Like the rest of my paranoid nightmares, this one was pretty generic. I was taking a shower with the lights out (as usual). From the shower I heard someone bust open the door to the apartment and shout "ANYBODY HOME? I'M GONNA FUCKIN' KILL YOU!"

I shouted something incoherent, then flung open the shower curtain to meet my attacker. It was dark as could be in the bathroom, but I could tell exactly where the person was. I punched his face, and he reached out and broke my arm.

Then I woke up. Screaming some meaningless yawp and slamming my left fist into the wall. I thought the intruder was actually here waiting for me to move. As if lying perfectly still in bed while a killer stands there is some kind of camouflage, and armed robbery is akin to the call of the wild.

When I was a kid I always planned to lie perfectly still when someone broke into the house to kill me. I just always hoped the intruder would leave my collection of pennies alone.

Anyway, this morning it took over two hours to separate the dream from the reality. A couple of hours isn't bad compared to days when it seems impossible ever to separate the two.

Now it's raining. I had a bad weekend. Saturday was mostly spent feeling numb and vacuous, the kind of depressive bout that can makes breathless and dumb. I know, of course, that things get better. They always do, though they eventually just go bad again.

Today I finally got a haircut. My usual $10 job. Somehow I've never seen fit to spend those ungodly amounts of money people spend on simple haircuts. But then again, after I left the barbershop today I realized that I may have accidentally tipped the haircutter $11 instead of $2. Can't be sure.

But while sitting there getting this hair cut I wondered what life would be like if no one ever referred to themselves as "I" or "me" or "my." How could some people function? How how how?

Last night, once again I decided to try and learn a bunch of card tricks. As usual, I didn't get far. What fun are card tricks if no one but myself is here to be amazed and confused?

Speaking of returning to this nonsense of card tricks, I'm starting to see a pattern to the things I do when I have days like this past Saturday. Without fail, when life seems to have no meaning and I have nowhere to go and no one to go there with, I sit down and start writing the story of my life. From the beginning. Here's how far I got this time:

I was born in Washington DC on January 30, 1968. I was the 2nd of 2 kids. My sister, Diane, is 5 years older than I. My father was with the U.S. Army, and our family was stationed to live at locations throughout the world. Soon after I was born we moved to Accra, Ghana. I remember almost nothing of Africa, but my earliest living memory is from there. It is of

I don't think it will ever get any farther than those few sentences.

In the past, when I had terrifying nightmares, I could never scream for real. Trying to do so produced at most a hissing, airless hush. Once I dreamed of walking behind a lake across the street from the house in Tampa. Some kind of giant grasshopper-like beast was hurrying around behind the bushes waiting to strangle me. It made its attack, and I tried very, very hard to scream. But it didn't happen. Just that hissing noise.

I'm not sure when it started to change, but lately it seems to happen almost every day.

Well, good night.