Some days, I look at myself and think, "God, I am such an asshole..."

I sat in this dirty diner all day, just feeling the same. I could have sat here, watched this paunchy man out the window with the bluetooth jabber and get fatter and fatter and lose more hair and get stabbed and swept away by a street cleaner and notice nothing but the way the sidewalk sparkles, before and after. Pretty girls come by and I notice them too. I see some dressed in black, and I think I knew them before. I notice them like statues, and I understand Pygmalion, his hubris, his lust for nothing but the familiar and awesome products of his own genius.

I think about the paper I edited last night, it was my friend's, and I marvel at how this guy took this mundane experience about air travel and used the claustrophobia he felt sitting in a hot taxiing metal tube filled with hot disgruntled strangers to propel himself to write this beautiful, bloated piece about it, about heroism and halloween costumes, among other things. What an elegant blow to the face of ennui and inertia, to turn that old whale on its back and find all these beautiful ideas still there, clinging to its gross underbelly. And I think perhaps that's a worthy goal, to be a spelunker of ideas, to go searching around in dark smelly caves for new life. But, Jesus, who really gives a fuck?

I have lunch with Ayn Rand's slobbering beast. He doesn't eat a thing, just sits there slobbering and I just want to yell at him, "eat you slobbery motherfucker, eat already, if you're so damn slobbery just eat something for Chrissakes!" but he just sits there drooling away with vacuous eyes that draw me in and give nothing back.

This is whom I am asked to love. I think about Christ's love, this perfect love supposedly and realize what's never clicked for me is that the goddamn loneliness of the whole business of divine commiseration couldn't be proper love, as if my love for a snake, all fangs and venom, could be called divine. I've searched for this ideal all my life, to love something that could not love me back and more often than not been consumed by the exact vulgarity I sought after. Where's the love that lifts as I lift, that uproots me from the soil?

But goddamn it anyway, I listen to the rhythmic drone of my own toothless drivel and teach my soul to settle, to give up the life I have left in exchange for the quieting of my squalling sensibility. It's God's way for me. I smoke a cigarette as I slowly go colorblind and number my hours like ants marching.