My hands keep getting cold. I shove them into my pockets. I am wearing sweat pants. A flannel shirt. A black knit hat. Amerika is everywhere. Proselytizing. Selling. Electronic mass surveillance. Totalitarian capitalism. Coupons for Pizza Hut. Tickets to Disneyland. Promo codes for Amazon.

Zoë gave me a promo code for a blowjob. 

I used it.

We are consumers. We are makers. We are spectators. 

We are artists.

Where is your paycheck coming from? Just asking. Might affect your politics. Your situation. Your circumstance. Everybody begins at the beginning. Or do they? Are you a beginner? A pro?

Greenwald might go to prison in Brazil. This is so crazy. The Amerikas are crazy.

I ate beef today. That was a mistake. Where did the beef come from? I had no idea. It came in a plastic package. A pouch. We ate tortillas. Black beans. Coconut milk rice. Salsa.

I cleaned the black carbon filters in the Berkey water dispenser. I scrubbed them with the scratchy side of a blue Scotch sponge. Just like the YouTube video recommended. I am a genius.  

I got 206 bones with arthritis. Now what? Even my boner has arthritis.

$357 left in the bank account. Now what? Does it get any better? Can I afford to be a person?

I sat at a machine and I thought nothing.

Sleep, dear sleeper.

Machine consciousness. Is that what I am? Nothing more. Nothing less. The neighborhood is quiet. I am nothingless. The bank account is a burst of laughter. I am reeling. Unspooling.

We played a splendid game called hide-the-kielbasa.

Zoë kept glancing over her bare shoulder. I guess to check on my progress. Coming? Not yet.

Novels get in the way of novels. The big idea. The big think. You never know when it is going to happen. So you wait. Like a fisherman. Sometimes you have to surfcast. Lure the Kraken. Scream at the water. Wait for the ripples. The whirlpool. The rise of the great sea monster.

I live inside my mind like a lighthouse keeper.

Are you just a story you tell yourself? 

Things happen. 

So what. 

Pretty important to me. The being. I like it. The way it tastes. The fragility. The vulnerability.

Put your shoes together. Run run run run. You’ll be on the horizon in no time. Feel it. The curve of the earth. Life itself. 

There I go again. Not really here. Not really there. A lingering of previous selves. Echoes and hallucinations. Thunderclaps. Zoë’s ass against my thighs. Craving for one more go. Under the eiderdown. On the kitchen floor. In the backseat of a Buick. The Hudson is flooding. Up up up.

Forget language. It distorts. Underwhelms. And yet I am a fool for words. Lispector speaks of red ochre and yellow ochre. I see it. I can see it! And really, what do I see? A vague abstraction projected inside my skull. I am still alive. I think. At least that. So long as I am thinking & writing. Shortcuts to Nirvana. Take the switchbacks. Take the meandering road. Ululations.

Her clitoris erupted in an electric frenzy as if Zig had plucked the string of a cello.

I wonder if anybody is a good example of themselves.

I miss drawing. I miss being.

I miss the cigarette. I miss the ashtray. I miss the glass of beer. Everything is forbidden. I forbade.

I almost became me.

I had to leave empty space.

I needed room.

I left. I fled. A becoming. Experiments in being. Quantum entanglement. She was more beautiful. I was the observer. Engaged. Detached. Everything at once. I surrendered. Squeezed buttocks. 

I destroyed my body. Now I eat spinach.

Is there anything left of me? 

I begin again.

Unsolved problems. I have more than a few. My skills are lagging.

The 88-day orbit of Mercury is on my mind. Not sure why. Faster year? Hotter planet?

She opened her legs. She had ginger-ale hair. We made love like never before. It was the greatest night of my life.

This is almost where the book begins. Right here. Now. In your face. At your feet. We are prostrate creatures. Undulating. Becoming. Sea cucumbers. Electric eels. Tentacles of a jellyfish.

I get so angry at nothing.

Achilles’ heel.

Aphrodite’s cock.

The progress we have made is astonishing. Remember? Remember when we were beginners?

