When you can't sleep, you start looking for people to blame. It's best to start with myself, of course; coffee 'round midnight is bound to have consequences. So I sit and drink and listen to Thursday and wonder why I am still the person that I have always been.

(cast off the shackles) the whisper says, but I think that it is not the dog that says these things. So then, what could it be? I cannot believe that the devil is driving, not the now, he must sleep as well. And what to do with this newfound freedom?

I have not written, not really written, in some time now. It is the way that I punish myself for being alive. Each day I wake up and reflect that not much has been done. I learn some small amount in zoology, or else some miscreant of a med school womanlet tells me that she believes my voice sounds as a Russian's would.

What flattery! How could such a person know of my love of the Russians? Oh then, she starts to cull intelligence and cultivate vapidity; she rages against the dying of the light and the inability of her voice and body to get laid. She says that she is devoid of mojo, but such is not the problem. She is as all others are, you see, and her objectives are not so empty of discernment as she imagines them to be.

I tell her that her problem is an unrealistic expectation of intimacy. I tell her that even such as men can open thoughts to see that she is looking for a bandage for a wound. I tell her that not every man wishes to be the splint on a grevious wound. I tell her that in this desert the cities are made of gold. I think that she has stopped listening. So have I.

I know that the sun will rise soon. If nothing else, Hemingway has told me so...but again I feel that there is no poison enough for such as I.

I saw a television show today and it was cruel. It reminded my of what I have been, perhaps of what I will yet be. All of yesterday I was reminded of my beginnings. Oh, how I hate the sight of animals. With every cooing expression of enchantment for chickens or rabbits or kids, I remember my life as I hated it most. I tell people sometimes that I miss it, but I fear that I dissemble. I remember my fondest dreams then, of burning their buildings all down; being free of mocking voices and unwanted obligations, the taste of goat's milk mixed with powdered stock, the way that bits of solute would stick with evil smells to the side of a green plastic pitcher.

It is nearly funny. A friend of my girlfriend was married not so long ago. I have known the girl for a very long time, and I had never liked her much. I started hating her one day. Oh when? She had a bow in her hair, the pastelled pink of bubbling gum. We were eight years old. "Don't worry about him, he's just white trash," she said. She must have thought that I could not hear.

Is there a point to this? The answer to my and your question is a resounding NO. It echoes off of percussion chambers in the body with the rumbling of a Lambeg drum. We live, we eat and sometimes love, and we die. For a blessed few, it can be believed that artistry will preserve and protect the memory of our lives, but for the rest, we die as we are born. These are our lives. They are not much, but they are what we have.