In robotics there’s this theory. The anthropomorphisation of inanimate objects creates empathy, e.g. Tom Hanks crying over losing a volleyball with a smiley face smeared on it. The more human-like the attributes, the cuter we find the object. But plot the emotional response of someone observing an increasingly human-like object on a graph and at some point, somewhere between near-human and human, it freaks the fuck out of your mind, e.g. Tom Hanks’ dead eyes as the conductor in The Polar Express.

Anyway this guy on my bus. Why the symmetrically pouty Julia Roberts rubina/Hollywood lips with the double Cupid’s bow? Why the doe eyes? The widow’s peak? The—

It just ruined my day is all.

In my dreams that night I’m at a bar, eating nachos. A busy waitress with hair the shape and color of henna enters a food order into a touchscreen computer. She side-steps behind me, back and forth, out of breath. The customers are rude but when she smiles her eyes are like two crescent moons turned to their side.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?” the bartender asks me.

“She aight,” I reply.

Later that evening the waitress takes me home with her and I notice unfinished paintings of everyone in her family and tell her I’d love to see her complete them one day. She doesn’t hear me and says what and removes flowers from a vase and pours the water over my stab wound from the tree branch, and the wound disappears, dissolving into white smoke like this is water from the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The waitress leans into me and says, “Don’t forget to leave Justin and Carly a wedding gift.”

“I brought my check book,” I tell her, “but I forgot to stop somewhere and get a card, and then I drank too much, and also I couldn’t find a pen. I need a pen.”

“Don’t forget,” she says, and then asks me to strangle her.

Car trunks being slammed shut and four-year-olds having meltdowns in the parking lot outside jolts me awake and the gash on my foot is still there and every vein in my head is throbbing. I urinate, briefly attempt a USA Today crossword puzzle, then finally come out of my cabin where the sun rays splinter through the trees and people are picnicking in the field by the volleyball nets and the trash cans filled with barbecue and bees. I take a seat on the ground, nodding hello to two of last night’s bridesmaidens and when they immediately get up to leave I look up their skirts. A squire brings me a plate of bacon and biscuits and I inhale that shit and when I complain about my headache and ask if they have coffee they hand me a bloody mary. Hair of the dog, someone tells me. Where is Justin and Carly, I ask, and they tell me they’re at Perkins with everyone else. I pound the rest of my bloody mary and check out of the lodge with the urgency of a fugitive and make the four hour drive home and I’d like to think ten years is the statute of limitations for consciously not leaving a wedding gift and then ignoring Facebook friend requests to avoid the subject ever being brought up, you guys.

HIM: It’s a housewarming party.

ME: Well, there’s lots of kids everywhere. Make any new friends today?

HIM: No.

ME: So, what are kids like you into today? Is Hannah Montana still considered “cool”? Justin Beiber? YOLO?

HIM: I spend most of my time thinking about space.

ME: Oh that’s pretty cool too. High five. Do you give high fives?

HIM: People just don’t realize how vast space really is.

ME: Look at you and the vast.

HIM: The light that we see from the stars in the sky travel millions of years to reach Earth. For all we know, they could no longer be there. We could be staring at the ghosts of dead stars.

ME: Alright, well, good talk.

HIM: Good luck with the adults.

Actually — no. Let me try this again.

When I was a boy my grandfather always told me that being Vietnamese is No Man’s Land. We’ll never be as smart as the Chinese, and we’ll never be as happy as the Filipinos. We’re right in the middle of the spectrum, he’d caution. Just smart enough to know how dumb we are, to be damned to a lifetime of frustration and self-analysis as a best-case scenario. But the only thing worse than a Vietnamese, he said, was a Laotian. Or was it a Malaysian? Um, Pol Pot. I don’t know… Khmer something something. Um.

OK one more time, from the top:

Like myself and all writers, Meg is obsessed with time travel. There must be a sequence of DNA in every writer that commands him/her to ask different questions than everyone else. Instead of “what’s here?” writers ask themselves, “why is it here?” And all this ever leads to is frustration and wistful thoughts about the past and then writing our way out of it as either affirmation or escapism and at the end of all of that we pretty much end up mutating into Vietnamese people, which rarely—

I don’t know how to start this. “Stacy laughs” was how I wanted to begin and in its brevity and veiled simplicity it was supposed to be a flawless catch-all statement for the ethos of our trip. It was at once Hemingwayesque and a subtle nod. It was my anchor to a beautiful narrative of self-discovery, my perfect opener, my “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,” my—

OK, 1) how many times has everyone vomited at my self-importance already?, and 2) I am terrified that I don’t know how to write anymore. I really am. A long time ago I was a pretty solid blogger, and this is how I became acquainted with Meg and Stacy, pretty solid bloggers themselves. But somehow, something happened to my writing (see Ambitionz Az A Writer), and now I just don’t know anymore.

