I open the instant messenger program to see who is available (that is signified by a green, yellow, or red tag next to their user name). I consider typing a friendly message to a friend that I have lost contact with, maybe one from high school, or college, or the time after college, or grad school. Instead I double-click on my brother's name and type "hey." He doesn't respond. I close the program. I open another browser tab and go to Facebook. I click through the profiles of people from high school, college, the time after college, and grad school. Everyone loves Jesus and smiley faces. Everyone belongs to a political party, somehow, without any active duty or even an official notification. Everyone "loves all kinds of music," which in other words means that they love all kinds of music on the FM radio dial. Everyone loves American I-Dull and Grey's Enema. Everyone has a bumper sticker that says, "I live for the days we'll never forget and the nights we'll never remember." I feel cold and put back on my sweatshirt. I glance at the stack of eight books on the elevated platform of my desk (where the printer used to go -- now I print only in emergencies): fiction, nonfiction...philosophy, psychology...all helpful, all wasteful. I pick up Visions of Gerard and start to read. Jean argues with his father; he wants to write and not do childish, mindless work, because he's an artist. Maybe this is becoming an artist's world, since now there aren't even jobs to be had. I can get no job, nor would I want one. Jean talks of his older brother Gerard, who died at age nine, who -- since we're all embedded from the start with a considerable amount of guilt -- was a sinner, even though he was an angelic, large-hearted child, who died before having a chance to do any real human destruction on this planet. I understand this picking apart of one's own childhood. Lately I've been scanning a box of pictures from '89-'90 -- hundreds of shots of smiling little monkey-like kids, wrestling, running, swimming, mostly in summer and fall, with not a care on their minds, nor with an inkling of the troubles ahead. I wonder how it could be a false goal to want to return to that, how it could not be the source of concepts like heaven and of stories like Adam and Eve. I still can't decide if it makes me feel better to listen to somber music and read melancholy tales. If I decide affirmatively, I might keep the Kid A and Amnesiac vinyl rips on repeat forever, and cycle through The Duluoz Legend until all the pages fall out. I haven't cried in months. I may have forgotten how again. I wonder what intoxicating substances are present in my apartment. There's always cheap liquor, but alcoholism would be too much work. I don't think I have the capacity for addiction. I get distracted too easily. Had I reached adulthood in the 1890s or even the 1980s, I would just walk to a pub and order a tall brew, where I could at least fake a healthy interaction with other people. But on this day, I am partitioned within a mass-constructed series of apartments, banked up against a freeway that runs from Port Huron to Montana -- neither am I likely to see any time soon. The leaves are gone from the trees out my lone window, and I see birds still bustling and rustling the twigs, preparing for the long, icy period of semi-survival ahead. It gets dark before five p.m. now. If tomorrow I sleep until eleven forty-five a.m., then I will only have about five hours of daylight to face. I keep the shades turned until the sun passes southwest, so it never sees me head-on, only indirectly through the cracks in the plastic, with back turned or sweatshirt hood hanging over eyes, 'til time has run on and the cool darkness comes to me once again. I deal with the patronizing light all afternoon. I think that might be all the mockery I can take.

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