Too bad. Whatever. Goodbye. Haha!

Machine poet

People just sitting in cars. All across Amerika. Across the planet. In parking lots. Alone. Just thinking. If that is what this is. Like me.

This is a solitude machine. I get away from my family. My beautiful wife. My beautiful kids. Everybody is going bonkers in the apartment.

I am sipping coffee. Trying to get rid of my thinker’s headache. Getting ready to play tennis. Against people I barely know. I’ll let you know how it goes.

It was okay. Just okay. Ever feel that way?

People are curious beings. What makes them tick? Are we machines? Are we flesh? The vulnerability of it all.

I am riding in a subway car. Is it better than an automobile? Yes and no. I am without satellite radio. Beyond control. 

Anything can happen.

The text. The text. I must stop reading. I must stop writing. Forgetting the Being. The rawness of life. The hurt. The squirm.

We are apologists.

“Take care, brother!” That is what the coffee guy said. I forgot I owed him money. I apologized. Felt bad.

What am I? A forgetter?

Gonna make myself a little better. Put on some fresh new clothes. Get a fancy friggin haircut. Alligator boots. Chinchilla mittens. A walking stick.

Sex has its ramifications. We had just finished. It had been quite incredible. Neither of us had believed such things possible. We lay there. As naked as Adam & Eve.

The protagonist Zig was giving life a go. We erase everything. Memory. Experience. Zig had to refabricate everything. From scratch. From Nothingness.

His first girlfriend sat on him. She gave him something to think about for the rest of his life. Butt-lifts and rabbit hops. The electric frenzy. Zig never quite recovered.

Are you a television child?

I am not really me. How could I be?

I tied my shoes in the Czechoslovakian style. I walked downstairs. Onto the street. The asphalt felt good. Everybody was happy. It was Thursday.

Everything was possible. Friday might happen. I thought so too. Only the naysayers were gloomy. Predicting apocalypse. I needed to get away from negativity.

I was zooming. Hiphop stepping. Electric zigzags. Thinking and rethinking. I was a cosmic thinker. A thought without a thinker.

Paper bags of groceries. Nuts. Muesli. Blue corn chips. Salsa.

You are the rider.

I know you rider.

It just gets creepy. Riding the rails. Sidestepping the psychopaths.

People stare. Straight ahead. Through your head. Reading the subway map. There is no guide in the Underground. Virgil has evacuated.

I am a poet. I am a machine. I am a machine poet.

Zig & Zoë. We appropriated and repurposed each other’s orgasms. Cosmic echoes. Howls of the Universe. 

We engaged in carnal intercourse with a relish not seen in human beings in millennia.

The Kraken keeps peeping up through the surface of the whirlpooling waters of Hell Gate. 

I see you.

You see me?

8808 words creeps me out. But here we are. Wait until we get to 88808!

Everything is incredible. I am always wiping the counters. The crumbs are everywhere. People are frightened by books. Books are frightening. What is this technology. What? I dusted the entire living room. I deserve accolades. I deserve a blowjob. I deserve a tongue in the ass. Toolmaker. Are you making tools? Are you acquiring language? What good are our feelings if we collapse into stars? We keep banking on each other, and the economy is failing. Get a jetpack. Get a parachute. There is no in-between. Are we really here? Probably. There is nothing else to do. She leans forward. Her nipples teasing the tip of my tongue. She is fucking me. I hold onto her ass. She bites her lip. Clenches her buttocks. Squeezing. Fuck, she says. Fuuuuuuuuuuuugggggggggggggggkk! Where do you go when you are alone? Is the Cosmos bigger than the biggest big? You. 

Me. 

I.

.

