Ollie.

I don’t know, sometimes I get a sense that - no, sometimes I feel so certain that none of this pain is actually mine. Like I'm grieving on behalf of someone else. What an unremarkable thought. Everything bleeds into everything else. Long day at your desk and you fade into sleep. Dreams follow you into the day. Sometimes, a memory arrives before a thought does. Bent nails in plywood. Weeds, prevailing. They insist and I'm jealous. Or proud. Friends of friends of friends are asking what I’m doing, what I’ve done? Well, I am sitting, waiting, looking at the world. I’m trying my best to leave the business up to everyone else. How do I explain to you, or them, or anyone that after my grandmother slipped in the bathroom and struck her head on the way down, she died alone in a pool of her blood and the only thing I could think of was whether or not she’d flushed? I’m no goddamn animal. I may be a stupid, foiled-up twenty-first-century son of a bitch, but I'm no animal. Don’t gimme that. I’m no animal. I don’t care if I’m pretentious. Everything is pretentious when everyone is a nihilist. Everything is pretentious on the downwards pointed earth. Everyone is all rotting and talk. There’s no purity left to us here because the apathetic tailspinners have consolidated life into one big joke. Sincerity is dead or laughed at. Most will take the newspaper … and throw it to the floor. Nobody knows where you’ve been. *pause* Nobody will care for that newspaper like you will. It just ain’t happening bro. I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.