No, no, no, no. What can I say?

All manner of evil thing.

Eventually I get tired of everything… everything!

Nowhere. Nowhere am… into nothing do I —

Someday, after years of unaffected silence, an entire army of novels will come tumbling suddenly and heavily from my ass.

“We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something. Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.”

Albert Camus

“You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you — you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability.”

Antonin Artaud

“The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all… I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it.”

Eugene Ionesco

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Samuel Beckett

I am remembering driving home in heavy rain in a borrowed car in the darkness of the early morning, after leaving eBay for the very last time. I didn’t say goodbye to anyone. I am remembering talking to a friend from the parking lot of a Glendale grocery store after my Denmark job went bust. I am remembering writing my final feature after years of work, telling my weekly readership that I was moving on to “bigger and better things.” I am remembering driving home from Caldera the last time, having lost everything I understood in my life and being stuck in the Wasatch Front corridor traffic, nothing to look forward to and nowhere familiar to go.

I am remembering driving Donner Pass on the way back from San Francisco in 1999. It was the most impossible thing I’ve ever done… I don’t know how I faced it. I don’t think I was ever that lonely before or have ever been that lonely since. All those trees… and no idea why I was bothering to go back. I am remembering driving out of Los Angeles in 2000, hopeful and confused, not realizing that nothing was going to be any different — that a ride across Nevada in a tow truck was going to be one of the highlights of my year, rather than anything that would meet me in the valley metro. I am remembering sitting in a bus station in Austin full of uncertainty and confusion, waiting hours for my bus to finally leave, knowing that I had three days of solitude on the plains ahead of me. That was the second most impossible thing I’ve ever done… and by the time three days were over, I was a completely different person. I am remembering laying on one of the worst motel beds ever in a coastal town called Brookings after listening to Mazzy Star on the road all day, looking up at a ceiling fan spinning, spinning… I was a one-man universe unable to do anything but sigh in the stifling, muggy air of late summer.

I am wondering what it will be like to remember leaving Chicago.

Why are so many of my most important memories so similar? And how do I get so lucky that they are all made alone? No, that’s a stupid question. Of course they’re alone.

Five years and all I really remember is how it felt to jump into my car suddenly at seven in the evening and run — to drive all night like a maniac at a hundred miles per hour, unable and unwilling to think — and then how it was when I got to the ocean’s edge and realized that I still hadn’t run nearly far enough — that maybe I never could — that the early morning Berkeley fog couldn’t hide anything from me. Five years and I don’t really remember anything else.

It’s funny, and just a bit sad, to see what remains in the end.