A Preface to This Edition

©2002 Adam Altman

I don't know if this is cheating, but I feel like I owe it to myself, to this work, to you -- though I've been told to act as though you don't exist. Fuck it. This needs to be said, and it needs to be said by me and not by your narrator, Will, whom you will meet soon enough. If I don't do this, then I will have nothing to go forward from. I will look at this experiment as a failure, as having created nothing, when in fact I feel I have. This is something alright.

This novel -- though I feel freakish calling it that -- started in high places, with high ideals, and most importantly, with a good solid idea. Somewhere along the line (about ten words in the race to 50,000) all of that got lost and what was left behind are mere shards. Most of these fragments fit together pretty well, more or less, but they and I have lost all sense of the big picture. At point during the writing, I would get excited and think, "This is great, this will show how Will is slipping into his insanity, is becoming one of the people on the train, one of the people in the café…." But then I knew I wouldn't be able to pull it off, it would get rushed, I would blow my wad too soon and end up telling instead of showing. And I wonder, if I was ever any good at showing instead of telling, and the answer lies right here in the fact that I am writing not an introduction so much as an explanation. I didn't even get the telling right this time and so I must resort to this.

But then, I figure, Dave Eggers got away with a lengthy (and unnecessary) preface to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, why can't I? Well for one, I'm no Dave Eggers. And for two, Eggers wasn't in a race against the clock and the calendar. But to Hell with it. Even if this is just me, the author, trying to tell you the story that I'm about to fail to tell you, and then -- of all the nerve -- pasting it to the top of the page to pad my word count, so be it. Words are words and these words have more to do with anything than the words you're about to come across (especially the bit about the vacation -- though hopefully that will be a footnote, or better yet, deleted entirely by the time it comes to this edition.

So here we go. This work attempts to explore several themes, or premises, or devices. They are, in order of their conception:

Themes:

1. The "muse" or a writer's ideas coming from voices inside his head.
2. Voices that tell you to do good things. Most of the time when we hear about someone who hears voices in their heads, it's either a religious revelation or a command to do evil. What if voices in your head told you to read to the elderly or volunteer at a hospital?
3. Drastic actions in the name of art.
4. Insanity's place in society. Cell phones as masks for lunacy.
5. Becoming that which you hate, in this case the "Cliff Clavinizing" of the narrator. He becomes an expert on random subjects and is willing to expound upon them to anyone willing, and even those unwilling, to listen.
6. An author's ideas forgotten. Scraps of paper that the narrator writes and leaves around become foreign notes -- death threats.
7. Trying to become a character an author has written.

How well any of these comes across remains to be seen.

Now, here's how it was supposed to work. We have a narrator, Will, who is a published author. He wrote a decently selling book three years before the beginning of this novel. Since the publication of that book, he has been unable to pen another word. Unfortunately, he squandered most of the money that he made off the first book and is forced to fall back on his other skill -- computer programming. He feels that this is partly to blame for his inability to write. The stress of having to work 8 to 10 hours a day, mostly using the tool of his other trade for purposes and a lack of good ideas have all combined to make him incapable of even starting his second book.

One night, while taking a walk, he is hounded by a group of people, Sheila and her friends. They know his name, they know his ways, they know too much about him to be anything but the first signs that Will's brain is slipping a little. And indeed, these five (of whom, you'll notice, only Sheila has any impact on the tale) are just figments of Will's imagination.

We don't see much (if any) of their relationship between their meeting and now, but we must assume that their friendship has grown, they have become closer and closer over time. But as the story starts, Sheila is suggesting that Will kill his parents in order to have something to write about. A drastic solution indeed! Up until this point, Sheila had told Will to do things quite often, but they were always normal things -- walking the dog, cleaning the house -- and he doesn't know what to do with this suggestion. That he doesn't immediately decry it, and continues to associate with Sheila is indication that perhaps he is slipping more than a little, and that he realizes that he needs Sheila, and that Sheila isn't as real as Will makes her out to be.

After all, he only ever talks to her on his cell phone. Never is there a description of Sheila's physical appearance (granted -- there's not much description of anybody's physical appearance in here, but you get the point) and she's never presented as being there.

In other news, Will rides the train a lot, and he hates every minutes of it. It's as if every one on the train is insane, and out to get him. Not that Will's paranoid, of course. No, these people just exhibit every personality trait that drives him nuts. A little common sense and common courtesy goes a long way for our narrator, and it seems that his fellow train riders have no idea what those words mean, much less how to display them.

Regardless of the fact that the train-riding-cell-phone-user is one of the characters that Will dislikes the most, he is one of those people himself. He spends a lot of time on the train using his cell phone to disguise the fact that he's having a conversation with a personality locked somewhere in his mind. He and Sheila talk about anything and everything -- from Will's situation at work to the fool Will's currently sitting next to.

Meanwhile, Will is finding notes on his desk and around his house that seem to be vague death threats. The handwriting is somewhat familiar, and the notes are so vague that he doesn't take them as more than warnings or suggestions -- but definitely not as threats. Sheila, however, is much more concerned with them.

Will's train rides are becoming more interesting as he meets the "Nixon's the One" man who is one of those people that just seems to know something about everything. First, Will has a negative reaction to this type of behavior, but as time goes on, he starts learning ridiculous trivial facts on many topics including the invention of the Corn Flake and the history of the television show, "Diff'rent Strokes." Soon, Will is trading harmless conspiracy theories with the Nixon Man, and it becomes a daily tradition. Of course, this activity spills over into Will's life -- his co-workers and friends become victims of his now boundless knowledge.

So, what happens? I guess the idea was that Will would figure out that he'd become one of the lunatics he'd been observing, that the voices he was hearing were all in his head. The point being that his muse, which had previously given him the ideas that had made him the prolific writer he once was, had either stopped giving him ideas, or had gone a little bit insane herself. Something like that.

And what about the notes? Remember how they were written in a familiar handwriting? Well, of course, Will wrote them himself, in a fit of creative brilliance, some sort of trance. He doesn't remember them, and they came about somehow separately from Sheila's input or participation. Thus, she's unaware of them and afraid, while Will is unaffected because deep down (in the subconscious, like) he knows that he wrote them.

Finally, Will has begun romanticizing his characters -- especially the noir figures he's created that wander the streets at night in their "long dark coats" always searching for something, with some sort of purpose.

And for a climax? Well, there'd have to be a showdown between Will and Sheila. Those voices in our heads don't like being figured out, our other personalities will demand equal time. Remember Fight Club? I obviously do. The idea is that Will, once dependent upon the "voices" or muses or whatever would break free and be able to write on his own. This, of course, would cause Sheila some amount of consternation. How would the battle ensue? Well, that's a question I was never able to answer.

And so the biggest problem that I had while writing this, other than the fact that I was constantly scrambling for words to put down, was that as Will was living too much in his head, so was I. So, Will's head and my head became too similar, too closely related. Writing in the first person perspective made it hard to keep my feelings separate from his. At the same time, it's possible that the first person perspective made any of this possible. If it hadn't been for my ability to start talking about any of my feelings about any of the major subjects -- religion, politics, sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll -- I may never have come anywhere near the 50,000 words that I was shooting to write. I soon realized that this "novel" was just a collection of several of what would be my journal entries. To combat this, at many points, I forced myself to think, "What is the exact opposite of how I would feel about this?" and gave that position to Will, just to bring the novel closer to the definition of "fiction."

Another issue: the piecemeal fashion in which this was written. I attempted to write 500 words each time I sat down on the train on the way to or from work -- undoubtedly this affected the work, as it became extremely focused upon the train rides -- and as many words during the work day as I could sneak in. I would then make up the difference between that and 1666 (the daily goal) at home at night. This worked out for the most part, but it still seemed like I was constantly fighting from behind (as I am now) even though I had several 3000 word days. I guess the several 500 word days balanced those out. 50,000 words is a hell of a lot of words, and you have no idea how heavy that is until you dedicate yourself to writing that many words in 30 days.

