It's asking for trouble to listen to music alone.

I had thought that growing up's consolation was that you could escape from the arbitrariness of things, that somehow one acquired more control. Now you had two numbers until you were ninety-nine. And it wasn't true. Growing up was just more of the same but taller. What happened was all luck. There was no logic.

No matter how often I think I can't stand it anymore, I always do. There is no alternative. I don't fall, I don't foam at the mouth, faint, collapse or die. It's the same for all of us. You can't get out of the inside of your own head. Something keeps you going. Something always does.

You would think there's a natural limit to tears: only so much the body can give at one sitting before it runs dry.

The phone is an instrument of intrusion into order. It is a threat to control. Just when you think you are alone and safe, the call could come that changes your life. Or someone else's. It makes the same flat, mechanical noise for everyone and gives no clues what's waiting there on the other end of the line. You can never be too careful.

I already read everything. I read poems and plays and novels and newspapers and comic books and magazines. I read tins in supermarkets and leaflets that come through the door, unsolicited mail. None of it lasts long and it doesn't give me answers. Reading too fast is not soothing.

Needing people yet being afraid of them is wearing me out.