I am not Zig. I am beyond Zig. I am the radioactive pile of Zig. Fermenting. Becoming something else. A new element. Periodic table, beware! Erasure. Disturbances in the electromagnetic field. What do I do? What do I do, pal? I am sitting in a chair. Supposed to fix screws in a doorframe. Cannot do it. I am machinist. Need to be here. At the machine. Banging away. Not at the hardware store. The hardware store that puts gazillions of dollars into the regime. Gasoline (gazoline? guzzoline? guzzling?) makes the world turn & turn. The Persian Gulf. The Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf of Oman. I pump gas into the Beetle. I slap a right buttock. This is madness. Existence. Civilization. Credit card debt. Student loans. I remember smoking a cigarette with Giselle. We are naked. We just fucked. A window is open. A black plastic ashtray. No idea what is out there. What is coming. We should stay in bed. Amerikans are everywhere. Fighting. Fucking. I study the law. I study the human body. I study the imagination. I study memory. No story. My life is shaped by absence. Pools of time. Riding a bicycle on dirt trails in the pine barrens. Yellow diggers moving the earth. Sheetrock infrastructure. Blacktop driveways. Chainlink fences. Razorwire protecting a forbidden zone of the sumphole. A UFO. An asteroid. Nobody really knows what made the crater. What is certain: the Sump Monster emerges. I keep a German shepherd in the yard. Sleeps in the garage. Barks at danger. He is always barking. The machines hulk. Lathes and Bridgeport milling machines. It is a nightmare of piecework. Burrs of metal. Stainless-steel. Aluminum. Teflon plastics. No future. Earth is not a Super-earth. Earth is simply Earth. There are Super-earths out there. Waiting. We need a fast enough spaceship. A VW Super Beetle. Elon Musk can kiss my ass with his Tesla. Floating out there. Space debris. Space junk. The Tesla Cybertruck I like. I might want to drive it on a rocky planet. A desert wasteland like Tatooine. So long as the windows hold up against projectiles fired by the Sand People. The Druids might salvage my Cybertruck. Put it in that amazing giant machine with caterpillar treads. Sell it to the Skywalkers. I digress. Where am I? Precisely here. Nowhere. Terrifying and beautiful places. If we can stand it. I am getting closer to the end of the beginning. We all are. Are you letting things happen? Is this a liquid document? Is this your life? Are you a computer file? The city is hissing. A steampipe metropolis. It is morning. I am cold. The coldest cold. Interstellar space. Believe in this. Believe! I push a bicycle over a hill. I see the landscape. I am exploring the planet. Everything looks so far away. There are no people. Just a village of red-tiled roofs. Houses made of ancient brick. I am an American. I am made of ideas. I am a Hollywood movie. An episode of a sci-fi TV show. Behold my blaster. Tunic. I am a Sandman. Everywhere somebody is building something. Construction cranes. Never ceases. Never stops. The jackhammer is the music of our time. People call it progress. I guess. Cannot hear a bird sing. Sip coffee in the morning. The apartment is warm. Winter light spills in through a window. No snow. Not anymore. A good idea for a post-apocalyptic novel: The Last Snowboarder. The ice is upon us. Behind us. In front of us. The coldness of interstellar space. Are you happy with this Solar System? It is pretty good, right? Lots of interesting planets. Rocky planets. Gas giants. The rings of Saturn. I need to go food shopping. Trader Joe’s. 

Or someplace like that.