How it is that I...how is it...or, rather, why it is that I...that I seem to keep...or, really, that I do keep, that I keep ending up...that every single night I look at the clock, I look at the clock and it's two o'clock in the morning, it's three o'clock in the morning and I...I keep ending up at three o’clock in the morning, I keep ending up sitting here with...I don't know, I keep ending up sitting here with all this shit, surrounded by all this shit? Night after night I'm sitting here, I'm sitting here night after night on the floor with my back against these racks of records, surrounded by these shelves full of shit, shelves full of plastic, anthropomorphized potatoes and carrots and hamburgers, all of them with hats on their heads and pipes in their mouths and their arms paralyzed in an embracing gesture that I often find disturbing.

I'm sitting here with my legs crossed and my back up against all this shit...I'm sitting here in this ridiculous and uncomfortable position, night after night, delivering incoherent monologues to the beleaguered animal that shares my home...and what the fuck is this I'm listening to? Honest to God, explain to me if you can why I am sitting here like this, trying to read about the Donner party and poor Lewis Keseberg, who was driven by madness and the most desperate of circumstances to eat a woman named Mrs. Murphy. "The flesh of starved beings contains little nutriment," the cannibal Keseberg assures me. "It is like feeding straw to horses. I cannot describe the unutterable repugnance with which I tasted the first mouthful of flesh. There is an instinct in our nature that revolts at the thought of touching, much less eating, a corpse....It has been told that I boasted of my shame --said that I enjoyed this horrid food, and that I remarked that human flesh was more palatable than California beef. This is a falsehood. It is a horrible, revolting falsehood. This food was never otherwise than loathsome, insipid, and disgusting." Explain to me why I would continue to read as this poor man was asked by his interrogator, Did you boil the flesh? And as he responded, "Yes! But to go into the details --to relate the minutiae-- is too agonizing! I cannot do it! Imagination can supply these. The necessary mutilation of the bodies of those who had been my friends rendered the ghastliness of my situation more frightful."

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I mean, seriously, holy shit, every fucking night....What is this? Why am I sitting here listening to...George Crumb? Is that what the hell this is? Or Morton Feldman? And at some point --this for certain-- listening to Lou Reed, the idiot prince of rock and roll, listening to that jackass Lou Reed, listening to this lunatic Lou Reed reduce Edgar Allan Poe to the most wrenching and painful sort of comedy. Are there even one thousand other misguided people on the planet who have paid to be thusly abused? Please assure me there are not, even as it gives me considerable anguish to know that there almost certainly are. But what in God's name is wrong with me that I would pay good money for a CD on which Lou Reed makes a muddled mockery of "The Raven"?

Look, honest to God, this is the fucking truth: No man should ever find himself sitting hunched on the floor with a pen paralyzed in his fingers listening to Lou Reed’s “The Raven” at two o’clock in the morning. No man should ever eat red licorice and corn chips for dinner --not at three a.m. Not ever. No man should ever sit at four a.m. raking the soiled carpet with his fingers and building bewildering piles of lint and scruff and dog dander and pubic hair and chips of indeterminate origin. No man should ever put these piles in an ashtray and burn them. 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 apartment that the liquor of his own stench has become 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 studying 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 clearly terrified face of an elderly paperboy framed in the window of his front door.