It’s funny how fast things move in some places. No one IMs anymore. Remember AIM? I logged onto AIM two months ago and my buddy list was a ghost town. And chatrooms. Remember those things, full of FBI agents posing as 14-year-old girls? I think people finally figured out that trading funny .WAV files and asking for everyone’s a/s/l wasn’t a good use of six hours of your day.

And now no one keeps blogs anymore. Blogs enjoyed their Golden Age between 2002 to 2006, back when girls would take cam pics of their boobies if you bought them stuff from their Amazon Wishlist and guys would take macroshots of, I don’t know, fucking graffiti art. Mom blogs began to hit the scene, the internet became littered with LiveJournals of chicks complaining about school and boys, and soon we saw the rise of the Story Blogger. I was a Story Blogger. A protagonist in a hilarious movie about… well, me. A David Sedaris wannabe, desperate to shock and amuse about my interesting life, self-absorbed and way too consumed in my own personal growth.

Blogging (in the sense that I once knew it to be) is dead, not necessarily because the technological Zeitgeist has shifted to the more pithy Twitter construct, but because simply: we’ve grown up and realized that we don’t have much important to say. We’ve become Vietnamese. And that is a tremendously unsettling thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I write with more energy now than I ever have. I have so much to say that my footnotes contain footnotes contain footnotes, each of my thoughts branching off into fractals. But it’s been really difficult to find anything meaningful in this art, to learn anything new or real about myself, to think of myself as a hack, as a minor leaguer who never got that call. The problem is the world has moved on, but I haven’t, and I’ve been looking for something in the wrong place.

But if there was one good thing that came out of blogging in the early Aughts, it was the friendships. Every writer that asks why? has this void inside of them, this longing to be loved and understood, and if you were born in the 19th century sometimes you would fail and sink to the bottom of a lake with rocks in your pockets. Two hundred years later, the world has become a much bigger place, and it was on my road trip with Meg and Stacy over the weekend that I finally realized that my blog was never supposed to be batting practice for my Great American Novel. It was simply a beacon, a lighthouse drawing others to me, and me to others.

Although even that may be disingenuous: do I see myself as the male Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City, where my friends are all concentrated versions of single aspects of myself? Meg, the tormented chaser of meaning, the Percival of Arthurian legend? Stacy, the ethereal will-o-wisp simply waiting to be unlocked and decoded, but worried that anything searching for her will not understand? Each of these friendships, and more, all so I can write squishy stories about a life full of an eclectic cast of characters, where in the final episode of the series they are all together in the same room, saving me a seat at the bar, where I too am a character: a mean-spirited, selfish oddball who insists that he is like the kid from Kick-Ass, where the only superpower he has is he can’t feel pain, but in reality the only reason he plays this “Asian Larry David” persona is because he has such deep reservoirs of—

STOP. Stop.

The road trip was a blast. It was all Meg’s idea, for all of us to get together and connect. We dubbed it “ABC”, for “Asian Bloggers Conference” (we’re all Asian), and spent three days running amok in Portland and San Francisco and everywhere between. On our last night there, Meg suggested that we make these trips an annual thing. I doubt I will discover anything new about myself on these subsequent trips, but I think I will still go, and next time I may actually write about it.

