good cook.  Who'd'a thunk it) and so he "improvised."  "Improvisation" for Bob consists of eating random combinations of things at the spur of the moment.  Sometimes he hits on new, and interesting combinations.  Other times he just gives himself the runs.
        This time, according to him, he ate:
        Three (3) avocados;
        One (1) tin of sardines in chili sauce;
        Four (4) hotdogs with salsa, onions, and cheese;
        Half (1/2) a thing of blueberry yoghourt;
        Some undisclosed amount of Count Chocula cereal (either with or without milk, he didn't make that part very clear);
        And an orange popsicle.
        He also washed it all down with several glasses of pink grapefruit cocktail.
        Now, he's lying in bed, moaning, curled in a fetal position, and holding onto his guts.
        I have nothing more to say.

12.
        Oh yeah, and a jar of olives.  I forgot about the jar of olives.

11.
        Thinking about the night the coffee shop burned.
        So much burned when that thing burned.
        God, that was so long ago, now.

10.
        In The Night Land everybody's menaced by unknown evil.  But they are still menaced.  There's still evil.
        At least evil is something.
        Everything in the novel is scary, but there's still definition.  Evil can be fought.  There are ways of warding it off.
        And, if evil is after you, that means that you are worthy of notice.  That means that you're not nothing.
        And, if evil is after you, that means there's still good.  Somewhere.
        When something is after you, and you're scared because of it, that's not real fear.  That's terror.  That's fight-or-flight.  That's cellular.  It's not intellectual.  It's not real fear.
        Real fear is deep.  It inhabits your mind.  It pollutes your thoughts.  And, it's the result of your thoughts.
        He asks me now if it's okay if he plays with the Playstation.  And I don't care.  Honestly.  He doesn't need my permission.  As long as he doesn't change the tv channel when I'm in the middle of watching it, I don't care what he does.
        For the love of God, what is wrong with him.

9.
        Real fear:  Is this all that there is?
        Real fear:  What is wrong with him?
        Real fear:  God, why did I get married?

8.
        Mom told me not to screw up my life.  Then she asked if I was pregnant.  Then I said no I just love him though and I want to marry him.
        Dad just said is he a jackshit if he's a jackshit he's gonna have me to answer to.  Dad's like that.  Nobody's a jackshit to my little girl.  He better respect you, Heather.
        She said don't make a mistake.
        I said I won't change my name Bob won't want me to change my name.
        He said what if we have children.
        We'll figure that out when and if it happens, Dad.
        So I didn't change my name and we got married and Dad said I love you (he never does that) and Mom cried a bit (which is weird because she always cries a lot no matter what happens you should see her watching movies about Jesus or something where puppies or horses die) and we were married in an empty little unsentimental ceremony which was perfect for both of us.
        Oh yeah, and we loved each other, right?  Okay.
        And now, and now.
        The way he's the cold way he's.
        I can't take this much more.
        Some ideas have to be suppressed, have to be crushed down.  You can't think them because when you make them into thoughts next they become words and when they become words they come to life and you start to live them, they take you over like a virus and live through you and you act them out so some ideas you can't ever think no matter what but:
        Oh, God, why did I get married?

7.
        Mom and Dad told me not to screw up my life.
        I should phone them more.  I should phone them sometimes.  I haven't talked to them in so long.  I should phone them more.

6.
        Okay okay okay.
        Dad asked me why I wanted to marry my boyfriend and then I said but Dad he's not just my boy friend he's my best friend.
        Okay maybe that was a little lame and dorky and maybe I shouldn't've said it but still the point remains.  The point remains.  The point, remains.  Remains.  The point.  It remains.  The point, the point, it, it remains.  It....

5.
        And Mom was like you're sure make sure you're sure and I said I'm sure and she said make sure make sure you're sure I don't want to see my little girl make a mistake....

4.
        And it's, it's the point.
        The point remains.

3.
        Real fear:  That numb ache that turns into sweat and you're trapped inside your body and you can actually feel your borders like a hard wall around your Self and there's an infinite black pit inside your mind.  That warming, heating, burning feeling and you try not to move but your muscles strain your arms, and muscles ripping you fight the urge to punch your face.  That crushing sensation when you're lying in bed where the air gets so thick it starts to smother you and your heart won't stop racing and yet you're calm.  And you can't breathe but somehow you do, anyway.  And your arms and legs are heavy for days on end and you want to run but you can't because your body's too slow and the universe is too dense and if you could move faster then the speed of light you'd shoot forward into your past and say NO.  But you keep moving second by second into the future and you can never achieve the velocity you need to escape because you're bound by laws that shred you to your very core.  And you're very very small.  And if you could change thing it wouldn't matter because they'd find a different way to go wrong.  And no matter what happens you will never give up fighting, even though that's the stupid thing to do.  And nothing is anybody's fault, ever.  And this is all there is.  For ever and ever.  A-fucking-men.

