First off, hi. Sorry for all the silence. Life is a dick, yo.

So, as we all know, I am never truly inert; I don’t stop thinking. Even if I’m staring directly at you with the most vacuous eyes imaginable, I’m never not thinking. [At that point I’m thinking “Shit, this person knows me and is waiting for me to say something; shit! Who the fuck is this?”]

All I ask is that you follow me on this train of thought and understand that I have the best of intentions all throughout. Okay?

[Frightened, yet?]

Lately I have been thinking about running gazelles. It could be between the moments when I actually wake up and my alarm goes off, or vice versa; it could be when I’m auto-piloting my car to work or from; it could be while I’m pouring lukewarm coffee in a septuagenarian’s cup who’d expressed in no-uncertain-terms that they wanted their upper-palate irreparably damaged. I’m thinking of running gazelles.

To be precise, I’m not thinking of myself running the gazelles; I’m not standing just outside a herd of them with a riding crop; I’m not perched on the second plank of a rodeo fence chanting “Hee-yah!!”; I’m not puffing a pipe while my well-trained shepherd dog wears them out near nightfall so I can corral them for a nights’ slumber.

I’m thinking of running gazelles. I see in my Mind’s Eye them running, independent of me. Bounding through the Savannah or the Serengeti or the rolling plains of the Sahara… [Have you determined yet that I don’t quite understand the ecosystem in which they exist?] They’re running. I see them. I am thinking, and I see them running.

Everything I’ve just told you is absolutely true. Except…

I have not been thinking of running gazelles. I have been thinking of killing myself.

Now, before you reach for the phone, I’m saying it’s the same as the running gazelles. I’m thinking of killing myself in this completely detached observant manner: I close my eyes and see a character that looks a lot like me killing himself, and it occupies my thoughts. It is not what I am thinking about; It is what *I* am “thinking” about.

I don’t know what it means, but it has persisted for the past month or so. It’s not romantic, or comedic, or tragic; it’s just a thing that my mind sees. I don’t WANT to kill myself, and I don’t PLAN to kill myself, or even HOPE to kill myself. It’s just something that I think about. Again, not me; I think about a character that looks like me and acts like me killing himself. That is all.

Here’s a recent dream: Senators Ted and Kelly [____] have fallen from grace in the small town that I live in but they will rebound, we’re all sure. Suddenly, many members of our town come down with an awful sickness; they’re only instinct is to kill those around them and/or themselves. The carnage is constant and oppressive. At one point I, a younger boy of 8ish, am found in a desolate corner with my younger brother, Alex. I am holding a shiny revolver with a four-round chamber. Violent village people emerge and I dispatch a few, and my younger brother asks for my help. A prevalent theme in my dreams is my ineptitude at violence, and so when he asks me to end him I am clumsy and after several shots I finally hit him in the neck. As the blood starts to blossom across his Victorian-era scarf, he excuses himself, explaining that the pain is excruciating and that his death would be an awful thing to watch. I’m left weeping at what I’ve done, and I open the chamber of the small gun to see if there are any bullets left to end myself. I shake out the four empty cartridges, all as shiny as the instrument holding them, and I feel an intense sorrow. As if by miracle, my father, a mustachioed Nicholas Cage, arrives blood-soaked from the outstretches of our colony, wielding a combat shotgun and a wild hog at leash. He wipes his face ineffectively and informs me he is returning to the wilderness to dispatch himself. I cry out in a childish voice “Can you take me, too? I killed Alex…” He flits his eyes to my brother’s bloody trail, chokes his patriarchal disappointment, and says, weakly, “Yes.”

To our left is a dark-haired woman, her features a nightmare, her hair streaked down to her wrists in terrifying tendrils, whom after seeing our exchange snarls “I’ll help you die!!!”

She reaches towards me, and just before she can touch me, one of the forgotten farmhands appears, a young strapping blonde boy wielding a pail of water. He pulls from the pail a dripping sponge, and at second view his head is gone, and his body slows to slow motion as his rippling muscles undulate beneath his water-soaked, headless body and he reaches a hand to the dark-haired woman and presses the dripping sponge against her head. She screams in agony, and before me, the boy, and Nicholas Cage her left eye pulsates and then shoots blood from her head as her head liquefies above her torso. As her lifeless body falls, the boy’s head re-materializes atop his shoulders, and we recognize him as one of our countrymen; he tells us he has the secret to discerning the Demons among Us. Nicholas Cage dumps all the live ammo from his combat shotgun and follows the Farmboy, and I follow demurely, the empty revolver in my right hand weighing me down with a gravity that I know I will never shake.

We are now filing into a Town Celebration, led by Senators Ted and Kelly [_____], heralding our overcoming of the awfulness which ensued. Townspeople are dancing, whooping and hollering, having their revels, and all I can think about is all that we lost and that I never managed to die in all of it.

But if I were you, or me, for all that’s been said, I’d look up some YouTube Footage of gazelles running.

Or I could present to you:

Running Gazelles…