In considering the worst seconds of my adult life, and I have so many to consider — they’re just seconds, after all, and I’ve got a lot of them — I have landed, flopped, against the checkerboard and from my mouth you will find something oozing, something black.

I stood up and drove around. It’s all I do — drive around.

Weeks ago I visited a dead girl in a cemetery where she sleeps in the ground, breathes with the planet. I pleaded with her to come back to life. Everyone’s lives would be a lot better if she would wake up. I pleaded, too, for a dead man in a city far away to get the bullets out of his head and come see me sometime. No one said anything. A cold wind blew, and I just sort of stood there and felt like a counterfeit jerk. My lungs were lined in cello strings and tinfoil balls. It was winter; it still is. It’s always going to be winter, as far as I can tell.

The dead girl didn’t end up coming back to life.

And neither did the dead man with bullets rattling around in his dead head.

When we put her in the planet to sleep forever, I knew that on that day — and I remember that day — the one where an innocent little girl went away from us, from everyone, and hid her face in the dirt — that jokes weren’t jokes, anymore, and little children had grown up into men — men who bury the dead.

I never did get to say good-bye to the other fellow.

Is he buried somewhere? I don’t know. Everyone’s buried somewhere, I reckon, in some sense or another.

The two of them have stopped growing, stopped existing. People still love them. People still think of them from time to time. It’s all we’ll ever do, I guess.

See: when the snow was falling — and it fell, let’s be clear — I was chained to the ground, again, hauling boxes around in my brain, again, firing electricity into warehouses filled with pictures that will never fade, only blur, and viewing worlds through eyes that should be in February, in 2010, in a little house near a harbor town that I once loved — and I’m not sure why — and presently despise — and I’m not sure why.

And how I am so envious of the little children in my head! I can’t get over it — being jealous over the minds of children.

I sometimes wonder, as I did when the snow fell — and it fell, let’s be clear — if I’ve simply overstuffed my head. I wonder, too, that if I’m having trouble laying down new memory, new abilities because my head is full, or if my attention is focused on all of those old boxes that I place here and there and put away for a while only to be taken out again, viewed again, each sweep of every memory overturned corroding it a little more, giving way to sunlight that frays its picture and ceases to be an image, but a paragraph that my mind assimilates into a picture.

I have this image in my head — and I have so many, don’t you know — of my father leaving me one night — like he did so often, don’t you know — and he tells me, “Son, don’t ever cry when I leave.” He lies, for some reason: “It’s all right.” He’s wearing a black robe — the one he always used to wear. It’s hanging on a hook in my bathroom, just upstairs, like the rags of corpse. I can put it on and think of him, and of that night. I’m sitting in his bed, and I don’t know where my mother is. I don’t know where my little sister is. The lights are dimmed low, and I don’t know why that is, either. He tells me not to cry. My memory is from an angle that would have been impossible for me to witness, as I can see myself. The perspective is from the other side of the bed. I sometimes dream like this — watching myself from a top-down perspective, or from the shadows. Is this memory just a paragraph of facts that my mind turns into a picture or a film to be replayed? And if I replay it enough, will it be twisted and bent and distorted? Surely, the paragraph remains: “I am sitting in my father’s bed, upright, crying because he’s leaving me, again. He’s wearing a black robe, and he tells me not to cry. I’m nine-years-old.”

I can recreate that image any number of ways.

And I find this is happening with everything, lately. Is the technology I’m buried in warping me, I don’t know . . .

I drive down old roads, sometimes, and I can think back on any number of times I’ve driven down those roads, but here I am on the other side! People are gone, trees have disappeared from where they once stood, looking, not hurting anyone — what the hell is going on? At the end of a road are the tattered remains of a sign that once hung — one that I tore down and gave to a man who was once my friend — and still is? — who put a pistol in his mouth and decided to turn the lights out, up there. And now no one is home, anymore, up there. He bled from every hole in his face, slumped there on the carpet and said good-bye in a horrifying way. Where are you, man?