Anyhow, this bitch was written in bits and pieces, chunks written on the train, or at work, or at home were short, fragments of chapters. Then, each time I went back to the document, I'd round out those bits, fatten them up. It lead to a somewhat disjointed creative process, and isn't the way I'd ever written anything before. But, I would try to add as many words as I possibly could, remembering Chris Baty's words: "Rip the delete key from your keyboard." In fact, I like ice cream so much that I could eat it every day! That's right, the Slinky was invented in 1928 by a man named Geraldo Valenzuela Slinky. I have three toes on my left foot and eight toes on my right, for a total of sixteen toes (I neglected to mention the ones on my shoulder.)

Do you see what I mean? This race leads to some pretty crappy words, and some amazing things being left alone and left in when they really shouldn’t be. Ah, but what are you going to do about it? It's a race, it's a race, let it go….

I've never been so obsessed with numbers and math before. This exercise makes one an expert at percentages, averages, and velocity. Every day I would do complex calculations, figuring out how far behind I was, what I needed to write the next day, what I needed to average as the days went on. As I approached the end, the numbers become harder, less of an average, more of a "write this many words tomorrow or fail" kind of thing. I imagine a marathon runner counting each step and doing long division in his head at the end of each mile.

I think that I have failed in the stated goals of this National Novel Writing Month, inasmuch as I've not written a 50,000 word novel, but a 50,000 word treatise with fictional characters attached to many of the sentiments. My goal, at the start of this, was to actually write a 50,000 word novel. Now I've come to realize what my true goal should have been (and will be now -- goals are reviseable, dammit) to just write 50,000 words. And so, that's what this is: 50,000 words. No less, and maybe a couple hundred more (though I doubt it.) After having written 10,000 words at the most during any month in the previous 4 years, getting 50,000 words down, even if they weren't connected to the ones before and after them, is a big deal at all. Actually writing on the train again. Writing at home again. Writing at all again. It's a big step for me.

It hasn't, however, answered the question of whether or not I've still "got it." I'm struggling with the question of whether I ever had it at all. I used to churn the crap out left and right, and it was well-received back in the day, but now it definitely doesn't cut the mustard. I have these ideas, see, but maybe not the wherewithal to manage the execution of them. Is anybody hiring an idea man?

I don't know if there is a novel in there. My current thinking is that somewhere within all this is a solid short story, or perhaps some sort of screenplay. Was I reaching too far with too small an idea? Too big for my britches? Am I stretching this introduction right now just so I can watch the counter at the bottom of the screen continue to climb (Climb! Climb!) so I can meet my daily quota of words?

So, without further ado, because God knows there's plenty of it in the pages that follow, let's get on with this.[1]

Narrative Voices

© 2002 Adam Altman

Chapter 1

Drastic Solution

It wasn't until Sheila told me to kill my parents that I thought something might be wrong. She was constantly telling me to do things -- clean my house, walk the dog, exercise more often -- but never anything as drastic as that. And the way she brought it up, casual as hell, like it was just another thing to say, nothing out of the ordinary. "Kill your parents," completely off-handed, as if she'd just come up with the idea that morning.

I was on the train, heading to work and I had no idea how to respond to something like that. I was still a little disoriented, having just woken up and rushed through some sort of morning routine to make the last express to the Loop.

"No. I can't do that," perhaps a little too loud. People around me looking up from their newspapers and morning thoughts, disturbed.

"Hush," a calming whisper. "Don't give yourself away. Think about it. You need to do this."

"Don't you have a better suggestion for me today? Like maybe I should find religion? Or adopt some poor African child for the price-of-a-cup-of-coffee?"

"What makes you think that would work?"

Three years ago, while working on my second novel, I lost my touch. The writing hadn't been going well at all and I'd started to think that I had used up all the words in my head when I ran across this group. Around 3 in the morning, I was walking along the lake front, trying to find even the slightest fragment of an idea. It had been silent, calm. The lake was almost perfectly still, the waves made little noise, and there was nothing around until I heard, from behind, very clearly, "Should we kill him?"

The sudden noise, along with the violence it implied made me jump. I turned around to find darkness, an empty path, and then a voice, behind me again, "Nah, he's not worth it." I spun around again to more darkness.

"This isn't funny," I whispered, and kept on, and a bit louder, "Fucking kids." This elicited laughter from the dark, from behind me, from right behind me. I fought the urge to turn around, in no mood to give them the satisfaction, in no condition to make myself care. They kept it up, though, whispering on one side or the other, keeping pace with me as I continued walking. I pretended not to hear.

"Aww come on, Will, we're just playing." This, as I neared the end of the path, just a few blocks from my home. I relaxed and stopped. This voice -- it was Sheila -- sounded familiar, and she knew my name.

And this is how I met Sheila and her friends. They are Jack, Lincoln, Donna and Stanley. Since that night, one or more of them have always been around, a tight family, though rarely, as that night, all together at once. It got so that I was seeing my older friends, from high school and college and work less and less, and spending more and more time with the five of them.

The novel never got written though, much to the chagrin of my friends, my publisher, my agent and myself -- and much to the delight of several critics. Technically, I have five years to make good on it, but everyone's pretty much written it off. I figured, along with everyone else, that I'd gotten lucky on the first one. It was a fluke, a perfect idea probably meant for someone else that I'd somehow stolen and made my own. Ever since, I wasn't able to write a postcard, much less another novel. The cat had my tongue, I was silenced, unable to pen a single word.

Sheila was convinced that I'd eventually come out of it. She always told me that I was just waiting for the right moment, the right idea, the right book to come out and make itself known. She would have none of my protests. I was trying to get this thing written, and it wasn't happening, and I knew how it felt -- that my hand didn't know how to hold a pen, didn't know how to make the words, that my head was empty, silent.

"We can change all that," she would say.

Sheila was silent for the rest of the ride downtown, but as I descended the stairs from the train platform, she spoke again.

"Come on. It'll give you something to write about."

"Are you crazy?" I asked, weaving my way through the other commuters on my way to my office. "I can write about it from jail. Sure, it'll sell, but what the hell's that worth? Besides, my parents have been pretty decent to me."

I went into the office without saying goodbye to her.

Chapter X

Don't Believe Everything You Read

I'm a web developer, believe it or not. Not that you'd have any reason not to buy that -- at this point, you've no reason not to trust me, even though we've just met. Isn't that just amazing, the way you'll open a book and immediately trust the narrator to be telling you the truth? Keep in mind, of course, that the narrator and the author are two separate entities, and the author is always lying to you when it comes to fiction. That's why they call it fiction. But the narrator could be lying to you as well, and that's when things get a little bit sketchy. Rarely, however, do we question the narrator's honesty, as if they have nothing to gain from lying. Having been both author and narrator though and known quite a few of both, I can tell you, they're a pretty sleazy bunch of people.

Anyway, I work for a living, if you could call it work. The money from the book, and the advance on the non-existent second one, was decent, but nothing that I could live off for very long. I had entertained thoughts of quitting the second the book was accepted for publication, but after running through the numbers, I realized I'd have to keep at it. And I pretty much hate every fucking minute of it. It's not the work itself that bothers me, but everything that you have to get through to get the work done. I'm just not made for it, or not made for work in general, or not made for the human race at all.

I think if I could just sit somewhere and write code in a vacuum and not deal with the people, I might enjoy it. But that's just not possible. You've got to be writing the code for someone -- there's always that bastard end-user waiting to rip your work to shreds with their talk of usability and instructional design. Who gives a rat's ass? It works right, doesn't it? It always works right, but it's never right.

But, I do like the challenge of solving problems, tricking computers into doing things that they just don't want to do, fighting the good fight. I swear a lot, and pound the crap out of my desk in the process, but eventually, in the end, I win. And there's nothing like looking at 500 lines of code and knowing exactly what each one of them does and why, workarounds and hacks, clever little bits of logic that make perfect sense. It's an orderly and perfect little world. Until the other people invade.

And those people are invading all the time. Imagine trying to do work that takes the utmost concentration, superior tunnel vision, closed circuit brain work while being constantly interrupted. Imagine trying to isolate one closing parentheses or curly bracket out of 250 that is causing a hundred web pages to display in German rather than Aramaic. Now, imagine trying to do this while someone who has absolutely no idea what you do for a living, how you do it, or sometimes even what your name is -- keep in mind, this person is higher on the org chart, less likely to be laid off in the event of a total economic catastrophe and what's more, gets paid a lot more than you do -- stands so close to you as you sit that you unconsciously physically recoil and allow a look of disdain and disgust to cross your face.