Whenever we get together we talk about changing the world, but it never happens. “We’ve got to change ourselves first,” I’ll tell him, which is code speak for “We can’t just meet up once a month at a dingy hipster bar talking about our shitty writing ideas and complaining to each other about how hard it is get motivated, and then spend all of the next Sunday afternoon cleaning and organizing our bedrooms and then flipping through a few pages of Hemingway for a jolt of inspiration before finally pulling up a blank white fresh new Word document, and as soon as the cursor blinks a few times our eyes start to blink and droop and then we decide we need a quick nap, which of course turns into a twelve hour slumber that is interrupted by our bosses calling our cellphone the next day wondering where the hell we are BECAUSE LET’S FACE IT, WE’RE NOT REALLY WRITERS, WE JUST LIKE THE WAY IT SOUNDS, WE LOVE WHEN PEOPLE ASK HOW OUR NOVEL IS GOING, WE LOVE THE AWE IN THEIR FACES WHEN WE SAY THAT OUR BEDROOM RESEMBLES THAT OF A CONSPIRACY THEORIST’S, FULL OF RANDOM NOTES STREWN EVERYWHERE AND SCRAPS OF PAPER AND WOBBLY JENGA TOWER STACKS OF BOOKS AND YARN THUMB-TACKED AND CRISS-CROSSED ALL OVER A MAP, WE LOVE WHEN WE GO ON DATES WITH WOMEN AND TELL THEM THAT YEAH WE HAVE A DAY JOB BUT OUR REAL THING IS WE WRITE, WE SEE THE WORLD DIFFERENTLY, AND TEN MINUTES LATER WE AREN’T SAYING MUCH AND THE GIRL BLUSHES AND IS ALL LIKE, ‘OMG YOU’RE… YOU’RE DOING THAT THING RIGHT NOW, AREN’T YOU? YOU’RE OBSERVING ME! QUIT IT!’ AND THE SEXUAL TENSION AND THE MYSTERIOUSNESS OF OUR—”

And sometimes we don’t talk about our writing. Sometimes we talk about Breaking Bad, or Eva Mendes, or Chinese food, and honestly I am a little relieved when we don’t discuss our projects. Rafo might barely be there but I fantasize about breaking him, about tossing him around like a rag doll only because I am threatened by him, I am so “sickly searingly jealous”² of his nimble mind that I need to daydream about dominating him in order to assuage the insecurities I have about my own talent.

Even right now as he’s halfway around the world, I hesitate in emailing him about my latest writing ideas because epistolary friendships always mutate into a game of one-upsmanship, and I can already see him staring disdainfully at the first few sentences of my emails, knowing everything I’m about to say, everything I’m thinking or will ever think. He’ll laugh at my cheap, secondhand thoughts, my clichéd and self-centered worldview, my lazy references to New Formalism, my obvious attempts to impress him by quoting from Arthur Rimbaud. I mean fuck. Once, at a bar down the street, I was lamenting the lack of cohesion on a screenplay I was laboring on, and Rafo smiled calmly, asked if I had ever heard of Samuel Beckett, then jotted something on a napkin and pushed it over to me: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” I nodded slowly and poignantly, as if every bone in my body felt the statement, but honestly? I’m not 100% sure what the fuck it even meant! Damn Rafo and his lucid and infinitely more sophisticated brain!

A couple weeks ago we had a going away party for him. His parents unveiled a cake, and instead of a speech Rafo recited a poem which I did not understand. When I was about to leave the party Rafo was nowhere to be found, and I almost gave up and went home without saying goodbye to him when he came running down the stairs and placed a book in my hand. It was a short story collection by Stanley Elkin, and one of the stories was about this man who has sex with a bear. Rafo says it was one of the first things he ever read that showed him what was possible with fiction.

I read the book carefully that night, loving every word of it, but also more than anything else, fascinated by all of the copious notes and scribbles on the margins from a teenage Rafo. To me, that was the real prize in all this: his notes are a treasure map to his once-developing mind, and a year from now when Rafo returns from South Korea, I will not be giving it back. It’s all mine now. And while Rafo is busy teaching strangers in a strange land, burning the fat off his soul, finding what he needs to find, I will be here, at my desk, staring at my blank Word document, finding what I need to find.

It’s funny — maybe we’ll never change the world together, but he’s sure changed me.

¹ But my worst fear is that by the time I pulled him up over the edge of the building he would be stiff with rigor mortis, his eyes frozen wide open, the hair on his head shooting straight up in every direction. Seriously Rafo why you gotta be like that.
² As David Foster Wallace once commented to Jonathan Franzen. Zomg these footnotes are so smug and pretentious.

You get in the car with your girlfriend and watch the hotel shrink in the side mirror and you say, “Ten days in Jamaica. All inclusive. They get a butler, too. He’s available 24 hours a day and will do anything they want.” Your girlfriend says Well why don’t you just fly to Jamaica with them and be their goddamn butler, and like for a nanosecond there, it actually sounds like a brilliant idea. Then, on your phone, Dave’s Facebook status says that he’s married to Tiffany and you click “like”.

Jaimie just looks beautiful tonight, doesn’t she?
Sure does. How do you know Jaimie and Paul?

We’re Paul’s aunties. I’m Deidre, that’s Sandy, that’s Donna (she’s drunk), and over there is Moira. I’m the second oldest one.
Pleased to meet all of you. I’m Pete.