2.
        "Yeah, hi, it's me.  No, yeah.  Yeah no just thought I'd.  Yeah.  It's good to hear you too.  No nothing.  No, yeah.  Uh huh.  Yeah no everything's fine, it's all.  Uh huh.  Yeah.  Yeah.  She didn't.  No, yeah.  Yeah, no everything's okay, everything's fine, everything.  Uh huh yeah, uh huh.  No, everything's, yeah, no, no, I guess, no I guess everything's.  No, no, I lied.  No everything's not fine...."

1.
        The other night, we were in bed.  I was reading a book and he was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling.
        Then he suddenly sat up and said:
        "Killing other people is wrong.  Even if the assholes in power sanction it.  Even if it can't be helped sometimes because there are times (war, being attacked on the street by a psychotic, etc.) when you have to act in self-defense.  Even if there are so many people on the planet now that human life has absolutely no worth."
        I looked at him.  He seemed calm, and sad.  He continued:
        "If I'm so unhappy, if my life is so bleak, if I'm always in so much emotional pain, why don't I just kill myself?
        "Because I can't.  Because suicide goes against the very fibre of my cells.  Because everything living has one and only one function-- to stay alive.  Everything else, every work of art, science, philosophy, thought, beauty and love-- that's all just a happy accident, some sort of side-effect.  That's all.  We are here to live as long as possible, and pass on our genetics like a germ.  That's all.
        "It's in our cells.  You chop a part off a person and that part will stay alive as long as it can.  There is no thought, no premeditation in those cells, they just exist to live-- blindly, coldly, pointlessly live.
        "It's hard to die, but it's easy to stay alive.
        "A newborn baby will struggle to stay alive.  A drunk freezing in a gutter will struggle to stay alive.  Look at war atrocity footage:  People who have been stabbed in the throat will still struggle to stay alive even as their blood spills out into the floor of the camp.
        "The fact that there are so many starving poor people in the world shows that it's easy to stay alive.  They will live and live and live in their shit and poverty and starvation and pain even after their higher brain functions have shut down due to malnutrition.
        "The fact that there are so many derelicts in the streets who constantly fry their brains with drugs and booze-- and when they can't get drugs and booze, they use solvents and gasoline fumes-- the fact that there are so many of these people shambling around, still, after having tried for years to kill themselves, shows that it's very, very easy to stay alive.
        "Staying alive is the easiest thing of all.  It's dying that's hard.
        "It's mustering the courage to finally pull the trigger that you've aimed at your head that's hard.  That's what takes bravery, because in order to kill yourself you have to fight against millions of years of evolution, you have to fight against the force that keeps the species alive-- you have to fight against the strongest instinct there is-- and win.
        "And so, I will keep going, and damn the torpedoes.
        "Because, ultimately, I have to face up to the fact that I just do not want to die."
        I looked at him, I shivered a bit.
        "That's good," I said.  "That's good that you don't want to die.  I don't want you to die, either."
        "Of course," he said, "killing people who want to die is no solution.  Killing is what humans do best-- that is also part of our genetic makeup-- sometimes we have to fight not to kill.  That gets proven again and again and again.  And, frankly, whether one human lives or dies is no one's decision's but the person's in question.  The only person who can truly decide whether an individual lives or dies is the individual him- or herself.  No general, terrorist, cop, judge, jury, president, petty criminal, or serial killer has the right to either kill or force another to kill for any reason whatsoever.  We are individuals.  And that means the decision to live or die is an individual-- not a group, or second-person-- decision.  That is, only you have the right to decide whether you live or die-- not me, or anyone else.  Of course, in cases of self-defense, where instinct takes over, things change.  When sheer instinct takes over because you're attacked, you have the right to fight back-- and if in the heat of the moment, in the middle of defending yourself, something happens-- it's unfortunate but unavoidable.  However, premeditating any death is wrong.
        "Would it be all right if I went out for a walk?"
        "Sure," I said, quietly.
        "You're sure you don't mind?"
        "No... no, I don't mind."
        "Thank you, Heather."
        And he put on his clothes and left for a walk.
        I debated calling 911 because, quite frankly, I was scared.  Not scared that he'd do anything to me, or that he'd do anything to anyone else, but scared for him.  That he'd try to kill himself.
        Instead, I simply stayed awake, reading a book and worrying.
        An hour later, he came back with a Slurpee.  He seemed happy.

