The sun rises as I sleep away; I awake perhaps at noon, smoke a cigarette; and the fog of lethargy will make my bed seem lovely again, and I will go down into confusion & unconsciousness for another two hours. Again I will awake, smoke a cigarette, this time drink some coffee, sit and think, read a little, write a little, surf the net with an indifferent boredom. Perhaps I will jack off; perhaps I will finish a book today and go on to another; and the books keep coming and coming, and there is no end to them, nor completion of the task of reading; and I write manuscript after manuscript, and there is no final manuscript, no point at which I can say, "Finally, I've finished." And day is added to day, week to week, month to month; the spring slips away into summer, the summer into fall; the sun rises, the sun sets; time is added to and added to, as I sit in the insulation of my air-conditioned, heated apartment, oblivious to the temperature & seasons, dry in the rain, warm in the cold, cool in the heat. And the days go by and by; perhaps I grow a beard in the fall and shave it in the spring; I lose weight, I gain wait, all in the isolation of my little room. And I want to go out into the world like a man who has been stranded in isolation in some alien land for decades; I want to go out into the street in joy and disbelief, embrace the first person I see, and say, "What day is it! What month is it! I've been away for so, so long. Who is President? What year is it?" I want to but I don't; for my very homeland is my desert isle, and I'm stranded in the hive of the city, encapsulated in a little box, away from the heat & rain & snow, dry and insulated like a metal box of relics in an underground cave, forever unknown, waiting, waiting, waiting. I want to go to my mother in much longed-for relief and say, "How old am I now? Who has died, and who still lives? Oh it has been a long, long time away for me." But I sit in my room, grow weary at 4:00 a.m., go down into my bed and fall right asleep; enter the desires & confusion of dreams, and wake to go through it again, again, again.