Are you here alone, Pete?
Yep.

How did you end up at the family table?
I’m actually not sure…

Well we don’t bite. We’re the cool table! Right Donna?
I believe it. Table 11. Cool table.

You’re bored. Talk to me. Who do you know in this room?
I think I know the really scruffy-looking fella over there. Can’t remember his name though. And this Middle Eastern chick smiled and waved at me earlier. I think I was on her flippy cup team once. I think we’re Facebook friends. This married couple that I’m close to was supposed to show up, but the wife actually gave birth this morning.

The nerve! And how long have you and Jaimie been friends?
Ten years I’d say. And we were like BFFs for at least five of those years.

Yeah?
Yeah. I played basketball with her boyfriend during college, but we didn’t become close friends until after they broke up. I spotted her at a bar and she’s staring blankly at this touchscreen video game where you’re supposed to figure out how many objects are different between these two nearly-identical pictures and she sighs and says, “I just want to meet a nice guy,” and I’m like heh well I’m a nice guy and then she sighs even louder and says, “but you’re Pete,” and I just shrug and buy her an amaretto stone sour and tell her the striped button down shirt backwards baseball cap guy with the sideburns at two o’clock has been checking her out and she says “I know,” and “how’s my hair?” and a half hour later she’s slow dancing with him to a techno remix of “California Dreaming”, followed by her standard disappearing act right before last call, followed by AOL Instant Messenger away messages that contain sad, cryptic song lyrics a week after finding out Mr. Right is either married or a teenager or a scumbag, followed by me calling her up and referring to her by her last name only and insisting that we go out and get hammered, but it can never be a simple evening of drinks with a buddy of hers, you know, it’s always this impossibly dramatic night where some douche asks for her phone number and then she gets super drunk and embarrasses herself and asks me every three minutes during the ride home if I think that dude likes her or just wants to get in her pants like every other guy does, and I have to come up with new and creative responses each time, and after a dozen repeats of this I go through this phase where I’m like yo I don’t want to be your straight gay friend anymore and I’m questioning if we’re really truly BFFs or if I’m just a convenient shoulder to cry on, a pet named Pete, I’m thinking all this until that one night when the bouncer threw us out after she had puked red stuff all over the dance floor so I ended up dropping her off at her place and carrying her inside and I saw what her apartment looked like for the first time and there was a collage on her refrigerator with all of her friends and I was in there, and in her living room there was a framed picture of us together, with the words “BFF” etched on the bottom of the frame, and I was like huh. I guess she really did care for me.

Yeah?
Yeah. It didn’t stop us from drifting apart over the years, though. Life happens, you know? I grew up, and she grew up too. And then she met Paul. I’ve come to realize that through our friendship we were playing the roles of adolescent archetypes: the self-destructive, vapid heroine in search of meaning and direction; the asexual, unassertive nice guy. When the symbiotic nature of our connection ceased — Jaimie snapped out of her twentysomething doldrums and pursued her career in law enforcement, while my personal growth came when I realized that deep down inside I’m really an asshole and was only using her to validate my desperate self-view as a man of integrity and loyalty — we sort of went our separate ways.

This salad looks delicious, doesn’t it?
That’s not to say that we’re a sham, and that five years of being BFFs meant nothing. I was a little late for the wedding ceremony earlier, and I’m sweaty and running up the steps into the church, still adjusting the buttons on my vest, and as soon as I’m busting through the doors to get inside, I see her in her wedding dress, about to walk down the aisle, and we make eye contact, and it’s weird because we know all these things about each other so we just kind of give each other this smile, this wow-is-this-really-happening? smile.

What a story. So what do you do for a living?
Now of course, one could argue that my reflection on all this is a classic case of cognitive dissonance, but seriously, have you seen her feet? Of course you haven’t. She’s got hooves. It’s nuts. I’m just kidding. Or am I?

Do you dance?
In front of the mirror on my sliding shower door at home, wagging my junk around like I’m a Chippendale, yes. At weddings, no. Ever since my early teens, as soon as the dance floor opens up I immediately bolt and hide in a men’s bathroom stall for three hours.

Mmm. Is that an invitation for some cougar-on-Asian-boy action?
Nopers. My last statement, and in fact, this entire thing, is all just a tawdry device to share unimportant information about myself. The latter being my analysis of an important friendship dynamic that was crucial to the emotional development of two completely different people, the former being yet another example of my debilitating neuroses that caused me to seek said friendship.

