I thought of all the things I had avoided during my poet days at school and beyond, days of waking late and drinking early, wandering through life with my one constant a constant shrug: regular jobs and regular people and regular hours, all the commonplace pains and terrors that, by fleeing, I had somehow replaced with these others, this whole grotesquerie that was—yeah, c’mon, say it out loud, there’s no one here to hear you—driving me out of my mind. Driving me crazy.
