It felt like fall today. Whatever else happens this time of the year, I feel like I am dying. Vanishing. Right now, my hands are numb and my neck is burnt, by what fires I can not remember. This has not happened since, since I don't know when. It is quiet in here. The sounds of these words being typed smatter across the room. In spurts. This paragraph would make an interesting speed-reading test among speed-readers interested not in getting these words out of the way in a hurry but in lurching and halting to the rhythm of this mud slipping right through my hands and showing itself on this screen.

I knew it. I should have started a calendar. I have no idea when last this happened. When last the life poured out of my head and onto the carpet; when last the breath of hours I routinely take for granted felt like a feeble agony. I should plan my year around this month. Around this day. No one is listening but me, and today I can hear myself. I am not being heard by anyone, but out of the air my own disappointments crowd my head like a freak show. It is like no one has ever heard me. Sputtering and stopping, standing up and sitting down, looking behind me and looking back, scratching my forehead and looking back at what I just typed, tapping impatiently, scrubbing the back of my neck and letting surface what is shitting across my brain: God, there is not going to be enough time.

Ah, hell, what is another day, anyway? I could use a cheeseburger right now. Cheeseburgers do not fuck with me much at all, and I will take whatever one which comes my way. It is hard to fuck up a cheeseburger. Of course, it happens all the time in this town. But don't get me started.

I can only look at the 1970's brain-dead smiley face (imprefect as it is) and be filled with envy and longing. I know it is not possible. Happiness. The perfect day. The perfect phone conversation. The perfect woman. The perfect word. There is no word, no woman, no conversation. Oh, man, is my head dying right now. And once again I'm sitting here thinking "FUCK YOU" to whatever it is. I want me back.

At times like this, I pick up the phone. I call friends, non-friends, payphone numbers, people I don't know but who I wish were here right now, or who I wish had been here last night, or the night before and the night before. I called 4 continents tonight. Last night, only one city. No one ever answers. No one ever calls back. I pepper the world with 7 or 8 messages on answering machines around the universe, and then I sit and wait for the calls to come. But the y never come until next week. Until yesterday. Until I am taking a shit, or shaving my face, or too tired to wake up, or somewhere else altogether.

Good goddam night. I need a beer. I need a sleep. I need things that do not exist. I am, in between these sentences (and much to my own disappointment) fanning the yellow pages in search of a massage person who will come here and poke holes in my back, in my front, in my head. It is so ridiculous to pay someone to make me feel good, or to ever expect it in the first place.

In the meantime, la-la-la-la-la. Time to talk nonsense all the time. I have not gone anywhere in the 45 minutes it took to tell you all this. And there is nowhere to go, because I ordered a pizza, and I got the money on the counter over by the door.

• July 27, 1997 - Persevering
• July 13, 1997 - Nothing
• June 29, 1997 - Noise
• June 22, 1997 - Wandering