Okay, maybe that's not working for you. Let's try something else. Imagine trying to draw blood from some poor sucker with ridiculously thin veins while a circus clown in full get up and funny clothing is repeatedly smacking you in the face with pies made of whipped cream and thumb tacks. Or, let's say you've got to disarm a complicated explosive while Martha Stewart is bitching you out about the disorderly way in which you organized your sock drawer. I could go on….

It's the voices that surround you that constantly penetrate the delicate and carefully constructed dome of silence that I have carefully created. These voices … demanding, questioning. It's the reason that the modern developer's best friends are a pair of headphones, a hard drive full of digital music and the uncanny ability to ignore someone while they are actually hula dancing just at the edge of your peripheral vision. Without these things, the voices -- of project managers, production assistants, vice presidents of business development -- will never allow any work to get done. And they wonder why everything's always late.

Now, let's not make any mistakes here and confuse me for a web designer. I know you were about to rush off and tell your friends, "I was reading about this guy… no, you don't know him … yeah, he's pretty cool… and…what does he do for a living? Oh, he's a web designer." I can tell. You have that look in your eye. It's not fucking correct. Oh sure, you think I'm splitting hairs, or getting defensive and angry about the smallest details. Sure, I'm prone to doing that, I'm the first to admit it, but this is not the case. The differences between developer and designer are many and varied and so uninteresting that I'm not going to bother to list them here.

Or maybe I will. Look, designers design things. You would never confuse an interior designer and a general contractor, would you? One guy builds a house, the other one makes it look relatively pretty. The same thing applies here and you would do well to remember it. Ask me to make something look pretty and you've made a big mistake. I have absolutely no skills at making things look pretty, relatively or otherwise. My interest and ability in the aesthetic arts are next to nil. I couldn’t design my way out of a paper bag (whatever that means) and it's going to stay that way. I couldn't draw a straight line with a ruler and the hand of God guiding my own. That's why I work the back end. I'll let the artists and designers make the pretty pictures, and I'll even slap them onto the front end of these things I'm making.

I've no formal training in this industry either. I got lucky out of college about three weeks before the internet became a big thing and got even luckier after the whole industry crashed. I'd spent nine months on the unemployment lines waiting for someone to give me another break. Lo and behold, someone eventually did, and that landed me where I am now.

Though, if you asked, I wouldn't call myself particularly lucky. There's nothing worse than hating what you do when you're not in a position to do anything else. And this is where I currently stand. The market's terrible, there are no jobs for anybody (at least no jobs for me) and I can't imagine myself going into this place another day.

So why do I? What gets me up in the morning, to the office, to my desk? (An alarm clock, a train, an elevator.) Habit, routine, an extreme effort of will, the ability to daily forget what happened the previous day.

And there was a surprise waiting for me this particular day. Scrawled on a yellow Post-It note from the pad on my desk was a note. It read, "Your imminent death is imminent." No signature, no address, no clues at all -- short of taking it to the crime lab in the cave underneath my stately manor, I couldn't figure out a thing. I didn't feel threatened by it, likely because it stank of Engrish, and made me laugh more than anything else. Sheila didn't like it though.

"Think about it," she said, "someone so desperate to kill you that they repeated the word 'imminent' just to emphasize how quickly your time is coming."

"But they never said anything about killing me, that they were going to do it or anything. It's just a statement, and how should they know? Everyone's imminent death is imminent. That's why they call them imminent deaths."

"Okay, but why is your death imminent?"

"Well, how should I know that?"

"I think this is a bit more serious than you're making it out to be."

"Nah, look. It wasn't written in blood, or even with a red crayon. This is way too calm to be worried about."

My casual nature confuses us both. I usually look to anything to get nervous or worked up over. Most of the time the vague nature of the note would make it even worse, presenting so many different possibilities for what it could be. A note that said, "I'm going to kill you tomorrow at 3 PM," would be less of a bother because at least it would be something concrete to hold onto. But for some reason, this note seems almost friendly, like a thought occurring to someone that they wanted to share. Like the beginning of a story that I might write, if I could write.

So why can't I write anymore? Mostly because I never have the time. Actually, the fact is the time I have, I choose to spend in other ways. Something about the fact that all the voices in my head during the day keep me from finding my written voice, or my muse. All that excessive input that I am being paid to absorb is pushing out any creative thought I could have. During school, it was always one voice, droning on, that I was able to filter out and ignore. I managed to get decent, if not good, grades. With work, though, the tests are harder and the stakes are higher. That may be a bit dramatic, but hell, it's my story.

I just don't know the right combinations of words anymore. I had once been able to turn quite a pretty phrase, but now it seems like every group of words just can't stand up to the pressure of the groups surrounding it. I know quite a few good words, like "antepenultimate" and "sesquicentennial" but I just can't find a way to use them to save my life.

It got so it didn't bother me so much, most of the time though. When I see people whom I hadn't seen since the first book was published, they are always congratulatory and full of praise -- some of it, of course, total bullshit and ass-kissery (how's that for a hell of a word?) Those whom I'd seen since then always ask the same question.

"So, are you still writing?"

Sure, I'm still writing. It's mostly in code, either some computer language, or bizarrely cryptic journal entries that even I can't decipher. What's it worth? Not a thing to anybody, especially not those who were banking on me coming up with 300 pages worth of something coherent.

It's all about the words though. They have the strength, the power, the weight. They have weight -- even when just on a screen, you see them, their power. And when combined properly? Think about it, the words can do anything they want to. The words can do whatever I want them to, when I somehow manage to control them. And that's the thing -- I think I've lost control of the words. No longer will they dance at my command, create meaning, create anything other than desperate, pretty trash.

And video games…. So many people say shit about how they spend all day looking at a screen, they can't imagine going home and doing the same thing, whether it's playing games, using a computer, watching TV. It's all I want to do -- ever. I think I might be trapped, I'm sure my genitals are warping and my head is never going to be the same because of the sheer amount of time I spend with a remote control or a game control in my hands. But there it is. The radiation and the electromagnetic interference all zapping right into my head, every night, the shit blasting through me every day, I might as well be standing in front of an unshielded microwave oven every moment I'm awake.

And then the games take over my head sometimes. I'll play for hours, seriously, hours, and the games permeate my every waking, and sleeping, hour. I've been playing this skateboarding game lately and it's bad enough that when I walk down the streets I think of every object as something to trick off but it's turned into something more insidious. I remember back when Tetris was all the rage, I'd play it relentlessly and it came to the point that I'd see the shapes from the game in between words in whatever book I was reading. With this game, I'm seeing everything as something to trick off. Things in other games, things on TV, looking for gaps and special bonuses. And it's as much an addiction as anything else. There is little else that I think about and little else that I want to do. Is it decreasing my sex drive? Maybe. But it's decreasing my drive to do much of anything else -- not that I'm against those other things, but there's little that's as fun or as rewarding as the structured world of the interactive game. Complete a task, get a new stat point, get $250, get to the next level. Nothing else in my world is as cut and dry. And I've got the strategy guide too.

I manage to keep my head quiet for most of the rest of the day. Few interruptions, no lethargy, no distraction.

The problem is that nothing interesting ever happens to me. The bigger problem is that it's mostly my fault. I choose to shelter myself, become a hermit, stay indoors for days at a time, staying awake until I'm dead.

And I don't have a coherent thought in my head.

I just keep putting words together until there are enough because I don't want to do it anymore. I don't want to keep doing this anymore. It's so fucking scary to be doing this because the voices aren't there and I'm all alone and all these words are coming from nowhere but myself. And without the voices, I don't have a thing to say. And I don't know what I did to make the voices leave, I don't know what I did to make them silent. They used to be so loud, but I must have insulated myself so much that even in my own head, I can't hear a thing. The television on at a low murmur, the low murmurs outside at an even lower murmur, and the only thing I can do is pray that someday I'll be able to hear again. When did it all start? When did it all stop? Did I ever hear anything at all in the first place? I may have been so delusional that I imagined the voices altogether. How fucked up do you have to be to imagine that you've got some sort of muse.

