I was writing out le rouge et le noir longhand, word for word, like Pierre Menand, with periodic cramps and vague stirrings of spending the future traveling down a tunnel of carpal. I would break to read Padgett Powell and Dianne Williams and Caryle and watch documentaries about apex predators doing their apex thing.

It could have been cancer, from how my top layer of skin seemed to sizzle without heat and blister but invisibly. It was not cancer, vouchsafed the cancer-detecting professional in five sentences. the derm then shared seven sentences describing a property boundary dispute with his four-stall garage adjacent to his 6500 sq foot home.

I am off the self seriousness. Pulled free of it like an excitable bully dog pulls free from a chain with two weak links and runs to go fight another dog, which found joy and blood and the possibility of everything going awry there. Two sets of bared teeth and snapping jaws. Like the Wolf against the Airedales in The Crossing, when the boy walks up and with mercy in his heart shoots it dead.

I am shooting self-seriousness in stride and with mercy in my heart and then taking aim at knowingness and sentimentalized self-loathing, which is world loathing of a sole solitary self unable to see the world as a bigger, separate, other-containing thing that exists outside of the life being lived in this particular idiosyncratic instance of selfhood.

Point: Human institutions are inherently and invariably fallible, and the more certainty and moral superiority they claim, the more filth and deceit they are likely trying to conceal behind that clean, lofty veneer.

Counterpoint: 404 error.