I have set up my computer at my black wooden desk. It’s in the corner of my rectangular room. It is neat and free of dust. I have kept it this way for a specific purpose. This is one of the habits I have formed in the last six months since I began really putting all my manpower into this project of mine. It’s not so much a big project. It’s not even all that important. It’s meaningless, really.

The project is me.

Let’s see: Once the computer is on the desk, I go to work with the rest of the room, busily adjusting this and that and so on.

Everything has to feel right before I put my mind-pencils to work. These fingers — they strike the keys so fast! I am quick, because I have something to say.

Like me, it isn’t that big. It isn’t even all that important. It’s meaningless, really.

I turn the lights out. I don’t like the lights on when I’m crawling around in there. I need it to look like my head. My head is dark. It smells of soy candle wax and Tibetan incense. So I make my room smell like that, too.

My room is, essentially, my mind.

It is what my mind looks like.

To the computer I connect small, extending speakers to be placed in my ears. I listen to horrifying music. It helps to wheedle the words out of there.

Before I do any of this, there are words and sentences and pictures and ideas in my head ready and waiting. They are ripe and quickly rotting. All of this quivers and pushes at my skeleton to get out. And so I let it, usually.

When it stays in me, I feel death-pale and useless and deflated.

I’m going to talk about the deflation of human beings in a bit. So hold on tight.

It’s going to be gut-quakingly, beautifully meaningless.

Which is perfect for the subject matter.

It’ll make your gut quake.

This music–

Oh! Great God, it’s the apocalypse in a tin can, all wrapped up in sweating metal, bloating and itching and alive and dead at once.

It is alive because we can hear it.

It is dead because everything is dead, when all is said and done.

Only the apocalypse survives the apocalypse. And here it plays on my little plastic headphones. Angry violins and cellos and all of that. Guitar strings plucked by the black, black bones of sentient skeletons. Thank you for this, my friends. I wouldn’t be able to mine the brain in my head without you. And I have struggled with it for a long time, and finally I can do it. I can speak about the colors and shapes in my head, and maybe someone will read it. Maybe it makes them angry, or maybe they cry. But I can say it still. It is here and not there, anymore. But there is always something there . . . And so forever I will say things here.

And I will warn you again, friend: It is all meaningless. And so are you.

I brushed my teeth before I sat down to write here. This is another habit I have nailed to the ground. I brush my teeth three times a day, no way around it.

The words came pouring into my head as beautiful, simple fragments and I tried to catch every one of them by the tail as they sprang from the cauldron and down the sink. Stay! Do not go! I need you!

I need to tell people about you.

And here is what they were:

I bought a pair of regal slacks for ten U.S. dollars. For those of you in the back row, ten U.S. is roughly the value equivalent of three acorns and two palm-sized stones. Or two acorns and a pack of cheap smokes.

And so I bought these slacks because they were rather nice to my eyes and to the skin on my legs. I liked the way they felt. I liked them, as far as slacks go. They were real nice.

They were on sale because no one else thought that they looked or felt good. They were unwanted, so I took them home with me. There I would look at them and feel them on my legs. The slacks weren’t happy about it. They weren’t sad, either. They weren’t alive.

But an hour before, I was still in this garbage can. Still around deflated suckbags. Still in the proximity of stupidity and senseless hatred. There in this place were three young men. They walked toward me, and I them. I looked ahead.

After ten seconds of languid locomotion, they had slipped out of my peripheral vision. One of them decided to say something just as this happened. He said a big, nasty word, followed by an even worse one: the abbreviated form of my least-favorite word. He said this:

“Fucking fag.”

The blood in my chest exploded. I was almost surprised by it. My brain had understood it and quickly processed it. It discarded of the contents as the lowest form of waste. It was a vacuous thing to say to someone, and an entirely hollow thing to utter to a complete stranger. This combination of unfortunate language is one of the most bottomless, asinine things that any human being can ever let slip from their lips. It is covered in blood and shit, buried in sludge and at the bottom of an ocean of human waste.

He said it in such a hushed tone that he almost seemed to be ashamed of himself.

And I’m sorry if he wasn’t.

So: The red sticky stuff in me sprang into every crevice in my bony human being chest — which I imagine is quite a space to fill, what with all of the heat I felt. I spun around after the second syllable, still walking.