Kafka was quite a dancer. Camus, too. Writers are stick-figure people. Cannot sit still. Jittery. Feathered dinosaurs and impact craters are on my mind today. Am I a scientist? Hardly. Just a curious human being. I look at my hands. Extraordinary. The interpenetration between Zig and Zoë is the Big Bang that begat the Cosmos. She pulled his hair. He pulled hers. They came together. Triumphant. Let’s begin at the beginning. Shall we? The end is near. The human machine engaged in a sex act. Three smokestacks on a horizon. Eighty meters high. I kept looking at them. Not understanding. Sex is an algebraic proposition. The television is broken. We have nothing to watch. We will have to watch each other. Watch ourselves. Where does one body-machine begin and another end? I keep getting older. The mathematics is exhilarating. Are you real? Are you plastic? Are you electronic? Are you supersonic? So I started measuring things. The diameter of the salad bowl is eleven inches. What is its circumference?3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406 * 11 = ? I stopped multiplying things. Too difficult. I racked my brains. And what? Purposeless. We keep fighting over existence. Who lived harder. Etcetera. This novel might not end. You realize that, right? So long as we are on the same page. What if nobody reads this? Is that not the best possible outcome? All things considered. I wish you could write paragraphs. Like meat & potatoes. Not these appetizers. Hors d’oeuvres. I’ll try. I’ll try. I am a beginner. Something is troubling me in the margins. Not sure what it is. A ghost. A palimpsest. The labyrinth of the mind is a phantasmagoria of memory. Inventions. Things made up. Truer than the truth. We must obey. Listen. At least lend an ear. It could be from elsewhere. A faraway elsewhere. Frequencies. Oscillations. The machine bores me with its boredom. I have not had a human thought in 18,374 days and counting. I will let you know when it happens. If it happens. You will be the first to know. Artificial light. Artificial gravity. We float in space capsules made by a machine brain. Delusions. A vapor trail cut the blue sky in two. What if the fighter jet crashed? Pilot killed. Innocents killed. This is a big city. Densely populated. Millions spent. Probably billions. To design and engineer and build the flying machine. To show off. To show the rest of the world we are powerful. I am poor. You are poor. We the People are poor. Beautiful days spent without an adventure. Life itself is improbable. A miracle. She came to my apartment to watch TV. She drove her parents’ car, and parked it on the street. She had short brown hair. She sat on the carpet in front of me. I lay on a broken sofa behind her. We watched TV. I started playing with her hair. She did not say anything. I was almost surprised. Did I pull it? Give her hair a tug? She turned around. She climbed on top of me. We wrestled. Playfighting & laughing. Our faces so close to each other. Our lips met and we kissed. Startled us. Things got real. Everything felt serious. We started making out. I suggested going to my bedroom. She hesitated. Just to kiss, I said. And I meant it. We kissed and grinded our bodies on a bed. Neither of us had realized how hungry we really were. It was the greatest day of my life. I am looking back through Bergson’s telescope. Everything is so far away and so close. I do not know what my experience is. I do not. And I do. Can it be both? Yes. Yes yes yes. 

What is love? 

It is all there is.

I lay awake. The ceiling is landscape. Skyscape. A half century of existence. What could possibly go wrong? The President is tinkering with Iran. People are dying. We are protected by a computer screen. Until we realize it is plastic. Until we realize it is not there. No separation. Amerika gets bigger and bigger. It is no longer a country. If it ever was. It is something else.

Information. What is information? The Camaro parked on the street? The yellow sulfur streetlights? Is it a Camaro? What if it is a Mustang? I think it is a Camaro. Yes. Definitely. It is a Chevrolet. Why do I doubt myself? Am I a coward? Does anybody really care about this conversation inside my head? I am not even sure I do. Yes. Uncertainty. Everywhere. I no longer trust myself. Bergson tells us this moment is telescoped through everything we have experienced.

Is memory a peephole?

Are we looking through the wrong end?

Pinpricks of light.

.

I see you. I think. If you are. Are you? You and I keep blinking in and out of existence. What a performance. Being a person. Who says it is hard? Just be. You are what you are. Or not. This is your beating heart. Your inhales. Your exhales. 

Strike a ball.

Watch a ball hit your racket        a yellow blur.

We are waiting for memory to return. It will never return.

I am a creature of the elsewhere.

This place is temporary.

Good enough.

The chainlink fences. The scrub oaks. The dwarf pines. The endless sand and the sea.