And there used to be light in the darkness, and a good amount of darkness for the light to be appreciated. And just enough silence for the voices to make a difference. Those two senses, that of sight and that of hearing, those two senses so important and so ignored. I must have slept, and I must have never woken up.

I wish there was someone to blame for this but myself, someone to take the fall for this but myself. It was my own doing though, most likely. My own failures along the way to keep strong, to keep at it, to keep my hands moving somewhere but my own crotch, because all along I've just been jerking off in one way or another. Why not create something while I'm at it?

Because it takes so much more effort to create than to not create. And I'm just too tired, all the time, too dead inside, too lazy inside. And yet here I am, in this box, in this cube, making myself….making myself.

Making myself what? Into a version of myself not yet seen before. And here I am again and again working this out, working this in, working out my issues into unsuspecting and undeserving pages. Paper wasted, trees slaughtered at my will, to allow myself this wasteful edge.

What I think, honestly, is that every thing I've thought has already been thought before. That originality died soon after the first man was born. In a flash, every possible combination of ideas and concepts went through that intrepid explorers head and since then we've all been picking at what boils down to being the intellectual property of someone who died a few million years ago. The fact that he's family doesn't make it any less of a crime.

But that should not prevent us from creating, or at least pretending to create, new things. It's not as if this prehistoric genius published anything, and though all his thoughts are ours, it's good to have general access to that which we've chosen to write down. And, as his record keepers, we're doing a decent job.

The point is, every word has been used. Many have been used to the point that they're no longer very powerful anymore. There are still some good ones left, and I know quite a few of them (antepenultimate and nonagon, for example) but all I can do is try to find interesting and compelling new ways to combine them into something more meaningful than perhaps they've been combined before.

And so I (and all writers) become these verbal interior designers. "Does this look good over here? Should I move it back a few words? Forward? What?" It's the closest thing I have to aesthetic skill, though my handwriting is terrible, and this word arranging skill has faded anyway.

I was never able to write anything other than about myself, in one codified form or another, and that was always the problem. The deeply internal ramblings that formed the basis of my first novel, so inspired by everything Samuel Beckett ever wrote, where nothing happens, but you still end up with this sense of ridiculous dread, only work once. Unless you're Beckett, in which case you can form a career out of writing like that. Then again, I've never sat, in the dark, my only sense being that of the pressure of the floor on my ass, my feet on the floor, my arms on my legs, my head in my hands, as is the case with most, if not all, of his characters. But I've been close.

And so I've never been able to create these worlds with Russian generals leading great armies, or railroad employees with spikes blown through their skulls. Every bit of dialogue I wrote must have been said at some point or another, every word now seems fake, I have nothing to give, and am starting to think that I may have never created anything at all in the first place.

But who has, ever? Greeks felt their thoughts came from Gods or muses, not their own, their voices in their head, it's tough to say if Plato's words were really Plato's words, or if he lived the Republic, or if he was just insane.

What demons are in my head? Worse still, why do I let them control my mouth? There is nothing in me that is rage and yet that is the only thing that I exude. I am the calm little center of the universe. I am the calm little center of the universe. For some reason, I think about Fight Club.

And what is the answer? And what is the solution? Why do I have to fight? I'm a lover, not a fighter. I'm a lover, not a fighter. If I keep telling myself that, maybe it will come true and I can get some lovin' done. And it keeps me up at night, these questions. And they keep me up at night, these questions. As it happens, I repeat myself when under stress. I rip off the thoughts of King Crimson when under stress.

Who can know me, if I don't know myself? This is what keeps me up at night. Because I hate sleeping with a stranger and that's me every night, going to bed with this person that I have no idea who I am. This is me, my hands on my head, my assumption of the position complete, this is me bending over and taking it up the ass from myself. This is me, strapping it on and walking the world.

Oh bullshit, this is me, sitting here on my ass, waiting for the world to come to me. Soon enough, I'll figure out that the world's not ever coming to me and the question is, what am I going to do about it? Odds are good that I'll keep on sitting here and keep on waiting, forcing myself, somehow, to forget the knowledge gained.

Jesus Christ, where was I? Sheila? Did she say something to me today? Did I go to work? Fuck…. Where was I?

I wake up every morning in the same bed, I wake up every morning in the same head. But always alone. And silent. The alarm clock is even silent, a whisper, a sub-vocal suggestion that I get up and get going. There are no voices, usually, until the platform at the train station, and that's when Sheila usually starts. Or Jack. Sometimes Jack starts my day. He's never suggested I kill anybody. Just hurt a few people. The rest of them are pretty docile, or…do I mean dormant? I'm not sure.

I came upon the scene, breathless, a chaotic crowd forming around a point of obvious trouble. There were, amongst the people, three cows wandering aimlessly, untroubled by what was apparently a murder.

"LAPD," I said, showing my badge, "Coming through. Hot soup. Gimmie some fuckin room."

Finally making it to the actual cause of all this, I find two bodies, both bloody, one covered in hamburger, the word "VegitAryans" carved into his chest.

What the fuck is that? Sheila?

What?

What the fuck was that?

What are you talking about?

That last bit. I'm not a cop. That was terrible.

A dream maybe? I'm…not sure.

Where the fuck are your quotation marks?

"Sorry."

"That's better."

And it's shit like that that can really make you lose your cool. All of a sudden…it's like something's taken over. Or it's like there's this voice in your head that's more than just a voice.

Sometimes, I'm lying in bed and I'll hear people I know talking. It's not me imagining conversations with them, or remembering something they said earlier that day. I can just…hear them talking. I couldn't, if I tried, imagine my father's voice, but sometimes when I'm waiting for sleep to come, he'll talk to me. It's his voice, and it's really confusing. I will lie there and think about it, and think that this is me trying to make my father's voice ring through my head and right as I'm thinking that, I'll hear him say something again. And the best part is that he's speaking complete nonsense. "Don't let the pages get too close together." "Fires are not for the taking." What the hell that means, I don't know. It happens with other people too. Other people in my life. What are they doing in my head?

Every night I go to bed in the same head, and a lot of times there are all these people stuck in here with me.

I never thought that the aliens were out to get me, or that I was an alien, or that I knew things that I didn't know. There was never any question about my sanity. There was never any issue with my day to day life. I never lost my job or my friends and family because I thought -- or knew -- they were out to get me. And yet…. Well, something was not quite right. In there, in that head of mine. It's funny how your head is where you live, and the rest is just this added baggage, this meat you drag around with you. Everything is your eyes and your head. Four of your five senses are right there. That's where you're going to spend your time. It's no coincidence that looking into someone's eyes is the window to their soul. How else are you going to know them?

And so a headache is just about the worst thing that can happen to a person. Especially a person who lives so much in their head. Especially a person housing as many people as I am. The headaches came often and when they came, they came hard. Pain from every quarter of my skull, causing so much agony as to nearly blind me. There's nothing you can do but swallow a few Advil -- or something stronger if you can find it -- and wait, and hope.

Each time there is the fear that it will never go away, writhing, holding my hands to my head as if that might help, but nothing helps. You can't ice it, or heat it, or apply pressure because it is ice and heat and pressure. It is something attacking the very core of your being, trying to make you different, trying to unmake you. And what do you do then? How do you keep on? You have to keep on. That is the terrible thing about personal crises: the rest of the world will not wait.

And so the bills pile up, the work piles up, the unanswered phone calls and fallen leaves and trash cans full of your empty bottles and vomit pile up and you are swimming in your shirked responsibilities and waste. There's no way to get better when you're surrounded by the products of your own disease. Migraines are eating away at your personality and you just want to beg the world to stop and the only thing you can think of that might ease the pain is a bullet plowing through your skull, easing the pressure, taking the bad parts away. If you could manage without actually killing yourself…. You might. It's like with a bad toothache, all I want is for someone to come along and punch me in the jaw, as if this new pain would somehow make the old pain go away and not just make everything all that much more worse.

And sometimes the rest of the body will betray with its ailments and sores. Sometimes I feel like my body is falling apart. In the shower in the morning, I take stock of myself, find where my muscles ache, where my skin is flaking off, where my balls itch, as I hack up the semi-solid lumps from my tired lungs. My body is betraying me, but only because I betrayed my body first.