His mouth was agape and his eyes were without any light in them. I suddenly felt alone in the way that the big gray glob in my head receives and distributes cosmic and physical sparks of electricity. I felt in me a great sadness. I wasn’t at all angry or offended in the slightest. I felt only sadness.

I told the cashier this when I bought these fancy new slacks of mine. They’re in the dryer, right now. I’m drying them because I love them, and I hope to wear them soon. I will wear them in my house. I won’t even go anywhere. I will feel them on my legs and thank them for existing in this time and place and for being of so little value to any other human being.

By God, the fucking sludge I trudged through for a pair of ten-U.S.-dollar-valued slacks. I could have stayed at home and saved my three acorns and my two palm-sized stones, by God.

Anyway: The cashier said something anyone would say, “Maybe he was having a bad day.”

And maybe he was having a bad fucking life!

But I was polite. I smiled — and this was a very rare smile, for it was a genuine one — and appreciated the simplicity of her explanation. It had been an explanation tinged in something that I don’t believe in, because I don’t believe in things that do not exist: hope.

Hoping is, after all, wishing.

It’s a hollow thing to do.

It’s meaningless, really.

And now we are home . . .

Home with these regal slacks!

Home away, home away . . . from jackapes and bloodless swine.

Hm, and now I think I hear a train coming, though there are no tracks in sight. And now I think I hear drums being beaten like pallid leather, though there are no drums to speak of. And now I think I hear violins being snapped at violently like the webs of homeless spiders, clinging to each drifting note like static electricity, playing metrically beautiful little sounds that resonate in the halls of black chambers, and in the homes of serial killers.

And now I think I hear music . . .

The slacks are drying still. And the incense continues its cannibal craw, consuming itself and leaving only small clouds of black smoke where matter once existed. It all turns to dust!

And now I think I hear music . . .

I have taken a break from my Project in order to build a Bridge. I am building a Bridge in order to connect here with there.

And there is so very far away, sometimes. I see it only through fog and lights and mirrors, never with my own sight, and only in the panting emptiness of soon-forgotten dreams. And I try still to translate these shapes and colors before they drain from my fingers and eyes and leave behind only a pale man who loiters endlessly on gray hills with teacup eyes and dark brown skies.

A thousand words in ten U.S. minutes. And I feed, feed, feed the Incurable Sadness Machine. Oh, treacherous fiend. Fucking king of slaves, beast of beasts.

I place a finger on the key with the Command key, and then Shift, and finally the Number Eight. It is my favorite number, because it is simply two zeroes that loop on and on. I like pressing the Number Eight.

The screen goes black and white and inverted and ugly. This is what everything looks like to me.

Only then can I empty out the spider-webbed place up, up, up.

Up where my eyes have always seen All, and where I feed the Incurable Sadness Machine.

I will feed it until the day I die.

If there’s something I love, it eats it. And how I love so very little now, it seems.

It is, after all, Incurable.

And now I think I smell leaves burning . . .

I am a human being covered in flesh and bones and muscles and veins. I am filled with the sticky red stuff. When something gets my goat, it boils in me suddenly and explodes in my bony human being chest like a wind-up clock. And then something in me speaks this:

“Tick, tosh.”

It says this forever and ever and on and on and the sticky red stuff boils and boils, all submerged in aggressive fluid and bad feelings.

It eats me.

And then I feed it.

Lord God, do I feed it.

. . . hm.

A friend called me tonight. She called me because she felt lonely. She called me because she didn’t want to feed her own Incurable Sadness Machine. She had a case of the Blue Shadows. She needed to talk to an expert.

She said: Everyone is drinking, they’re smoking. Everyone is doing nothing that I want to do. Everyone hates what I want to do.

What she wanted to do was this: not drink, not smoke.

It was an organic and real thing to say. It breathed and sighed and crawled out of her throat like an escaping spirit. It crept into my ears. It curled up and lay there like a stone.

She felt full of good feelings again when she said this. Or least she’d gotten rid of the bad ones.

Still, the Blue Shadow remained there, lurching and quivering like red gelatin. And the outside air made her knees cold and her head quake. Her body sought to counterbalance this: It filled the bony chest in her human body with the sticky red stuff. It exploded in there like a wind-up clock, the alarm still screaming as each part that made it up — that made all of this screaming possible — was torn and twisted from its intended location in space, stripped of its only purpose in The Big Meaninglessness. Each part dug into her human being body, and she felt human being pain. I told her, “That’s a feeling I know.” This seemed to fill her with good feelings. Or at least it momentarily got rid of the bad ones.