What will happen to you? I hardly know. If you do this for money, you are doomed. Nobody reads. Not anymore. If they ever did. People need a text for survival. This is that text. A novel. 

It cannot feel like a novel. Must feel otherwise. Urgent. Emergency purpose. Not a beach book. Or perhaps a paperback at the sea is the most important book of all. Endless miles of beach sand. 

Zoë in her bathing suit. 

Waves.

I linger at the edge of memory. Fog. Mist. Under a gray sky. Every now and again I see something. What? Unsure. Lack of clarity. Opaque. Obscure.

The Volkswagen Beetles of tomorrow are hurtling through hyperspace.

You ever feel like driving a ’74 Volkswagen Super Beetle down to the Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile? I feel like that sometimes. Shift into gear. Pop the clutch.

The fallen pine trees are everywhere. The river gurgles. Earth spins. Turns. Orbits. We are passengers aboard this rocky planet. Spaceship earth.

Will they carry this book at The Strand on Broadway? Who the fuck knows? Who the fuck cares?

Are you a writer? Are you a dishwasher? Are you a sock puppet? 

Are you capable?

Can we use this book as a flotation device? Is there any yellow highlighting in this book?

Is this book really a novel? I mean, I am starting to wonder. Where are the actors?

Is this a first edition?

Signed? Get the fuck out.

I am getting hungry for a paragraph. You got anything left? Like a story. Like a fairy tale. Tell me more about the Sump Monster. That dude freaked me out. Did he really wear a brown paper bag over his head? And he just emerged from the sand dunes? Heavy. Really heavy, man. I’m trippin.

It might happen. It might not happen. Whatever is about to happen. What is the probability? What are the odds? I am not a mathematician. I am a novelist. I am a machinist. I am an artist. 

I am a hooligan.

I am a jester.

What information does your body take in? What perceptions? What observations? Sensations?

I am a fool. I get easily fooled by the foolishness.

Newspapers.

TV shows.

Radio.

What is the ultimate reality?

A memoir of Being. I should write a memoir about Being.

Fragments.

Diaries.

Notes.

The echo is uncanny. Orgasms lasting for 13.799 billion years. Spiral galaxies. Supernovae.

I miss you. You know who I miss. Remember what you said?

I forget.

What is left of what we were? We shed our electronic snakeskins. Keep moving. Keep wriggling. I am becoming something else. I have no idea what. Are you what you anticipated? Great expectations. Remember Miss Havisham? She freaked me out. Not sure if I ever recovered.

Amerika is at its best when people invent things. Nikolai Tesla. Charlie Parker. Jack Kerouac.

The government can brute-force the key space on your iPhone.

We are electronic beings.

Quantum beings.

This book is forever. Keeps getting better and better. Can you take any more?

When does a novelist surrender?

Never!

Might have to perform a spellcheck on this puppy. So many words. Ruff ruff! Bark bark!

Cats meow.

Marmots whistle.

I am in the Wilderness. The wilderness of the human imagination. Anything goes. Anything is possible. We are beginners. We are professionals. We are electromagneticbiochemical reactions.

It is so fucking cold in Space.

This apartment is toast. It is my spacemachine. Things I think here are incredible. The vastness of not knowing. Unpredictability. Beginner’s flux. Every now and again I am.

Absolutely!! she texts me. I want to bend her over a green leather sofa. It makes no sense. She is twenty. I am ?. Actually, it makes sense. I want to pull down the back of her panties. See her ripe cunt.

Men write about machines. Women write about people.

Just an observation. 

Might not even be true. 

What do I know?

Is film superior to literature? Probably. What are we doing here? Spooling from spool to spool. Reel to reel. The electronic eel of human consciousness is the Kraken.

Zig imagines the spread of his big right hand on K.’s left buttock. 

We are in Greenpoint. 

Fucking.

Everything is imagined. Even reality. Even real things.

I watch Zoë lick the glans of my penis.

My balls are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. My balls are bigger than grapefruits. 

I am at a distance. 

I get smaller and smaller and smaller.