Why would anyone invent something that destroys us? Cigarettes, alcohol, Twinkies. They are empty, worthless things that are turned out by the millions, sold by the millions, consumed by the masses. Everything that we put inside ourselves can do nothing but change us and yet we choose to take these evils into our bodies and then act surprised when these sacks of meat and machine fail to move us down the hallway anymore. We rot our insides at will and with abandon and the people who make the money from it keep on making that money from it.

What freaks me out even more is the gun makers -- here are people who with straight faces are making "civilian versions of the M16" and "home assault rifles." And these people spend their lives making devices whose sole purpose is to hurt and kill things -- mostly people. Who needs an assault rifle in their linen closet? Who can make a land mine knowing that its sole purpose is to explode under someone's feet?

Guns terrify me, but not because of their potential violence. Or perhaps it is. I just get scared of what I might do when presented with guns. Sitting in a coffee shop, watching two police officers come in and I am frightened that some part of me might possess me to lunge for one of their guns. I wonder if I could get to it before his partner drew and fired. I wonder what I would do if I managed, somehow, to get it from its holster. And no idea all the while, why on Earth I might be doing such a thing. What would lead me to such an act? I'm not violent, I'm not malicious, and I'm not insane.

Nor am I depressed, or suicidal, but the thought, what if I was alone, alone and with a gun. I picture a revolver, something small but with weight, heavy in my hand. Hefting it, feeling its power, this is a tool, not unlike a chainsaw or a drill. I can't shake the image of the gun in my, tasting the metal, smoky gunpowder smell, the taste of a chisel, the sight on the barrel loosening the space between my top two teeth. And why am I holding this gun in my mouth? Why am I pulling the hammer back? Why am I bringing myself this close to the edge, even if it's just in my mind? What would happen in that instant when all of me, what used to be me, shot out the back of my head and onto the wall. Would it paint a picture of my life in red and gray and white? What would that look like?

But I have these thoughts about anything and death or dismemberment: I can't help picturing my body sliced in half because I jumped off a boat too close to the propeller; being crushed by a falling tree; losing a hand to a table saw. These aren't pleasant images. Why would my mind be so obsessed with them? Why do we stop to look at the most grisly of traffic accidents, unable to turn away?

They're the only people that don't really annoy me. They have no tics; there is no sucking of air through the teeth or tapping or knuckle cracking. They rarely even talk during movies. Aside from the occasional late-night phone call or early morning shouting, they don't even make that much unwanted noise. It's a wonder I found them. I've long been cursed with attracting the loudest, twitchiest people wherever I go. That's why I rarely go anywhere anymore.

"Where are you going to eat?"

"I'm not sure. I like pizza."

"Oh? What kind of pizza do you like?"

"Well, I like Lou Malnati's and I like Leona's and I like Giordano's and I like Carmen's and I like Troubadori's but I don't like Pizza Hut but I do like Domino's but I don't like Papa John's because it gives me gas. But I think I might go get a steak at the Gateway. Have you been to the Gateway?"

First, I notice that they speak in better sentences that I ever have, even if they are a bit obsessed with the minutia, and who can really blame them for that -- you try spending your days with your only worries about getting enough spaghetti sauce and what time you're playing ping-pong. Jesus, that sounds beautiful.

I suppose they do have bigger problems than that, especially the ones who think the CIA is out to get them, or that the Maharishi is personally brainwashing you, but you have to admit, a little spice like that in your life might be just what you're looking for. Wouldn't my life be so much more interesting if there was a global conspiracy that was completely focused on rubbing me out? What a confidence booster! That there was a group of people that cared enough about me that they'd go through intricate machinations just to ruin my life would fill me with the sort of love that doesn't come easy.

But really, you've got to learn to keep your cool, because otherwise you're going to end up scaring off everyone in your life. People don't tend to like to hear that sort of shit, and they're going to skip out on you the first chance they get. That's why all these guys have nowhere to go but their halfway house and this café, their home away from their home away from home. And they have nothing to do but annoy and generally creep out the folks that come here. They're rarely harmful, and they're often amusing, but more often than not, it's just more than you ever want to deal with.

"I love the Gateway. They have steak and they have pork chops and they have shrimp and they have salad and they have everything you could ever want."

"Gateway's okay."

"Okay? Okay? Gateway's the best! Oh man, they have salmon and swordfish and…"

Shut the fuck up! But it's not me yelling that. It's not anyone yelling that. It's the fervent wish in my head, the words reverberating in my skull, their words reverberating in my skull as if I'm having a conversation with myself about this particular restaurant. I try to chase it away…

…I am the calm center of the universe I am the calm center of the universe I am the calm center of the universe…

…but it doesn't work. It never does.

There are a thousand different types of lunatics that come to this café. There are a few inpatient care facilities located conveniently nearby. I know a few of them by name, but I know most by their afflictions. There are the twitchers and the mumblers and the ones who rock back and forth incessantly and the ones who, god forbid they should learn your name, will talk to you at any and every opportunity. They all congregate here, or else they are following me around or else they are everywhere. They hang out here just like we do, just like I do, doing the same things that I do: drinking coffee, chain-smoking, shit-talking. The difference is that even the most casual of observers can pick out which ones live in the care facility and which one actually has his own place to go.

But, it's gotten so it's easy to hide your insanity these days if you really want to. When everyone has a cell phone, it's tough to know who's having an actual conversation and who's just faking it. It used to be that someone walking down the street talking to themselves was to be avoided. Now it happens all the time that someone seemingly spouting off to nobody in particular is actually having an animated conversation with a friend or co-worker. Now, we're all used to it. It's come to lunatics with hands-free headsets walking down the street, talking animatedly and now we don't give them another look except to sigh and fret about the prevalence of personal communication devices and the need for everyone to be talking to someone that's somewhere else, when in fact they're likely talking to someone that's not anywhere at all.

And then my phone rings, or at least I think it does.

The caller ID says "Unknown Number" which is a rarity on my cell phone. I answer anyway.

"Hello?"

"Will! Sheila. Look, I've got to apologize about this morning. That was out of place, the whole kill your parents thing, that was just waaaay out of line, not my place to suggest."

"Hey, it's okay. I'm sorry I snapped at you. Under stress and all that, you know."

"Yeah, I was thinking about it, and I realized, this is a decision you're just going to have to make on your own."

"Uh, yeah, thanks. I'll have to think about it." Starting to realize, this girl's just a little off-kilter. Even though she's been a near constant companion for a couple years, I'm still learning things about her, and this is the most disturbing. She's apologizing for pushing me to kill my mother and father (and step-father and step-mother? She never specified) but telling me it's something I have to want to do on my own? Can that be real? With friends like these, who needs friends? Is this the kinda thing where, were I a kid, my parents would advise against me hanging out with this crowd? I imagine, knowing what Sheila's suggested, they'd advise against me hanging out with them now as well.

"You can't tell me what to do, Dad!"

I'm always so tired. I don't have insomnia, I don't sleepwalk. There's nothing creepy going on here, but I'm always just so tired. I've pretty much cut out caffeine and most of the sugar from my diet, but that hasn't helped matters any. I still have a midday crash right on schedule. At 2:00 PM, like clockwork, the yawns start coming and don't quit until I fall asleep. It doesn't matter what time I go to bed, either, and it doesn't matter what time I wake up in the morning. I can't keep a full day's worth of energy stored in my body at any time, and so mid-afternoon I become worthless and might as well just hide from the world for the rest of the day. And so often I'll do just that. It's pretty easy to hide most of the time. The trick lies in making yourself as unnecessary to the rest of the world as possible. That's easier than it sounds, too. Just finish what you can and punt everything else to someone else. And then head for the hills before anyone notices. Sometimes I feel guilty…no, not guilty, but… I wonder if someone is watching me, or if someone is thinking, "Where did he go?" Or maybe I'm afraid that nobody noticed, maybe I'm running so someone will chase after me and why isn't anyone following? The trick is in not hiding so long that you're completely forgotten. Once you've been written off, it's real hard to get written back in.

Sex. Is everywhere. And it doesn't stop. And somehow I will never stop thinking about it. And the slightest thing can set me off, but these Victoria's Secret commercials can send me to the bedroom in half a second. Honestly though, give me a glimpse of an animated cheerleader from a video football game, or anything at all. It turns into chronic masturbation and very tired wrists and arms. And dick, for that matter.