And now I think I see a pale little boy . . .

We spoke of the Incurable Sadness Machine, and off tar-black pornography that simmered in the guts of loveless streets, and of the bloody animals thrown screaming into grinders and mashers and electronic hell, and of the feelings felt just before feelings no longer exist, anymore. We spoke of God and of human beings, of human beings and their gods, of the selfishness of it all, of the waste. We spoke of human beings who want things, and of the microscopic demographic who wanted nothing at all. We were speaking of ourselves when was spoke this last part.

And I said something honest to her, that I don’t love so many people, these days.

And I said this because there aren’t so many people to love, anymore.

They have all gone away, said I. They have marched on with no light in their eyes, no flickering of the organ in their bony human being chests, where the sticky red stuff is made. There are no explosions of wind-up clocks, no concern for the big blue ball and the legged things that walk on it. They want things that everyone wants, and haven’t stopped to wonder why, haven’t given themselves the opportunity to remove the tumors that grow like grapefruits.

They all want food, because food is something that tastes good on human being tongues. They all want sex, because sex feels good to human being sex-organs. And when they can’t have sex, they all want tar-black, wheezing pornography, because pornography feels good to human being sex-organs, and looks good for the loathsome creature that inhabits the minds of flickerless jackapes, the ones without light in their eyes. The bodies that eat and shit and fuck and jerk off and lie and hate and submerge themselves always, always in selfishness and bad feelings . . .

And now I think I am a pale little boy . . .

To love because love feels good. To lie-say, “I love this human being simply because I do,” without any thought behind the irrationality and the incomprehensible stupidity. To look for love, I told this girl, is a sick, sick thing to me. Whereupon this love is discovered, randomly, through loneliness and self-pity and idiocy, and here it is: it is speckled with innocuous little lies that fester and consume and hide the light from the sun and the thoughts from small brains.

She says she loves this one guy — he’s a human skeleton covered in lots of things, too, but she says she just doesn’t know. I don’t know, either. I tell her this: “I don’t know anything about that.” I say to her that she should only love him if she really does, and not because she thinks she has to, and not because she wants to be loved in returned. I tell her this again: “I don’t love so many people, these days,” and “Maybe there will come a day when no so many people love me, either.”

She shivers because she is cold, there on that iceberg . . .

And the bloody animals are thrown screaming into thirstless machines that spin metal wheels and turn rusty cogs and continuously, always, ceaselessly mash bone and meat and eyeballs and nostrils and ears and feelings to feed the gutless human beings who look out for me and me and me and me . . .

Wake up!

Wake up, Goddammit.

Or, spin the metal wheels, and turn the rusty cogs. And hunt endlessly for love, and food, and sex, and masturbation, and money, and good feelings, never once seeing that place just beyond the stratosphere of your own stupid life.

I can hear it right this second, in this space, as this human being with thoughts and fingers and access to the internet . . . The train rumbles on like death-quaking apocalypse, and the drums shake the walls of my home, my there, and the violins mathematically pluck threaded metal in the dark, dark night, all submerged in pancake batter and bad feelings.

Control and then Shift and then Eight. And I can see everything so clearly now, and I can write so clearly now, and I can think so clearly now . . .

She spoke of subjects still. Each played out in my mind in inverted black and white, so that I could understand it all. I wouldn’t have understood it otherwise. I felt like weeping and sinking into snow. I thought again of the black, black things.

She sounded so sad, alone there in her sinking iceberg. I said, I am sinking on my own iceberg.

“Tick, tosh.”

I told her: Good-bye, lady. Good-bye, good-bye.

I went away to brush my teeth and say my nighttime prayers.

I had to let burn Tibetan incense and turn off the lights and let spill out from my head many words there were ripe and quickly rotting, and meaningless. The shapes and colors up there melted into a human language that I speak and that other human beings speak. When spoken, it sounds like a wind-up clock exploding. And when heard, it sounds like cheddar cheese and fat sex.

It began: “I am a human being covered in flesh and bones and muscles and veins.”

And when I wrote this I swear that I could hear what I ponder now was sweet music. It was the sound of the apocalypse.

It sounded like this:

“Tick, tosh.”