My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.

I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.

‎Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving?

America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and consumerism against what might be called a kind of moral or civic impulse.

I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity

I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.