0.
        Days went by.  Nothing much changed.  Eventually, Bob stopped apologizing and asking me if I was angry.  About a week later, he got a new job.  Status quo.
 
 

and all the thoughts splintering in  my hea

it's like a clip show, and

port to Toronto, I had both seats to myself.  Alex sat in front of me.  This gave me a chance to sit near the window, and to stretch my legs.  My legs are so long they always get cramped on planes.  And on busses, too, when I don't have both seats to myself.  The window seat also gave me a good chance to watch the city's density increase as we neared its core.
        Toronto is boxy, less organic, mo

collapse.  Collapse with me, with my ev

gh Burroughs was difficult and weird, somehow Pynchon was even more difficult and weirder, and so Gravity's Rainbow began to sweep me away, to take me into weirder, more complex worlds even Burroughs hadn't visited.
        "And I worked at the school paper.
        "And I worked at my book, and Pynchon had begun to flavour it totally and completely, so that even the cut-ups began to take on a weird Pynchon-flavour.
        "And I still read my coverless copy of Cities Of The R

away from this place."
        "But where would you go?" she said.  "Every other place is exactly the same."

as kind of sad," Heather said.
        "Yeah," I said.  "There's a lot of it going around.  The thing is, I don't know what's more depressing, the fact that the guy writing this is so clearly lonely and depressed, or the teenagers who want to mark the rollover by possibly making the biggest mistake of their lives.  We don't need another baby boom.  We ha

re department was only barely able to contain the fire.
        In the end, by sunrise, the fire was completely out.
        In the end, the entire complex the coffee shop had been a such central part of was reduced to ash, blackened wood, smoldering beams, sheets upon sheets of dirty black an

o more driving, no more noise.  Turn off the Merzbow.

ess.
        You blink.
        Maybe you think: "Good God, is there something wrong with Brian?"  (Maybe there is, maybe there isn't.)
        And then you realize that you have been reading.  You have always known you were reading, but this is the first time you have been told directly you are reading:
        Reading black tex

alking it out, sharing ideas and time, it makes you grow even closer.
        "And it is like telepathy.
        "That's the weird thing.
        "I don't care what Brian think

CE UPON a time, there was a cute little mouse.  He lived in a magic kingdom in the middle of an enchanted forest.  Or at least the thought he lived in a magic kingdom in the middle of an enchanted forest.  And, as we all kn

fear.
        Fear.

istening to the news on the radio, pretending that all the stories I hear are of a piece, chapters in a huge novel.  Imagining connections, causal relationships, between an exploding bomb in Iraq and a lottery winning back home.  Or maybe something to do with sports because sports is the most trivial and meaningless thing I can conceive of.
        But, how could they be connected?
        An oil tanker sinks somewhere in the Atlantic, how is this connected to an old man finally getting his new liver?  How is the old man finally getting his new liver directly tied to yet another series of suicide bombings in Iraq?  What relationship do the suicide bombings have with new developments of super miniaturized ID tags that are almost microscopic and can be read by the computer ten feet away from the terminal because they broadcast low-frequency radio waves?  How are the ID tags connected to the promise of another mild winter?  How is the winter connected to soccer scores in Brussels?  And so on.
        How can these things be made to relate?

writing on walls.  Burning dow

e city, driving in circles, turning endless corners, around blocks and blocks, closing my orbit, and spiraling inwards, tighter and tighter, circling nothin

but people are already complaining about them because we're not supposed to play God or whatever.  I'm getting really sick of being told I'm not supposed to play God.  Seeing as how I've always wanted to be God, I find this attitude to be kind of, well, an irritant.  I mean, how dare some Van Morrison-listening, goateed, fundamentalist, hemp-wear

my love

November 17, 1999:  I am outside and lights are streaking the sky.  It is a meteor storm.  And even though where I sit and write these words the sky is covered with clouds, through writing I can still place myself on a hill in Asia, all alone, hands in pockets, breathing fresh cool air, looking up.  The meteors enter the atmosphere and burn up, making long bright lines.  There are thousands of them.  The sky is alive, flickering, streaking.  I could read by this light.
        And then time passes and they die out.  The meteor storm is over.  The sky is dead and cold again.  And here I am, at my com

radio on, and all the while I'm too busy listening to what it tells me about "life

"Well, I guess I could talk about 20-sided gaming dice or maybe grapefruit juicers but they I don't think they've really changed the world all that much, sorry."

