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http://www.ftrain.com/ http://ftrain.com/bicycle_stolen_dammit.html

I called the landlord and told him I’d withhold rent unless he secured the doors. Giant rats, thieves, estimated taxes, all lurking. Open sewage in the basement. Junkies, skulls wrapped with blue wire then layered with thin skin, shooting up in the foyer. Five or six friends suggest, helpfully, that I move to something nicer - oh, fucking genius, thanks - but on what? On the hope of more advertising work? With the Dow going down faster than Linda Lovelace? On my prospects? Because the world needs an obsessive document theorist/fiction experimenter. Thank God I can fill that niche, by which I mean to say, God, I had the new bike, the one given to me to replace the old ones, for 3 and a half days before they stole the wheels from the hallway…

Now would be a nice time to have some sympathy, a place to go, a hand to hold, an ear to speak into, a chance to be sensitive and sad without fear of mockery, since so many things are going wrong, aggregating: not enough work, a sense of increasing futility with the work I get, difficulties writing anything that goes deeper than a single layer of skin. Health insurance at $380 a month, for coverage that the doctor hates to honor. My pitiful retirement fund, of which I am proud - look! I’m 27 and self employed and saving - fading to nothing. Clients who stretch projects to a full month of work, then don’t pay for 5 months. Under it all, an increasing understanding that my abilities and talents are being squandered, due to my own inability to pull together the 30,000 disparate threads of my interests. And then there’s this Web site. Why couldn’t I love a form of writing that wasn’t considered the bastard child of the bucktoothed computer nerd and the self-published poetess? Why couldn’t I be good at something reputable, like Defence Contract Proposals?