I just dragged a razor across my face for way-too-long. Maybe four minutes. I’m not even sure why I shaved. I thought about it, yesterday, while taking a bath: Am I going to remember this bath? Probably not! Nothing out of the ordinary happened. I ate my apple and banana and drank my orange juice and had my bowl of honey-dripped grains swimming in soy milk.

I bathed, too.

That’s what I do, now: I clear up time. I make room for more nothing-to-do-and-no-one-to-see. If I eat my fruits and grains while I’m letting the conditioner to set in, hell, that’s some good time management, as far as I’m concerned. When I showered more (as opposed to taking baths), I used to brush my teeth while the conditioner set in. Now I take my morning-to-late-afternoon-breakfast.

Anyway, that’s all I remember. It is, yes, a rote thing — eating breakfast in the bathtub. As I shaved the spiny black hair from my soupy-sad face tonight, I thought, you know, I’ve accepted doing this for the rest of my life. When I first saw the tides of testosterone flooding my system ten years ago, or whatever, I told my dad, “This is nice, having to shave like this.” He said, “You don’t really have much of a choice, either way.”

When I first started piloting a two-ton vehicle in order to go, well, somewhere, I told him, “This isn’t that great.” His reply was the very same, “No choice, really.”

And I guess that’s it, huh. It doesn’t matter if I like shaving, or driving a car (I don’t know like either), it’s just something I have to do.

Which reminds me: the garbage needs to be taken to the curb.

I did the math, recently, and determined how many more times I’ll have to take the trash down to the curb. It wasn’t a startling number. It was, yes, a rough estimation, no matter how you look at it. I don’t even know if I’ll be producing waste in the next ten years — maybe I’ll be dead! Maybe my development will have dumpsters — I don’t know. Maybe the garbage-men will all be dead.

Maybe everyone will be dead.

And anyway, my skin looks terrible. I took a picture of myself the other day for no reason other than I wanted to know what I looked like at that exact second and apparently I have purple-white skin. It looked horrifying. I noticed this while shaving, too, just now. Have I stopped looking at myself in the mirror in the morning? Do I have no idea what I look like anymore?

I guess not!

God, I looked spooky as hell.

I think that maybe I’m only looking for specific things when I look in the mirror, which is to say that I’m looking for something wrong. In the same sense, I never really even consider that I work in Baltimore, because I’m all ever in one tiny corner of it, and that’s inside of a building with one enormous window that overlooks an overpriced vanity condominium complex that a whopping total of nine people live in. Beyond that is the harbor. The hell if I know what it looks like anymore. As soon as I’m doing pecking around with my hands in my pockets for six to seven hours, I tunnel-vision it back to my car and drive to exactly the only place on this earth that is Mine.

Which is, generally speaking, the only place I ever go.

Which is where I shave my face because I have to, whether I find it fun to do or not. I don’t find it fun to do. It’s winter. It’s dry. My face stings like a God damned jack-o-lantern snorting cocaine. My hands look like they’re inhabited by restless earthworms, I notice now as I type up this coal-black schlock that no one — not even myself — ever reads. And you were wondering why it seemed like I never proofread!

No, you weren’t!

So, I’m driving to Virginia tomorrow, though I’m not sure why. I told my boss-man, “Hey, I’m out of here, man. I’m going to Japan and I’m not sure why.” I say this every year. He said, “Okay.”

Really, why am I going? Because I have to? I don’t know! I’m truthfully asking! Do I have to do this, whether I want to or not? Does that even matter?

Questions, questions!

There’s no one to see! No one ever calls! Who is this nebulous “no one” anyway, I wonder. I asked this guy I know if he wanted to maybe get dinner with me, and I jokingly said, hey, if you’re too embarrassed to do anything with me, I understand. He never replied. He said, “Talk to you later,” and then . . . nothing. A lot of days went by. I should have assumed then that my joke was not taken as a joke, but I went on in this way just because I felt like it, I guess, told him just today that I was still waiting for a reply. He then invited me to do something that was already going to happen anyway, whether I was invited to show up and say stupid things or not.

Also: On the twenty-third, a day before the day before “the day that matters,” (I guess!), I’m going to, for whatever reason, have dinner with some people that I barely know. I think that I will maybe not say a whole lot of things that night. I’ll just stuff my face with rice and think about buying boots (I need to buy some boots for Sapporo). I am, as I have repeated nonsensically for months and months now, God damned tired. I am changing a lot of things, and I guess I should take the hint as soon as my comprehension allows and realize that a lot of other people are trying to change a lot of other things about their lives, too. Maybe sometimes that includes not returning phone calls and messages, and to a greater extent, maybe that doesn’t include including me.

So, this dinner. I am indifferent. Honest! If it happens, that’s something. If not, I will find Something Else to do. My phone book has dwindled to damn-near no one at all in the past year. There’s that “no one” again — the absence of someone who once existed, but exists no longer — at least in my small orbit. I’m just a flake of laundry detergent, man. I’m just a fucking upside-down penny.

You want to know what’s lonely as fuck? When you want nothing! Hey, look — I promise not to get into this bowl of oatmeal again, but really, the small wisps of smoke that dot the sky tell me that people want things, and that they’re after them, and that they have no room in their lives for silly black-haired children who have lived longer than most children live, and refuse to be anything other than silly black-haired children for the rest of their want-nothing lives.

This dinner is going to be about none of that! The company will expect me to say the same stupid things, but I don’t think that I will comply, this time. I think that I will just be heavy-headed and heavy-tongued and just eat my meal and sleep and wake up and sleep and wake up and eventually I’ll be on a plane that will take me to a foreign country. There I can stare at shadows and think of water and see smoke and hear sirens and walk on trains and at the top of skyscrapers reach up to see the lowest rung of God’s heaven, which is maybe in Korea or something.

. . . not really sure if I’m even going to publish this on THE INTERNET yet. Still debating!

Will I break my six-month streak of sludge-sucking nonsense and say way too specific sludge-sucking nonsense??

I think I will, actually.

You know, last year on Christmas eve I went to an internet cafe in Ogikubo and drank three gallons of hot chocolate while waiting for a friend to get out of the gym, and then I went to this friend’s house and watched six episodes of season four from Seinfeld, and man, I don’t know. I’ll be home this year, a place I wanted to be last year, and I don’t really particularly want to be here right now. I said to the occupants of my bedroom, just now, that I may just kill myself on Christmas, because I’m not really sure what else I’m supposed to do once that twenty-four hours sets in. Sit in chairs? Drive around?

. . . open presents?

There are no presents to open. I guess I will be sitting in chairs! And driving around!

I am excited about this!!!

(Aren’t you just enthralled that I’m not being abstract, today? That I’m not the gum at the bottom of William Blake’s gold-tipped boot?)

Anyway, if I end up alive at sunrise on Jesus’ birthday, I will go to a place west of the only place that’s ever mattered to me and pal around with the only people I ever want to be around. And that includes my grandmother, God help her. I hope, yes, that there will be snow on the ground still. And I hope that we can pile logs into the wood stove and regale fondly the technology of our springtime years.

And I will comment on the savagery of the wind, and the toll it has taken on my thankless legs.

I am certain that my skin will have melted into an even purpler purple-white, by then. I’ll be downright reflective come the morning of the twenty-sixth.

And then away I go on an airplane, bubbling, bubbling, bubbling.