It’s an ambulance driven by a blind man, my understanding. Always too late and with plenty of dents. My… I… The single most… I’m just tired, is the thing. Or, rather: sleepy. I’m used to… Normally, see, I get home at like six in the evening. I leave work, race home and…

I was reading somewhere about essays, and how the best describe the common trivia of a life and make it luminescent and I’m thinking, who’d ever want to do that.

And I was thinking, on the way into work, having no Beta to distract me, although it is rarely described, we do all take craps, don’t we? Except for maybe Dick Cheney, who I suppose has a sphincter that distends like a pink tapir nose and squeezes out giant hornet eggs. And then he sits around his basement talking to them; the translucent eggs are arranged neatly on his pool table, which he never uses anyway and is therefore covered with large sheets of heavy clear plastic and as they gestate and hatch he talks to them. Arranged neatly in rows, aligned vertically, horizontally and diagonally at the same time. I’m going down to my study, he tells his wife, because that’s what they call the basement, his study, and he goes down there and says, I can’t let you out you know. Because you’re giant. If you were regular hornets, I could just let you go. But you’re giant.

And then he says, Man, I shouldn’t have had that spicy pork. And lays a few more.

Sleep, you see, battles with social contact in my snowy little paperweight this week.

It all comes down to, what do you want?

I was in a bus depot somewhere. I was seventeen or eighteen. Salt Lake City. Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Someplace. Sitting around talking to people, or rather, listening to other people talk, somehow in this group of strangers waiting for buses. This old wrinkled up guy asked me, So what you want from life anyway? And the question floored me because I had no idea. Maybe he felt sorry for me, because he said, Just fuckin wit you man.

Different things present themselves to you at different times, don’t they. Right now, it’s the what do you want thing that keeps coming up in different forms for me, in various conversations, whatever. Like life asking, Are you going to listen right off or do I have to get your attention first? It pays to listen from the start, because life has all sorts of ways to get your attention.

Where was I?

Left to my own devices, I gravitate to people. This is new.