Your writing has gotten so weird lately.
Yeah, my friend Natasha in San Francisco is going to cringe at this “self-aware, postmodern” bullshit I’m attempting.

“Everything looks so different,” Tina says. Kevin wraps his arm around his wife’s shoulder.

Scott lifts up his phone to take a picture of the place, but thinks better of it and just shakes his head solemnly.

“I feel so weird,” Tina says.

I don’t feel like these people I’m with. Kevin and Tina had spent like two-hundred dollars at the student bookstore on “HUSKIE PRIDE” t-shirts, while I’m doing math in my head: it took sixty miles to get here, and gas costs $4.28 per gallon. My Bimmer does about 24 miles per gallon, so a one-way trip costs—

It’s just, the tacky red paint of the student center is crumbling! The carpets here haven’t been shampooed since the 70s! The dorm room window curtains still smell like dead ladybugs!

The renovations are contrived. Lame, kitschy touches are everywhere. In the middle of the campus is a pond with a fountain, and off to the side is this walkway made up of bricks with names engraved in them. I don’t even look at the names. It’s like, Oh God, they’re trying to create a “quad” now. We walk from one residential hall to another and I do not see the ghosts of me, Dave, Timmy B, Phil, Larrballs, Scott and Roy running through the gravel lot, laughing and holding camcorders. We walk past the science building and I do not see my ghost sneaking in as a tourist at Bre’s physics lecture — she’s furiously taking notes and I’m next to her, pencilling in “ILOVEYOU” as an 8-letter answer to some unrelated question of the crossword puzzle I’m working on, and then showing her. I do not see the ghost of my freshman year roommate casting imaginary spells in order to fend out styrofoam sword-wielding geeks. I do not see the ghost of Julie playing frisbee with a bunch of skinny nerds.

We hit up a lot of the old stomping grounds. There’s this photo that the entire crew took in front of Ruby Tuesday’s at the end of our sophomore year. To us at least, it’s kind of a fascinating, historic picture. It’s our “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima”. Our “Sailor kissing girl in Times Square”. We all look really young and happy in the photo, but if you study it more closely you’ll see all of the tension and drama and love triangles that felt so real at the age of twenty. Ten years later, we’re taking a photo in the same spot, all of us posing the same exact way. We vow to return to take this photo every ten years for the rest of our lives.

At the end of the evening we’re at Molly’s, our old favorite bar, only it’s been torn down and rebuilt a block away, and it looks and feels nothing like the old Molly’s. It’s spacious and modernized and all of the athletic frat boy douchebags are replaced by homosexual hipsters. And instead of fifty-cent beers, I’m drinking a four-dollar Manhattan. Everyone keeps talking and I’m all distracted, catching only the middles of sentences, and I’m just looking for the right way to explain that we shouldn’t haven’t come back, that college was fun and all but it’s better sealed off in the past, perfectly caught in amber. They are all wistful and nostalgic and I want to tell them I don’t feel like them. I feel nothing.

I end up saying nothing. We stop by Pita Pete’s, right before it closes, and are saddened to find out that the pitas aren’t football-sized anymore. I give all of them hugs in the parking lot and Tina hugs me the hardest and longest out of all of them and tells me to drive home safe and I get in my car and get the fuck out of that stupid town that smells like dead ladybugs and I play that Jay-Z and Kanye CD really loud in my car and three months later I will get a phone call about Lamont. It will be a terrible night of vague information. I will go to sleep. I will wake up thinking about how I always called him the Token Black Guy. And how he danced like Rerun from “What’s Happening!!” And how we were supposed to hang out again. And how he slept on the floor so I could sleep on the couch. And how I always made jokes about him sweating so much. And how his last text message to me will be “Hey what u doin nxt fri” and I will never respond, out of laziness. The doctors might say his body got too big for his heart, but at the risk of sounding too prosaic and saccharine, I will argue that his heart was too big for his body. I will miss him tremendously.

1a. Nonlinear circular narrative structure. Begin with overwrought shopping list description of apartment {N.B.: the more words, the better}. Stream of a caffeinated consciousness meets alienation.

1b. Somewhere sneak in: “flanked by several loosened-tie yuppies who are exaggerating {better: embellishing?} their laughter of Jon Stewart to show how informed they are.”

