text: I have decided, I think, as much as you can decide something like this—that I am going to stay the course re: reading huge books and watching long movies, and sitting crosslegged on the floor with my guitar in my lap, and going out at night alone with a terrible bottle of wine hidden inside my jacket, and writing stupid novellas that no decent tax-paying American would ever want anything to do with. Which is to say my quasi-ascetic idiot-monk lifestyle goes on, and I will rebuff anything that threatens it!!
  I thought even a month ago that, hell, maybe I should call it quits and just date someone, or whatever it is you people do. But then: why? To be pierced with a poison arrow yet again?? I trust only a few people, for God’s sake, and I have seen no good reason to trust any more. And I’m certainly not going to let anyone get near this dumb lockbox containing a thing that, were the barb in it to be removed, would kill me!
  Laura and I were saying today that so many people go around claiming to have Beliefs and Principles and Values, and hold themselves to a strict Moral Code. When really they’re just a trash bag filled with helium. They are met with a real test of character, and they immediately shrivel up and abandon all the noble things they prided themselves with having imprinted on their god dang souls. Their beliefs are conditional! Behind the thin human mask is a web of hideous spineless lies!!
  The world, near as I can tell, is solid all the way through. But people are just vaporous fools who would vanish if you shined a light on them.