I understand that, as a male, it's my duty to be constantly horny, but I thought that would end in my mid-twenties. Frankly, I'm tired of it. The hint of a breast, just the hint, tight under a sweater, it's getting worse -- I never understood the attraction of a tight sweater until recently. I'm a madman, a pervert, a slut.

But I'm not. I know that it's also my duty to have as much meaningless sex as I possibly can, but after a few experiences of that sort, I realized that it just hurts my head too much to have

Back in the day when I had a few good thoughts in my head, it seemed that I'd get my best ideas mid-orgasm. No joke -- in the middle of a climax, it was always an epiphany and something would just come to mind. Like my head was so clear at that moment that all the clutter was gone and something that had been hiding from me all along would be revealed. Or else, that's when I was able to talk to God. Who knows? I would clean myself up and grab the pen and write. It was always golden. I don't know what happened -- it's not like I jerk-off any differently…or any less, these days. So what is it? Have all the hidden ideas been uncovered and used up? If so, what did they produce? Where are the results of my brilliance? Shouldn't I be wallowing in a heap of amazingly clever, well-written pieces, each one destined to be counted amongst the greatest works by an American writer? Maybe I'm trying too hard, maybe acknowledging the source of my ideas has ruined any effect it once had. Maybe I'm just using it as an excuse to look at porn.

I had a good childhood, never was beaten or abused, and though my parents may not have exhibited the best moral judgment throughout their lives, whose have? Sure, they're divorced and remarried and moved all over the country, but I could have done much worse, as far as parents go. Recently I've even been a little pissed that my childhood was too normal -- or abnormal in that normality is not the norm these…oh forget it. I figure if there'd been some incest or abuse or something I may very well have had four hit novels and a few more therapists.

The problem was that we were a dreadfully boring family. Even the few crises or controversies I can remember pale in comparison to things that I know happened in other households. We didn't even yell at each other all that often. Yes, I'm grateful that I had loving parents and a roof over my head and enough to eat, maybe I was a bit sheltered. Probably, this is what led to my ridiculous teenage rebellion which undoubtedly fucked up my chances for a normal life. I look at my parents -- upstanding citizens with nice houses, good jobs, cars that run, well-organized files and good oral hygiene and I wonder, why don't I have any of that? If they'd been irresponsible slobs, would I have gone the other way and become the amazingly with it person I'd just love to be? If they'd slapped me around a little more, would I have run with a better or worse crowd than I did? It's impossible to say, and impossible to know. I would like to know what would have happened if my life was just a little… different in some way. I'd like to know what all the parallel me's are doing these days. I'll bet a lot of them are total assholes.

Chapter X

Don't Think About God / All That We Can Know is That We Know Nothing

I've never run for public office. Never had the desire to be in politics. I don't know the first thing…well, about the first thing. Even the second thing eludes me pretty well most of the time. The thing is, I just don't have the kind of attitude needed for that sort of work. I'm not convinced of enough things.

How can those who do evil be convinced that they are in the right? How can anyone at all be convinced that they are right? So many people so convinced. It's unnerving. All this conviction. How can anyone lead a life with a doctrine of anything but, "Don't fuck with the way other people live?" This is why politicians scare me. These people make their living from being convinced that they know how people should live. That they know what's best for me. That's why I never vote. It's not that I feel my vote doesn't count; I know all too well that it does. Casting a vote is releasing power over who controls my life. Casting a vote is saying, "I endorse you to be in a position to make decisions for me."

Sure, by not casting a vote I am giving that power to others. I am giving someone else the power to choose who will gain this power. But I'll be damned if I'll be a party to a system that repeatedly gives power to some group of rich, white assholes. None of them -- not a single one -- represents me or my interests. All of them are on the take, on the make, crooked and dirty.

They've even turned environmental issues into political offices. Why? Because there's money to be spent and money to be made. I'm not sure how to say this without being wildly hypocritical, but fuck it. Anyone here who feels we should do something other than try to keep the planet we live on relatively clean, raise your hands. Now, please slap yourself with them.

It all comes back to limited resources. If it were the case that there were abundant resources for anyone, none of these assholes would be around. Drill for oil in the Alaskan wilderness or find some other alternative? Which is easier? Which will net my state some extra bucks? Which will keep me in office?

These are people who are voting along with their party, or voting along with wherever their money is coming from, but rarely ever voting their consciences. I wouldn't give fuck all what ridiculous bills they passed if they just actually believed it. If your job is to represent the people who voted you into office and you act against their interests because to vote the way they'd want you to vote would somehow jeopardize your being re-elected…. Do you see where I'm going with this? Why should you even want that job? Why would you want to keep doing that if you're just in it to keep doing it?

Do I sound like an activist? A hippy? Like someone who cares? Fuck those people too. They're just as convinced that they're correct as anyone else. They simplify complicated situations into slogans and stickers that can be easy sound bites. "No blood for oil!" "No war!" They'll tell you they're the only ones giving you the straight, unbiased story right before they give you their slanted, biased version of the story.

And they will rarely mention the good things about the country. I figure if you're going to bitch, you should at least thank the country for giving you the freedom to bitch about it. There are plenty of places where their thoughts and opinions would have them killed in the blink of an eye. These sons of bitches are so sure of themselves they forget even what they've got. Look at you with your personal freedoms and you're not mentioning a single one.

Sure, our country's governments have perpetrated a million wrongs, perpetuated a million wrongs, but on the 4^th of July, you don't have to feel conflicted about fireworks, you don't have to spend hours pontificating on the meaning and implications of blowing up little rockets, about the flag-wavers, about the patriotic. We may not be truly free, but we're freer than most, and if they can't recognize that, then to Hell with them too.

No, the only people worth listening to are the ones who have a healthy sense of self-doubt. The religious, political and social agnostics. The ones who know they'll never know anything.

The number of things we can't and will likely never know. It's staggering. There are so many things in the universe that will just remain total mysteries to all of mankind. The presence of life on other planets, the "meaning" of life, the existence of God. Don't let anyone tell you they know these things because that's total bullshit. They may "know it in their hearts" but they really just think it. People constantly present opinion as fact, rarely preceding their statements with "I think…." Like everything I've said here. Why don't you just assume that I've said "I think" before every little bit of exposition on these pages so I don't have to fuck up this smooth-ass rhythm I've got going here.

I don't believe in very much. I don't believe that it's possible that there is a God that would punish a person who doesn't go to church if that person lives his life being as respectful of others as possible. So I won't go to any church that teaches that. No God I'd ever respect would send me to Hell. Egotistical? Arrogant? Maybe. But I'm not John Wayne Gacy and I'll never be on trial for genocide. So, what would be the point? I wouldn't ruin heaven, right? Maybe I would. But if I'm in Hell and there's a lot of phony pretending-to-be-pious motherfuckers chilling upstairs, there's going to be a seriously pissed off hombre in the land of the damned.

I'm not very religious -- surprise, surprise -- another Godless Gen-X slacker heathen. Well, fuck you very much but that's not fair at all. I'm not a heathen, and I think that even calling me Godless is going too far. I have spirit (yes I do, I have spirit, how bout you?) and I am spiritual. I feel there is a part of me, deeper than all thins anger and all the hormones. Somewhere. I feel it.

Another thing we can never know: exactly what other people think about us. I'm driving to the store and go out of turn at a four-way stop sign and I wonder if the cabbie whose turn it was is swearing at me. He very well could be, and I'll never know it. It makes me wonder how many people have called me an asshole without my being aware of it. How many people have cursed up a storm at me behind my back, from behind a windshield, across the train from me? As many as I have silently cursed, undoubtedly. The way I try to live, though, is to keep from being cursed out; to live so that I cause nobody to need to curse me, you dig?

Beyond that -- you can never know what someone really thinks about you, even if they tell you. You have to be in someone's head to know what their thoughts really mean to them. Maybe this is elementary and obvious, but it seems to be that it would be interesting to be able to know exactly what you mean to someone.

