I grip myself from a thousand sides at once from the pit of my mattress: this is stewing agony. The apartment manager is a short little Hitler of a man. He has no ambitions, thankfully, and so he won't end up murdering the world. But his mustache and sweaty little body maneuvered about the gravestones, bloodying the flesh of my nerves. There were sharp things biting into the edge of my table, and somehow some of my nerves had gotten into my table (perhaps I had shed some flesh while looking out the window); and I felt a sharp pain in the region of the table, and turned to see the apartment manager stabbing me in the table again and again from across the room. I was made into sweat and corn mash; such are the pangs of flesh, phantoms that come with knives & needles. I had quit drinking by the time the sun had come up. Someone offered me a shot of rum, and I said I didn't drink, that I quit. When did I quit?--he asked. "Around one a.m.," I said, "when I was too drunk to stand." I lay my roots across the wall and became a thing growing out of the wall like mold: I had roots stretching out horizontally into the plaster, and mine was the life of a tree. The Buddha came to me and opened mine eyes to his blank understanding, and I said to him, "Thou phantom thing, art thou wind or water?" "Breath," he said, "I am breath." I said to my daimon that comes and dines with his ghostly sheet, "Am I not untrue to mine own self?" He said to me, "I shall give you nothing of what you ask for, and everything of what you desire." I did not comprehend, but rather suddenly felt my taproot fail; and I plummeted back to my floor, unable to stagger to the toilet: I was sick right there where I lay. And I stopped and considered that I have no options--I cannot go on living like this, and there is nothing else I can possibly do--I do not want to be published, I do not want to put my confession before the world--when I think of people reading this I feel a sense of shame & regret--and I do not want to go on living like I am--I feel my life leaving me, I feel like a mere ghost of a man; and I do not want to live and live like this; I want to cultivate tumors and let them do their wondrous work. And so I made myself a suffering body, that my body may be bread for hungry worms; and I made my body out of bits and pieces of the broken lives of broken men; and such are all things when they fly on past their zenith, and we get a taste of the treasures that have been stored up, whether fair or foul. This is what is meant by losing your soul in this very life. I could have been saved--I turned from the very threshold of the heavens in this very life, and came down to this tiny world of pangs, terrors & long nights of mourning. And so my thin scaled fingers move on and on and push the keys, and I am made to trace out the feeble outlines of my broken life.