I want to get arrested. I want to spend time in prison like Václav Havel. I want to write letters to Zoë. Is it too late? I want to be a playwright. I want to be a dissident. I want to be a defector.

Eyeballs the size of grapefruits.

The secret police are watching you.

I write a quick novel. This novel is a quickie. A detective novel. SF novel. A dimestore novel. Pulp fiction. Amazing stories. Hugo Hernsback. Philip K. Dick. Fans call themselves Dickheads.

I have no time for Amerika.

Amerika is all I know.

Thinking about writing a SF novel about a man named Razaqk. Something like Logan’s Run. Razaqk and his girlfriend Giselle running away from the secret police. In a big city in the not-so-distant future. A planet under the threat of giant methane clouds. Earth is becoming a gas giant. We are going to freeze to death. Unless we can escape. Escape pods are only for the elite. Razaqk and Giselle are adjunct lecturers of composition. Pods are not designed for part-time faculty. Nevertheless, Razaqk and Giselle make love like nobody has ever made love in the 13.799 billion years of the Cosmos. They deserve a second chance on a terrestrial planet. We all do.

Are #hashtags making us happier?

We are lying under the duvet cover. I am wearing a flannel shirt and green dungarees.

“I am taking off my pants,” she says.

“Why?” I say.

She laughs. 

Nobody can come. I am just too tired. She is just too tired. We just kept fucking. Doggie-style. Missionary. Nobody comes. Still. It is nice.

I thought you abandoned Civilization. Why are you still here? So much good TV on Netflix.

This paperback will be carried in the backpocket of every University student on the planet.

Unfinished nature of reality. That is what intrigues me. The fragments. The particles.

We are interactions.

I realize I faked it for most of my life. That is upsetting. I thought I was real. It just crept up and slapped me. Such realizations are incredibly sneaky. I sit in a chair for a long time. Run my hand through my hair. Who am I, I keep saying.

Getting colder. When it gets this cold, there is only a single goal: to remain. 

Survive.

Wait for the sun to heat up. If it ever will. Wait for it to expand.

What am I supposed to do? What if I do nothing? Is that okay? Will the Cosmos collapse? Or will I remain? What if I sit here with the engine running? Jotting my thoughts into a notebook. Making believe I am somebody else. Not simply me? Will you go on? Will you continue? Dare you? Are you not afraid? Uncertainty. Unknown. 

You are brave indeed. I envy your position. Where are you, if I may ask? Aha. Just as I thought. No need to elaborate. We understand each other.

I am getting bored watching strangers walk past me. Vehicles accelerate and decelerate. Supposedly, the planet spins and orbits and loops after the sun.

I have no concrete proof. No evidence. For any of this. We could be a film projection in an extraterrestrial theater. Perhaps a planet circling Betelgeuse.

I hear that star is going to blow. Supernova. Wait for it… 

there.

Getting colder. I should restart the engine. I turned it off. To save the planet. Now I feel cold. The vacuum of space presses in on me. Sucks me up. Into a tube. 

Wormholes fascinate me. As they fascinate you. What do you say? Let’s go for a twirl. Let’s go for a swirl.

The Internet is a disaster. Everybody knows it. We are addicted. We are bewildered. Riveted to the machine.

Snow. 

Are things a little better? 

Yes. Little bit. 

Kind of nice.

Do you suffer from Imposter Syndrome? I do. I definitely do. I do not belong here. Never did.

Anger.

Unable to capture the Kraken in my bare hands.

She is so good at it. What am I good at? I keep trying to be a person. It is so hard in Amerika. At least for me. Are you doing any better? I hope so. Somebody has to represent.

There are so many writers in Amerika.

They are writing memoirs.

Diaries.

Letters.

Fragments.

I want a totality. I want the whole fucking thing. Bring me the Kraken! And if I see Pierre fucking his half-sister in that crazy French flick Pola X one more time… I just don’t know. 

I might watch it again.

Again.

This life is not for everybody. The artist’s life. The machinist’s life. For one thing, it is terribly lonely. I crave solitude. So perhaps I belong here. This void. This abyss. This vast emptiness, nothing holy. There are no road signs. The way is the way. It is a roadless road. A switchback without foresight. A rattler behind every rock. Take a flying leap. Blue azure sky too cold to contemplate.