Chapter X

6 to 10

I'm usually early for things. Appointments, dates, weddings, whatever. My poor estimation skills, combined with this deep-rooted fear and loathing of being late combine to make me arrive ten to fifteen minutes early for everything. In college, it was always the case that if I was going to be late for a class, I just wouldn't go. For some reason, absenteeism was preferable to tardiness every time. It became an easy excuse to blow off a whole day of classes. When I first started working for a living, my hatred of being late caused much anxiety for me and tension between me and my less-stringent co-workers. I never understood how they could saunter in an hour or two after starting time and not feel like they were slacking off.

These days, I'm a little less rigid in my thinking. I can walk into work an hour late without sweating it too much. And this is a good thing because lately I've been late a lot more often. I have these early morning stares that keep me locked into tasks for longer than need be. They occur in the shower, on the toilet, while I'm putting on my shoes, throughout my whole morning business. They turn five-minute jobs into twenty-minute affairs. I get locked in my thoughts and I end up having to yell at myself to break out of it.

These almost always consist of imagined conversations with family members or co-workers. They're never pleasant, they never do anything but make me… not necessarily angry, but they definitely cast a negative light on the start of my day. I act out these entire scenes in my head where whatever issue is currently weighing most on my mind is discussed extensively, but never resolved. I end up staring at some point on the wall or in space and wasting a ton of time that could be better used on things that don't bring me down to start my day.

Some days, it's not just in the morning, either. A single conversation with a single person will keep replaying itself over and over throughout the entire day and there's nothing I can do to keep me from slipping into it, sitting at my desk and all of a sudden it's ten minutes later, I'm staring at a filing cabinet, arguing with someone who's not even there to defend himself.

"Another of your morning terrors?" Sheila asks. Like I said, it brings me down and I guess it's pretty obvious. Sheila can always tell, and not just by looking at the clock. I'm twenty minutes late even leaving my apartment. Somehow, that will work out to me being forty-five minutes late to work. I'm not sure how the CTA manages that, but their power is infinite and their plan is unknowable.

"Yeah," I rap my skull. "This damn head of mine."

"Hey, don't knock it. I like it."

"Well thanks, Sheila, but it's caused me enough trouble for one lifetime."

"You can't be…" she starts, anxious worry in her voice for a second before she realizes I'm just screwing around. "Ha ha, Will. Not good to joke about."

I'm not sure where she thought I was headed with that. It seemed a rather mild joke to get too worked up about. Not like I said I was going to shoot myself. But if I've learned one thing about Sheila it's that you shouldn't push her on issues of verbal misconceptions.

"Sorry, Sheely, I didn't mean it."

"Oh, no problem. You didn't say anything wrong. I'm a little edgy this morning."

Silence. One thing about our conversations is that they're full of little bits and pieces of silence. They're not the uncomfortable kind, though. We're both just very thoughtful people and tend think a bit more about what we're about to say.

"So what was this morning's delay caused by?" she asks.

"I was telling Dan what I really thought of his last proposal." Dan is a salesman -- sorry, a vice president of business development -- at the office and I am quite convinced that he's either completely unclear on what it is that the company does or he's sold his soul to Satan and is regularly working off his debt by perpetrating evil in the devil's name. I'm not sure what I did to deserve the pain, but I'm figuring it must have been really bad and I'm just blocking it out of my memory.

"He's at it again, huh? Want me to beat him up?"

"That's mighty sweet of you, Sheila. Could you?"

"Maybe you should do it yourself. I can't be fighting all your battles for you. What's his deal? Doesn't play well with others?"

"He's saying we can build thirty electronic courses using technologies we don't know in 2 months. For $10,000 a course. With a team of three."

"Are you sure you know --"

"A team whose members are all committed to at least two other projects."

"-- all the details --"

"A team whose members haven't received raises in over two years."

"-- about the project?"

"Are you preaching conservative compassion here? Are you telling me to keep a level head?"

Sheila catches herself. The one who advised me to ace my folks in order to write a book wants me to take a deep breath before getting angry at an overpaid suit? "Well, alright, Will. Just don't go overboard."

"I think that's the point of my 'morning terrors' -- to keep me from going overboard when reality hits. I work out all the angles before the conversation even takes place and that way I can guess which path to take when the talk actually does happen. I just wish I was able to keep my head together while I was in the middle of them. I'm not sure why I lock up so completely like I do."

"Well, it's not easy to have imaginary conversations while you're putting your socks on, buddy."

"True, I just wish they'd wait until I'm on the train and not needing to use my brain for simple tasks like washing my face."

"Beggars can't be choosers. So how'd this one go?" Sheila asks.

"Not too well. I told Dan he was full of shit and he didn't appreciate it at all."

"I can't imagine he would."

"You know, I thought he'd be used to it by now."

When I get to work, the confrontation with Dan is much less explosive than I expected. It turns out a few other people had had less productive pre-talk imaginary conversations and had gone completely off the handle at him. Once again, I've missed my chance to be the rabble rouser. These new kids here, damn them, they have no respect for their elders, no idea of their position within the company. I'm supposed to be the one that tells it like it is, keeps it real, and keeps everyone honest. Still, I suppose they've gotten the job done: Dan is nowhere to be seen and several of the team members are glowering in the corner.

"It was amazing, Sheila, we met with the client this afternoon and Dan shows up late to his own meeting, eating a sloppy joe, trying to jump in the middle of a conversation."

"People like this have jobs? Your culture confuses and frightens me."

"He's been promoted to a level equal to his incompetence."

"Well, at least he's got that going for him. Don't they fire anyone over there?"

"Only if the company's bleeding money. They call them layoffs and trust me, Dan will be golden. The first one to go will be yours truly. I can guarantee it."

"That's disturbing. You're one of the skilled workers that makes the machine run."

Let me take a break here and say that I know that last line sounds like total bullshit, but sometimes that's just how Sheila talks, and that's the kind of thing that sometimes she'll just say. And the best part is that she actually means it. From anyone else, it would sound sarcastic or corny, but those words come from her mouth sounding like the most sincere thing you've ever heard. And really, I couldn't make that sort of thing up. I wouldn't put that in there to build myself up and I'm quite certain that I'm not one of the skilled workers and that if the machine runs at all, it does it in spite of me and not because of me. I had to agree with the sentiment she expressed though. Like I said before, these people are all clueless when it comes to the deeper levels of what the company does and are the last to go when trouble comes.

"Sure I am, but when they look at salaries and personalities, they see a decently-paid hard ass who makes too much trouble to be worth the trouble. They can find someone with similar skills and a better temperament and pay him a lot less and bite the cost of training and integration."

"Whatever happened to corporate loyalty?"

"Do you even listen to yourself sometimes? Corporate loyalty is dead. The almighty dollar is king. That and the sloppy joe."

"But at least you're not bitter," she says.

"Hey, you spend five years at a company that wants to pretend that it's the biggest thing in the city, the biggest player in the field but still can't manage to keep enough blank CD-ROMS around. A company where people use the phrase 'work hard, play hard' to disguise the fact that they're all alcoholics. A company where the people who make the most money have the most difficulty explaining what their role is. We have a Director of Training and Education who hasn't arranged for training or education for a single person. She's been there for a year." I come up for air.

"It's like that everywhere, Will…. From what I hear, anyway."

"Well then I'm the only person who thinks that it shouldn't be like that anywhere. Why does saying 'it's like that everywhere' make it right?"

"It doesn't, of course. But it's a statement designed to make you feel better about the lot that you're forced to accept and to keep you from jumping ship."

"Well boy oh boy did it work. If it's like this everywhere, shucks, I might as well stay put where I is, boy howdy. At least here, I'm used to the bullshit, right? At least, this particular brand of bullshit."

It's amazing how your standards will fall when you're pushed for time and you're just damned sick of trying anymore. You're exhausted and your brain is mush from trying to keep a thousand details straight. Any one mistake costs you time. You'll make up any excuse and rationalize releasing shoddy work. There comes a point where you just can't give any more effort and you'll say, "It's good enough for government work," even though you don't work for the government and neither does your client.

And it's sick how giddy you and your co-workers get. Moments ago you're at each other's throats and now you're laughing too loud and making too many jokes just to try to ease the tension in the air and because your brain can't handle any more of this. The whole situation has an air of desperation and tragedy that you can't find matched anywhere else in your life. The weight you give to this is so completely out of proportion to its actual importance that you find your view of everything completely skewed. These couple hours that you spend here are so valuable and so wasted that you feel that everyone owes you and owes you big.

