Like water, blood must run or grow scum. — John Updike

His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.

Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.

Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know.