SCENE:  Still ruins.  What did you expect?

sincere drive to destruction is indeed evidenced, the type of "destruction" Cotts is calling for, is still, however, unclear.  Clarity, however, has never been the primary issue in the body of *30*, and so the lack of any real cohesion or clarity in the many small, yet overwrought, chapters of

Driving in circles, around the city.  Tired.  Must stop driving in circles around the city.

onship.  But because I'm here alone they seem to isolate me a little more.  But it is through this isolation that I can see them all the more clearly.)  There is a message here, a code that is easy to crack:  Subtly and quietly we are telling Nature that we have won.  No matter what

At home:
        The tv:
        There's a special about outer space hotels on one channel, and an ad for a very special Oprah on another.  There's always a very special Oprah.  In this ad, her fat, selfconsionsly emotional and "concerned" face is all puffy and round and looks like it's on the verge of pretending to blubber.  Everyone, now on cue, cry with Oprah.  Get it all out.  That's it.  Sweet, sweet release....
        I turn back to the thing on outer space hotels.  I would pay thousands of dollars to go to a hotel in outer space.  Just to be up there, in Zero Gee, drifting and bouncing off walls, looking down at the earth and up into infinite blackness.  Listening to the sounds the air filtration system makes.  Trying to drink balls of water that drift and wobble in front of me.
        I like to think that there wouldn't be any Oprah in outer space, but sadly she would probably still make her way up to the hotel.
Ý      And, there's also the matter of the radio-tv-sattelite-whatever signals, the ones that are free from the confines of cable and so are totally willing and able to go drifting off into the void unchecked forever.  Laurie Anderson has a routine about that, Carl Sagan wrote a book about that.  And yep, all that stuff about radio and television signals drifting forever into infinity, it's true-- and Oprah will be there, all fatfaced and sobbing and meaningful and "sensitive."  Traveling deeper and deeper into space, getting weaker and weaker as she covers more and more area.  But she'll always still remain.  There will always be trace residuals of Oprah blending into, yet still very minutely differentiated from, the humming and crackling background radiation we highjack and hitch all our pathetic signals to.
        Makes me sick.
        There is no escape from Oprah.  Even deep space.  Even if we were t

cause this knowledge recedes almost as quickly as it comes upon you, in a way you are-- they tell you you're just paying lip service to an idea-- which, again, because of the regression of memory, in a way you are.  But you know that for a nanosecond you were very close.  And you know that they also have had this experience, this panic and terror, being brushed by nullification, but for them it's also receded into memory, and that they too, on some level know that language cannot describe it, that it is distanced from language, that in a way, it is even distanced from experience, because what it is is a flickering glimpse of the opposite of being.... And so I bolted awake, for a

rnoon.  Waiting at a bus stop.
        "There's something I've noticed about manga," I said.  "And anime."
        Kim drank her SoBe and cars drove by.
        "What?" she said.
        "Have you ever noticed-- I noticed this a long time ago but I never started thinking about it till recently-- all the white light?"

bought her a cute little pet-rock-bug-type-thing.  And he bought himself some sea monkeys.
        I'm a cynical bastard (or so I've been told) so I bought nothing for nobody.

warm day.  Becky and I are just getting back from wandering around the city, shopping together, eating out, talking.  She approaches the house-- the way to the door is up a flight of stairs, and
Becky, having come from California where they don't have a need for basements and furnaces, doesn't like stairs-- she ascends carefully and I follow her up.  We put our bags on the floor and she says something, and we both laugh.  Then she notices that the answering machine light is on.  She walks over to the machine and presses the REWIND button, then PLAY.
        The voice on the tape is Robin's.  He's calling from Chemainus.  He has just heard that yesterday, at 6:50 PM, William S. Burroughs died after having a massive heart att

, yet.  If ever again.
        And knowing that made me feel like I was choking.  And it made my mouth dry.  And it made me want to scream.
        And I can't really describe this p

alk about that Karlheinz Stockhausen quote and about how his weird metaphor about the 911 attacks being a work of art by Lucifer or something was totally misinterpreted by a typically ignorant media, and so because of this it offended everybody, and then pe

at all you can ever do, no matter how hard you try, to connect, to fix things, to alter anything, no matter how trivial or important.  Utter helplessness in the face of things you could never hope to understand.
        Also, fragmentation

