I had, up until three years ago, lead a wonderfully vibrant fantasy life.

That life has since ended. It ceased to be, yes, three years ago.

Since that time, since The Fall, I have been living in shell craters filled with mustard gas, wheezing and panting and sweating out of my eyeballs. Dear friend!, it has not been a vibrant three years. It is a stinking, dull place I live in now; everything is sunken and deflated and filled with cockroaches. These cockroaches would be identified by cheery, yip-yipping pollyannas as members of the human race, who would then scold me for referring to my species-brothers as abhorrent insects. I would then squelch their irrepressible optimism with bile camouflaged as the language we both share, and I would be asked, quite bluntly, to take my opinions elsewhere, because there do exist good people and no one likes a cake-shitter.

And now I shit on your cake:

No, actually, I don’t think I will. I think that tonight I will speak harshly of myself. I’ve been hard on you, you gut-leaking, snot-sniffing, duffel-bag-filled-with-cigarette-smoke-smelling cockroaches.

I am a sorry man, which is not to suggest that I’m about to apologize for alluding to the fact that your guts leak. No, I am a battered, horrid sack of rotten turnips. I won’t apologize for that. Here I am!

I am writing to you because I know that despite my exhaustion, I must stay awake to say things. The solution to my weariness, of course, is to sleep; that I will not do. For, on the two-dimensional time-line that runs parallel to everything you and I do every single day, the next big event on my time-line is “go someplace I don’t want to be and do things I don’t want to do and make money I don’t want to have.” And after that, there will be hours to fill, and liquids to be consumed, and baths to be taken, and messages to be returned. Then we can do it all over again, and one of fifty-two is over, and number two of fifty-two begins, and we count on in this manner until we can look behind us and realize that we did little else with those fifty-two fragments of a greater whole than peck at the ground and say useless things. Every day, one of fifty-two begins again. There isn’t an end, no, but we call this “last year.” The year I drag myself through now is smoke and dim light. “Last year” will then feel identical to how I will feel tomorrow when I am scheduled to present my warm, movable body for living wages — someplace I don’t want to be.

Lord, I’m so tired.

I saw a worm sleeping on the sidewalk just the other day; he was sleeping forever. The ants had come out of the ground to take what they wanted as their own. They did so carelessly. The worm just lay there; it couldn’t move; it was dead. I thought about my own body being picked apart by vultures and cockroaches that are supposedly of the same genetic make-up as me. I thought of it rude how they did so while I am still here blinking and uttering tiny sentences in between storm clouds and chilly winds — and I am here, am I not? — and how each step is a fifteen-ton blast of ammunition and gunpowder, how every breath is a ragged lung excreting poison and laughing gas, how silence is a shameful friend. The ants crawled and chewed and hurried about.

And as the ants take what they will, I ask: was it not your body first, brother worm?

Lord, I’m so tired.

I’m so tired.