When it's 6:30 and you'd wanted to be home and naked by now and you know it's going to be 7:30 before you even think about putting on your coat, you start to go a little mad. Your head feels like it's about to feel like it's going to explode and your eyes start to burn a little and your heart hurts and there's a pit in your stomach and you just need to get the hell out but you can't -- and why? What keeps you there? That paycheck, that respect, that sense of duty. Fuck all that, it's all meaningless. But still it's got you stuck fast and against your will. And you're salaried so when you work more than 40 hours you still get paid for those 40 hours. Sucker. Oh wait, that's me I'm talking about. Sucker.

In this industry, this digital media industry, it still takes time to do things. People don't seem to understand that. They think that magically, blammo, it will appear, done and perfect and fresh and new. But here I am, waiting 20 minutes for a CD-ROM to burn, just to see if two icons are lined up properly. It won't tell me before it's done, and I can't leave until I know. And I don't know why I'm in such a hurry to go home, like there's something huge waiting for me there. There isn't. There never is. But I just need to be away from here. Knowing that the longer I stay here, the closer it is to the time I have to come back….

There is nothing glamorous in this. I'm not helping the world. I'm not making an impact or leaving my mark or becoming immortal. Burning data onto shiny plastic discs, there is no greatness in that. There is no greatness around me. This mark I am leaving on the world -- what is it? Shiny, plastic, forever. Eventually this will be junk for a landfill, coasters, Christmas decorations. It's meaningless.

And when it's finally good enough, it's still not perfect. And you get no sense of closure, knowing that. You put a label on it and shove it into the Fed Ex package and you take it to the place with the latest pickup service nearby and hand it off and you leave with the one fear deep in your heart: that it might come back. You never want to think about it again, but knowing that it's out there, potentially useless. What are you going to do but obsess about it? Your creation is out there on its own, probably broken, potentially useless.

It's 8:00, do you know where you children are?

And it's 8:30 and it's pitch black out and here you are… here I am…

Chapter X

Illinoir

…walking through the city at night… it's never what I hope it will be. I have created a hundred characters forced to walk dark streets, the rain running off their long dark coats, soaking their feet, their very souls stained by the gritty urban landscape. They were all on quests, searching for something that might save them from whatever bleak fate I'd had in store for them. They were all free from petty worries, free to focus on whatever major problem I'd invented. These were heroes, true heroes to me. They thought their great thoughts and fought the good fight. And they were all some version of me projected onto the page and into imaginary cities always in the grip of some kind of storm.

And what do I get? This is me just running to catch the last express train so I can save twenty minutes on my commute. A brightly colored medium weight coat trying to keep out the cold. I don't even own a long dark coat. How can I have a dramatic noir experience without a long dark coat? I just wish the weight on my shoulders was denser, not the product of a hundred little things. Something that would send me out into the night to search… for something.

I want to be a tragic figure. Not as pathetic as Holden Caulfield; not as terrifying as Beckett's Unnameable. But something. Something that would justify this martyr complex that I seem to have.

But most of all, I want to walk the streets at night with my hands thrust into my pockets, my head bent forward, my footsteps confident and sure, never doubting my purpose, my resolve steadfast and true, the validity and honor of my quest unquestionable.

But they're not handing out that sort of character at 7-11.

What it means, surely, is that I lack purpose. I lack meaning. I lack resolve and character and vision and depth and clarity. Did I ever have it? Did writing give me any of these things or was it just a different form of masturbation? Did school or work or sport ever give me these? Have I just been going through the motions of a life? Going to college because it was expected of me; getting a job because it was expected of me; living because it was expected of me? I didn't choose to exist. Someone else made that decision for me. Maybe that someone else should be responsible for me having some sort of purpose. Otherwise, what was their point? Didn't they have something in mind for me when they made me? I have never created a character without having some sort of reason for their existence. What kind of author would I be to randomly create these entities, to give them life, and then give them no purpose at all? "If there is a gun on the table in act one, you can be sure it will be used in act two." That's the rule of law in the world. Why not with people?

Dammit, my parents brought me around and never told me what I was supposed to be. They never gave me the quest that sent me off to do anything. I don't care if I'm not a tragic figure, searching through Chicago's streets on a rainy or snowy night, looking for the answers in a bottle of gin or a jazz bar or a street fight. It doesn't have to be that dramatic, but at least it could be something. So they wanted to have kids, but why? What did they think that would accomplish? Sure Mom, I know you love me, but what did you think this thing would become? You nurtured me until I could take care of myself for a reason, right? You must have had some point in all that and don't give me that shit about…well, I honestly don't know what shit you'd give me.

I'm not looking for the meaning of life. I just want there to be some meaning to life. I don't want to ask God why the human race is here. Just my parents about why I'm here.

Chapter X

You Can't Go Home Again

"Mom, what's my point?"

She's understandably confused. After not hearing from her son for a few months, a sudden phone call is going to throw her off-base. Add to that the fact that I'm demanding information that she has no clue about, well it can lead to one of those uncomfortable silences.

"I don't know, Will, what's your point?"

"No, I mean…. Why'd you bother having me?"

"Well, I was pregnant and abortions weren't as easily obtained back then."

"Way to build my confidence, Ma. I appreciate it. Maybe I'm not explaining myself well here."

"That's a distinct possibility."

"I was just thinking that all the characters I've made…. I gave them all purpose. And I figured it stood to reason that since I'm a character that you made, you must have had some purpose in mind for me."

"Good night, Will."

"Mom, come on. I'm serious. You didn't just make me from some biological need to procreate, did you? Or out of some religious duty? Or, God forbid, some sort of egotistical feel that your genetic line shouldn't die out?"

"Isn't that why you create? Because you're afraid you'll never have children and you need to leave some sort of mark on the world? You think your writing will somehow carry on your legacy?"

"Well…."

"Will, I was horny, and so was your father, and that's how those things work."

"Thanks, Mom. You really cleared everything up."

A call to my father is in order. He and I tend to think more along the same lines than my mother and I do. Though we rarely had the kind of discussion I was about to start with him now, I figured there was a good chance that he would understand where I was coming from.

"What the hell are you talking about?"
So much for that idea.

"Seriously, Dad. Don't you feel some responsibility to give me purpose in life?"

"Not particularly, no."

"But you put me on Earth, surely you have some duty to…."

"Look, I paid for your food and clothing and college. How's that for duty?"

"Hey, I appreciate everything you've done for me. I really do. But I'm not talking about material things here. I'm talking about purpose. Meaning. Reason."

"Are you drunk again?"

"No. Dad, I'm serious."

"The point of life is finding your own purpose, Will. And I did everything I could to see that you weren't eaten by wolves while you grew up enough to find it."

"Am I grown up enough to find it? I'm not so sure."

"Okay, okay. I did everything I could to see to it that you made it far along enough that you could watch out for yourself while you were growing up enough to find it."

"I think you owe me a bit more than that."

"Fine, I'll give you purpose. Come to the house and wash my car."

I sit next to the cutest girl on the train. I smell her, and think, she must be foreign, not because she smells bad like most foreigners, but because she smells, I swear to God, like what I imagine Europe must smell like: cappuccino and flowers and pretension. It turns out she is not foreign, but wearing Calvin Klein's new Eau de Eu. But then she ruins everything by opening her mouth. Up until that point she was petite and innocent, unassuming, almost tragically cute. But she dials her phone and becomes a monster, talking too loudly, and with an inflection that destroyed all possibilities. It is stunning how few words it took and which words did it in.

"Which wallet did you get her? Because is it too big for the purse? I saw the cutest card at the store today…. I'll get the card…."

When she hangs up, it becomes almost possible again, as the sound of her nasal and condescending voice fades from my ear. I begin to return to my original opinion of her.

But who am I trying to fool? Rather, why am I trying to fool myself? What purpose would it serve to blind myself to this first, heart-felt, though shallowly reached, first impression? On the other hand, first impressions can be wrong -- they often are -- and wasn't my true first impression of her that she was a thing of beauty?