Is your work keeping you young, or making you old?

The house is quiet and cold. The washing machine has stopped working, joining the dead car battery, the leak in the roof, and the broken back window covered with cardboard. You sleep in the dark in the blue chair where, in happier times, your cat once joined you. You are a joke variant of a Hank Williams song, as interpreted by BJ Thomas.

Hurtling toward the last curve, picking up speed and terrified.

Should: a stupid word for stupid people.

Things seem to be picking up at the shop.
Three jobs today.
Total billable hours: .75.
Thy will be done.

Later he would remember this as his Year of Watching Tennis. He didn’t particularly like or understand tennis. He found it boring. But little by little, hearing the ball bounce back and forth, he felt his mind putting itself back together.

How could something so wonderful even come to exist?

Mon
Stepped outside. Seemed gross. Went back inside.
Tue
Same.
Thurs
—
Next week sometime
Birds, wind. Weeping.

She said, normally people at this level of depression are dead by your age.

Zoom out, insignificant. Zoom in, grotesque.

Every night you pray for their protection. You pray for their protection from you.

I’m of ten minds on the subject.