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No, I prefer poetic vagueness to uncreative clarity.

I'm curious how it works out for an alcoholic who's come close to overcoming his addiction only to be ruined at the last minute due to coming into contact with the object of his addition once again. When an addiction is present, there's nothing else that I seem to want to think about. Given enough time, it seems that I can almost forget to become addicted. Yet, with just one small stimulus, all of that can be undone almost overnight. The stimulus, no matter how minor, can creep its way into my dreams — a once familiar yet now almost foreign emotion can embed itself in the familiar once again. Despite all the effort that was taken to eliminate it, with no effort whatsoever, it puts itself back in centre court.

There are some things that people might not know about you… and it's not because they're such a scandalous secret: you just never bothered to tell anybody about it.

My senior year of college, I woke up in places that had weird names such as Weddington, Watts and Elm Springs¹. Often, the morning would greet me as I slept in the backseat of my car with cold 5:00 AM air and a mean headache as a result of spending the better portion of the evening in an uncomfortable, cold vehicle. I would wake up in these unique locations because I was getting away from what I thought at the time was a colossal mistake. I'm not really in the elaborating mood right now. I feel like skipping to the end and telling you the lesson that I learned.²

We can only be as good as the rest of the world will let us be, and we can't blame the rest of the world for not letting us be good to it. I've been so mixed up thinking that the world's been doing me wrong while trying to do me good that I've been too blind to see how my efforts to do good aren't appreciated.

1. I once woke up in my car in Tulsa the day after the Rockies beat the Padres in The Tie Breaker, but that was not on purpose.
2. I realise that that's leaving a large hole in the narrative, but make up whatever you want to make up: it's probably going to be more interesting than the truth.

Old people tell me that they can't find jobs because the younger people are taking the jobs for less pay. Younger people tell me that they can't find jobs because they lack experience and can't get experience. The reality is that no one can find jobs. Why not stop blaming other people for not being able to find a job and blame the natural forces of the economy.

I've discovered something about myself. Part of my job involves telling people that their only source of income has been depleted, and they will probably be evicted and homeless. Somehow, some people, after hearing this bad news… take it very well. A good number even thank me. I guess this means that I have a talent for delivering bad news.¹

Does this sound bad: I sometimes wonder if I would like a job in a hospital telling patients' families that they're going to die? I figure that if I'm good at delivering bad news…

1. That and the fact that people really take bad news better when it's not immediately before or immediately after Christmas. Which reminds me, Jesus, was it some cruel joke that you played on humanity to decide to be born in the last month of the year so that when people celebrate your birth, corporate budgets are used up, lay offs are a plenty and family savings accounts are dried up? Some twirp is probably going to remind me that the date of Christmas was chosen arbitrarily to coincide with some pagan ritual in order to Christianise it… which you are probably exactly right about.