No man should ever find himself in the fish-belly gray light of dawn sitting hunched on the floor with a pen paralyzed in his fingers listening to Jimmy Scott.
No man should ever eat plain white rice and corn chips for breakfast.
No man should ever sit at four a.m., raking the soiled carpet with his fingers and building foul and bewildering ashtray fires out of lint and scruff and dog dander and pubic hair and brittle chips of indeterminate origin. No honest man should ever call what are clearly the clippings from fingernails and toes “brittle chips of indeterminate origin.”
No man should ever write such words as those that preceded the words “No man should ever write such words….”
No man should ever spend so many hours sitting in one dank room that the liquor of his own stench has become almost intoxicating and the crawling of the hours has reduced him to a savage who cannot remember his last truly conscious thought.
No man should ever sit puzzling over a diagram of the arteries of the brain as if it were a satellite photo of a country that no longer exists.
No man should ever look up from his hunched stupor at five a.m. and find himself gazing into the terrified face of an elderly paperboy framed in the window of his front door.
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