And people are gone, yes — some of them are still alive, some of them. They’re growing human beings in their bodies, and they’re not sure why. They’re putting rings on the fingers of young girls or having rings placed on their fingers by young men, and they’re not sure why. They’re excited, maybe, that they’re finally living out fantasies of wearing their mother’s dress, and linking arms with their father, and smiling, and hoping and hoping that one day, maybe, a baby will grow inside of them, and they’ll give it a name and feed it and it’ll plump up like a bell pepper and it’ll have a name and a face and everything. Some of these bell peppers will become children and later small men who will light Tibetan incense and write essays in the dark on the floor of their little places of existence. Some of them will put pistols in their mouth. It’s a poisonous world.

Some of these people horrify me. I’m afraid to leave my house, sometimes. Maybe, someday, I’ll be too frightened to ever leave at all.

The reason is this: they’re half-baked. There’s a muscle, somewhere in their brains, that never quite plumped up. It withered on the vine, so to speak, and now there is only a space where something once existed. They’ll keep aging and buying things and stupidly, emptily loving women, only not really, because just what in the hell is that? Do they know? No! These people frighten me more than any explosive or ferocious dog or lurching shadow. They’re pantomiming and I’ve become ill — really — with all of this disingenuous make-believe. Maybe I’m being too vague, I know, though I don’t care to elaborate for fear or stirring dark forces. I’m in the business of staying put, of hunching down, here in this bunker, and not saying a damned word to anyone at all. So I won’t puncture any more holes into this thing, whatever it is, however small my holes are.

The only “real” people I’ve ever known are dead in the ground, maybe, or damn near close to it. And I’m just an old fool, shuffling around, shuffling around, for this is all I ever do.

I’m at my best in the morning.

But: when everyone is asleep, I’m a sad-soupy stain on the carpet. Black, oozing. I make myself sick, just thinking every night. I’m trapped, up here! I am banging on wood and metal until my fits are fucking bloody, you know! If I could burn the boxes and kick down the door, God damn you, I would. What a human being I’d be, then, I don’t know — maybe a better off one.

You God damn fools, I swear. I miss your guts.

And sometimes, at night, I think about how all the more painful corpses are when they are still animated, still walking around, still talking. I’ve never been to the grave of the man who loved a woman so much that he put a pistol in his mouth — died in her sight. He’s floating around up here, still alive, as far as I’m concerned. He can’t do anything else. He’s more alive to me than some of the living are, I reckon.

I still check up on the ghosts from my gone-dead life. Far too regularly for me to ever remove the purple-black smears from under my eyes, I’m afraid. It’s become such a sick habit, I really ought to stop. They’ve left behind little fragments that I hold on to, like the old pictures and artifacts from my dead family, still stored away in two closets in the bedroom above my head. I hold on to them just in case one of them wants something back in eternity, or the void, or the deep-dark-nothing. Who in the hell even knows. I’ll wait until we get there, if we ever get there.

I drive down dirt roads and think about the spider webs we create, and of the spider webs of long-gone people. Where are you? Where? I think of the children I grew up with, of girls I used to like — and just why did I? I can’t answer my own questions, even. The only thing that erupts from my mouth are smoke clouds, not answers. I visited this dead girl at a cemetery she now lives at, will live at until the sea gives up the dead, or whatever, if it ever does, and I listened to a song that I’ve listen to for a thousand sad drives, and black fireworks sputtered and sprayed behind my eyes and my hands went numb and I couldn’t breathe. It was amazing. The combination of ice and blackness and roaring engine and unanswered echo turned the hair on my body into spindles radiating electricity. I screamed in perfect harmony, and blood chugged around in the organ between my ears, and oh God! Oh God! I felt like accelerating until my car lifted off and ignited and exploded into ice shards and coal. God!

I crave this sort of thing! I do it alone. It’s all I do, now. It’s like masturbating for crazy people, I guess.

I’m crazy, I guess.

I miss you, whomever you are. Do you know you? I know you. I miss you. I’m crazy, you know that, but I’ll hold on to your things, should you ever want them back. Now, don’t cry. Don’t ever cry. It’ll be all right.