What about pornography?" he said, uncharacteristically prudish.  "What about the prurient and the obscene?"
        "Not even that," I said, "because you can't define it."
        I told him yo

ter the coffee shop burned down, Heather had found herself unemployed and lost.  School was expensive, and married life (she found) really wasn't that much cheaper than being single.
Especially when her husband was just as unemployed as sh

After all, why shouldn't the sky have girders and supports?  Why shouldn't the sky be inside?  Why shouldn't there be absolutely no difference between the ceiling of a mall and the infinity of
space?
        I mean, it's all the same stuff, right?  Everything is made of the same particles, in the end.  In the end all we are all just fluctuations in quantum foam.  Or maybe accretions of some sort of basic particle/not-particle things that aren't really things at all and defy all common sense and logic.  So the ceiling of the West Edmonton Mall and the sky over Edmonton are simply abstract probabilities made concrete, are both made out of the same core presence.

cannot lose what one does not have, Bob."
        "There's a first time for everything.  Even if you didn't have credibility, you'll never get credibility now."
        "Oh, who needs credibility anyway.  There.  I'm ou

implies that, here at least, 1999 won't be ending with a bang, or a whimper, but instead a resigned sigh.
        She knows him too well:
        He was always difficult to approach.

A highschool shooting in Erfurt, East Germany.  How 20th century.  How 1999.  How "Graceful Monsters."  How pathetic.  Disgruntled youths, and highschool violence.  Come up with your own
shtick.

There is no such thing as the trivial.
        There is no such thing as the important.

godgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgodgod

IT SOUNDED LIKE THE FABRIC OF REALITY WAS BEING RIPPED APART.  IT SOUNDED LIKE SHARDS OF BROKEN GLASS CUTTING INTO MY MIND.  IT SOU

stroy the world.
        526.  I want to destroy the world.
        527.  I want to destroy the world.
        528.  I want to destroy the world.
        529.  I want to destro

her.
        She slumped, and thought about bed.  Thought about the covers tight against her feet.  The softness of pillows and the warmth of a comforter.
        Growing up, she had had a bed with a footboard, and this had made the sheets tight against her feet.  And now

But that's just me.)  So I do maintain that he's good, and when he's on the ball he's funny.  There's even a trace of humour when he says stuff like, 'There's nothing outside the text.'  Which brings us back to Gorgias."
        "Just what the hell is that supposed to mean?"

her son.
        Another voice:  "Buddhists were rioting the other day.  Couple weeks ago."
        "What the hell kind of Buddhist riots?"
        "I don't know.  But it was pretty bloody."
        "Aren't they all supposed to be non-violent?"
        "Yeah."
        "Why were they rioting?"
        "I have no idea...."
        Third voice:  "And what about those girls in Mexico?  Said they found an alien skull?"
        And I buy my snowman and I get the hell out of there and on my way out of the mall I hear a voice saying:  "Brian.  Is that you, Brian?"
        And I turn and it's some woman I have never seen before.  But still, somehow, she's sort of familiar.
        I pretend to know her.

the clouds below me.  They looked solid, like I could walk on them.
        Yesterday, Rebecca told me that she would be turning 30 soon.  And she, like me, had a big plan, some sort of artistic project to commemorate her 30th birthday.
        "You've got *30*," she said.  "That's about you.  That's your big 30 statement.  I'm also doing something."
        I asked her if the substation picture was a part of it.
        "I really wish I would have been able to spend more time with you," she said.  "Take care, ok

THIS!  MUST!!  STOP!!!  NOW!!!!

fear:

Everyone is wrong about everything.  Always.

home, home, home, home, home.
        In front of the tv, now.  On the couch.
        Eyes crossing.  Needing sleep.
        Clip show over.
        Trapped.
        The noise from the tv.
        The tv is the only light in this room.
        It's been a long, long day.  Driving around in circles.
        Exhausted.
        Nodding off.  Eyes closing, chin down.
        I drove and drove and drove.  Feels like weeks, no, months.  But still, outside, it's dark.
        I needed something.  I didn't find it.
        Partly, because I'm not sure what I need.
        Except sleep, now.
        The tv gets louder.  I start awake.  Sort of.
        It's an infomercial.  That's what's on, now.
        I reach for the remote control.  I key-in a dead channel.
        No sound, and a soothing sky blue.
        And then, I close my eyes.
        I can see the blue from the tv through my eyelids.
        And then, darkness.
        Darkness.
        Darkness and sleep....

Next:  *30*
 

Epilogue 73.
Epilogue 71.
INDEX.
HOME.