2a. Tie in with sports bandwagoning {N.B. joke: “Oh I’ve always been a Blackhawks fan, I think Jonathan Toews (pronounced ‘Toes’) is great.” {awkward?}}, then follow with implicit criticism of blind support of Barack Obama: “like one day the city is swept with the dancing-in-the-streets bliss of the election, the next day we’re accepting the lazy political musings of former sports athletes. There’s nothing more infuriating than watching Shaquille O’Neal at a halftime show proudly say, of Obama, ‘Yeah, he’s GANGSTA,’ {reference Chris Rock on Bill Maher instead?} with the exasperating realization that he can’t name one of his policies.” {N.B.: maintain elitist rant but watch tone.}

2a(1) Insert the word “nescient” wherever appropriate.

2b. Not breaking paragraph, continue with ultra-long self-aware rant on perception, winking about how the beauty of multiple-page paragraphs in postmodern literature trumps function; the statement behind this device, so to speak, has far greater value than any direct meaning behind the words. Ergo, if one finds reading Molly Bloom’s soliloquy an exercise in madness, a walk along the edge of the infinite, he or she is nearsighted beyond description. The appropriate response to Ulysses is to flip through the end of it and simply smile at its inscrutability. {N.B. insert the word “ergo” wherever appropriate.}

2b(1) Pepper interstitially with mathematical references, namely the Maclaurin series, to build more of an aesthetic disconnect. Maclaurin {or Taylor?} series will be metaphoric of cultural relativism and solipsism.

2b(1) Conjure bar scene from Good Will Hunting, with undercurrent of frustration à la Flowers for Algernon.

2c. Move away from stilted prose. Dissolve into quick perverse thoughts and observations about pop culture shifts, preferably both. Incorporate “Kim Kardashian” {if too passé, try Jeremy Lin} jokes with simple Keynesian arguments for stabilizing the modern economy, then conclude with lowbrow simile on the adjustments one has to take whenever in an awkward position: “like when you’re on top of a girl while having sex and this weird farting sound starts to happen because your chests are rubbing in a certain way so now you’ve got to reposition yourself differently and that gets distracting.” End with run-on, do not finish thought as were are interrupted by a hyphen–

3a. Begin with, “Eddie is to blame. I took the…” {N.B.: reveal: intern, named Eddie, brought smart pills {“also called ‘cognitive enhancers’” {avoid/flat?}} that he had ordered off of the Internet to the office. Joe Rogan endorsed the pills on the website and on his radio show, so Eddie reasoned that they had to be legit.}

3a(1) Several “smart pills” were ingested just before lunch. No immediate difference had been felt.

3a(2) Exposition. Science behind nootropics {reference Limitless?}. Full listing of cholinergic components.

3b. Description of euphoric power trip, a couple hours after taking the pills. “The veins of my thoughts wrapped themselves…” and “insinuating that she knew exactly what had occurred, when it was evident the vagueness…” and “…could have had the conversation in fifteen seconds, however…”

4a. Back to apartment, in a living room full of strangers. Abruptly stand up, disoriented, demanding to know who they are. The puzzled looks on their faces only infuriate. Sweat drips over eyes. No amount of critical thinking seems to provide answers. “Where the hell am I?”

4b. Feverish thoughts lead to, literally, a fever. A trip to the bathroom proves unhelpful, as splash after splash of water on the face brings even greater waves of nausea. “‘God damn fucking smart pills,’ I mutter.”

4c. Second reveal: over-dosed on the cognitive enhancers {N.B.: better first mention of this word here than in 3a}. Left work fifteen minutes earlier than usual and stumbled into a Chili’s. Drank a giant margarita, then debated about theology with a group of gay pol sci majors, then got invited to one of their apartments afterward to watch The Daily Show.

4d. One of the gay pol sci majors enters the bathroom and makes a pass, saying, “I bet you want to see how left my wing goes.” Dislocate his jaw with a series of martial arts moves that were recalled from watching a UFC fight a couple years ago. Push out of the bathroom and out of the apartment and onto the street. Run into a bus, a sweaty, shaking mess. The nausea is too much. Lights and sounds are amplified, and worse yet, there are too many people on the bus. Everyone is talking too loud and saying too much. Too many thoughts. Almost a drunken state. Take a depressing/macabre turn as yet another wink. After considering jumping out of the bus and rolling in front of moving traffic, thoughts about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle flood the mind: “Paradoxical as it may seem, if the very act of observing me changes my behavior, then I must end this now — not my life, but this story. For not knowing what happens to me next is how I elude any rules that the reader–”

4d(1) Conclude with unfinished thought. Bask in meta glory.