In which the older wiser more PR-savvy future stand in wonders how to artfully disavow a borrowed sentimental posture baldly inhabited as a room of one’s own

Alive and achingly so. Reading Vollman’s Whores for Gloria and chain smoking Camel Wides, stopping momentarily every now and again to jot down a particular metaphor or invocation of a color - this was what 18, 19 years ago - some time after it became necessary to unplug the N64 from the wall and throw it out the window, down three stories to the molten black stew of a Chicago parking lot, to explode like a denuded dream on a stiff therapeutic couch, just so my roommate from Paris would stop playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater and go to class. At which point I no longer had a roommate. The abandoned carton of Gauloise like Camus smoked works in a pinch if the corner store was closed and no food was in the offing. Acrid cigs to make the eyes redden and well up, the better to keep up with William the Blind’s lustful portraits of broken and broken-down lives would stave off sleep and make me almost shaky with envy as each aria of authenticity hit a new high note. It made no sense why the rooms i occupied were always so silent while the rooms in my head were a Modernist novel’s party scene of Bahkinitian dialogic intrigue. Solitude, no; loneliness, yes. Quality No! Energy Yes! Good grief, I yell back across time, go out and talk to a stranger. Manufacture an experience for your ownmost self. Take leave of the crack-smoking auteur whose carpal tunnel is a real deal testament to a work ethic you won’t be able summon until much later, when money starts to matter much more, too much more. End the alienated majesty, take stock of the feeling that the story line leaves you as it vibrates and shimmers in all its pilfered mediated splendor. Don’t you see what you have - waste it, yes, but savor the wasting more.