Briefly, I thought about wrapping my lips around the barrel of our shotgun, but the Ex had hocked it a few months earlier in order to buy thousands of pairs of underwear, so that was out.

I wasn’t even depressed, really. I was just aware of how I was supposed to be depressed. It was an intellectual phenomenon, a resident in whichever brain lobe houses reason. I mean, if I looked at the nuts and bolts of my life, it was totally fucked. Noting that it seems like you should be depressed, does not make you depressed. Or so I guessed. Hell, psychology with its dozen or more theories of the self, each one working about as well or as poorly as the next, just guesses, too. A mirror can’t reflect itself, which is why psychology is a faith and not a science, a faith, certainly, with better drugs than wafers and wine, but a faith nonetheless.

Still, it was an ugly thought, no matter how brief, and I was glad the gun was gone. If there’s one thing a gun gives you, it’s options: all of them empty and terrible.

this is #8. here are the others in order 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7