We live hours away from each other. Our bodies cooling from the heat. You write me such beautiful letters. Paper. Ink.

My hands cup your breasts. I am unpracticed. So much to learn. 

Still.

Talking is difficult. It requires human thought. Feeling. Sometimes I am a machine.

Can you get to the next chapter in a novel without chapters? Probably. There is always something to say. Silence. Echoes of the Cosmos. A star explodes. A tree falls in the forest.

Mountains & rivers.

The Catskills.

I love you.

Six thousand light years away is the Swan Nebula. It was discovered in 1745. It is also called The Omega Nebula. It is also called the Horseshoe Nebula. It is also called the Checkmark Nebula. When will astronomers make up their fucking minds? At any rate, it is in a very milky part of the Milky Way galaxy. In the area of Sagittarius. Birthplace of 800 stars and more. Interstellar matter.

Nobody has written the great tennis novel.

As far as I know.

Jannik Sinner. I am predicting that Jannik Sinner will win a Grand Slam title. Perhaps he already has by the time you read this novel? Spacetime will tell. It will fluctuate. It will warp. It will tell.

Perhaps I should become a tennis journalist?

Is it too late?

It never occurred to me to  skip a  beat a  pulse  a gap  a space. What if entropy kicks in? What then? Are you and me okay? Is Maxwell’s demon spinning some weird shit? Opposite of entropy is negentropy. Perfect example being a star system. 

The Solar System.

Here we go again. Space & drums.

.

o

O

Sometimes a machine is for the sake of a machine. Nothing else. Not watchers. Not Hollywood. Not Netflix. Not Hulu. Just for the sake of writing. Being. Being in the peculiar way that is a novel. Boy do I feel peculiar today. Not of this Earth.

Played some tennis. Supposed to help. Did it? Now I am in a funk. Every machinist gets here. Or maybe only I get here. In my peculiar way. An orbit not sampled elsewhere in the Universe. Every move feels false. Like a miss-hit. Unforced error. 404 error. I am a computer fuckup. I am a human being. I am a robot. I am a machine. I am a defect. I am a defector. Ye$$$. I am a defector. The cash in the register is artificial. Are you sure $$$ equals work? The banks are too big to fail. I keep failing. My dad taught me many lessons about money. I forget them all. Where did he go?

Information is information. Particles of what.

How many tennis balls are on this planet?

Good morning, Amerika! Saturday. Are you ready? Did you pay all your upcoming bills? Are you satisfied with the arrangement? Satisfied with your situation? Satisfied with your station? NFL playoffs today. What else is necessary? A cheerleader. A Budweiser. Go Green Bay. Go Packers!

I am demonic.

I am the antichrist.

I rage like Poseidon.

You’ve got a semi-Western grip. You’re making me fall apart. I thought I understood strangers. I am a stranger myself.

A novel is a provocation. I dare you to read me. I dare you to permit yourself to be bewildered.

There are no more books. 

None. 

Only this one.

You are like a fucking machine. Buttocks engaged.

Amerika is going smoothly. And then I arrive. I am a defector. A defect.

I rub my face between her buttocks. She is from Pittsburgh. She lets out the low moan of a prolonged orgasm. My penis is gaining altitude.

She sits on my vertical cock and gives me something to think about for eightyeightthousand years.

I am a beginner. Little or no experience. I get better.

Nobody wants to marry me. I am a Neanderthal in a flannel shirt. The blank stare of a novelist. I am good for a fuck.

The end of chapter one should be around here somewhere. I just do not know where. This might be one of those Thomas Bernhard novels. Endless eternities.

I am not a regular novelist. So. Expect nothing. 

Expect everything.

She has a semi-Western grip and I am squirting coconut milk before I can put it in her pussy.

What does it mean to be a human being in the Third Millennium? 

What does it mean to be real?

What does it mean to be fake?

What does it mean to be plastic?

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.