loop, infinite

This Justice video is pretty absurdly well-done. It’s been around for a while, but I didn’t see it until a friend linked it to me a couple days ago.

Something I’d always known but that I’d never really thought about, something that had never really clicked for me, is that those those two Justice guys – whatever their names are – actually, no, let me go ahead and look their names up. Okay.

. . .it had never really clicked for me that Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay don’t really come from a musician background. They apparently don’t. Before they formed Justice, they were both graphic designers. And I know it’s kind of a prosaic thing to point out, but, man, that explains a lot about their shtick.

There are many obvious similarities between Justice and, like, Daft Punk: they’re both groups that consist of two French guys and the music they both make is some flavor of house. They also both have this distinctive imagery associated with them, what with Daft Punk’s robot suits and Justice’s penchant for crosses.

There is one semi-interesting distinction, though. From every interview I’ve read, the impression I get with Daft Punk and the robot thing is that they do it to anonymize themselves: the music should speak for itself, they say, so they want to take the ego out of the proceedings; they do not want to become “rock” “stars.” Hence the great pains they take not to show their faces to the camera in interviews; hence those Discovery-era videos where they appear as a fictitious anime band.

Justice go for the opposite of that: they aim for flash, because flash is memorable. Their songs are either thick and aggro, with distorted bass and distorted synth, or deliberately gimmicky and cheesy. Which is not to denigrate these guys at all, because I like them a lot, but it’s true. Their “DVNO” video literally illustrates the song’s lyrics such that you can’t ignore them. Their video for “D.A.N.C.E.” does something similar: it’s pretty in-your-face stuff, intentionally so.

“D.A.N.C.E.” was Justice’s first single from Cross, so perhaps the equivalent Daft Punk single would have been “Da Funk” from Homework. That video is, you could say, the Justice thing’s philosophical opposite: aggressively pointless, it features a man inexplicably endowed with a dog’s head. He’s walking around a city having a bad day, and he happens to also be carrying a boom box playing “Da Funk.” This video (despite being strangely awesome) has nothing to do with anything, least of all the song it’s (theoretically) supposed to be promoting.

. . .I kind of ran out of things to say so I’ll stop writing now. I have crap to do anyway.

Human After All is seriously the best Daft Punk record. I heard it for the first time yesterday, after having avoided it for years because of all the bad reviews it got, and because of how many people said it sucked. It really doesn’t suck.

Your mileage may vary, of course, since the point of view I’m coming from is a little weird: I never liked Daft Punk too much. I acquired Homework and Discovery at some point in freshman year of college on the strength of a friend’s recommendation. (“They’re French and shit,” he had said, and just like that I was sold.)

But look. In the interest of full disclosure, and with some shame, I’ve gotta admit: at that point in my life I had not developed any actual taste in music. I mean, I thought I had taste at the time, and perhaps to other people I had the appearance of some simulation of taste, but I’m not going to kid myself: all I listened to was a combination of the bland indie rock Pitchfork said was good and what my hipper friends suggested I get into.

So at the time, Homework and Discovery passed in one ear and out the other without leaving much of an impact, probably because they didn’t sound enough like fucking Radiohead to me. Now, a few years later, I’m older and wiser. Which is to say that I have graduated from having “no taste” in music to having “bad taste.” While not ideal, this is a significant step forward.

So lately, with my new-found sense of critical judgement, I’ve listened to Homework and Discovery again, only to find that they. . .still don’t do a whole lot for me.

The first Daft Punk record, Homework, is just too much of a house record. It’s nearly eighty minutes long. I’m still enough of a douchebag rock guy to feel like the ideal length for an album is about 45 minutes, and anything more than that really tries my patience.

I know that’s kind of not the point: Homework isn’t a rock album – it’s more or less a DJ-ready disc filled with tracks to play in clubs. In that context – the context of hanging out and dancing at a club – Homework is likely some great shit, but me, I do most of my music-listening through headphones while moping in my apartment. 

The followup Discovery is not really my thing either, but in a different way. The tricky thing is, Discovery is consciously a poppy record. It contains “proper” songs – pieces of music that are structured in the style of pop songs rather than Homework‘s grooves. In theory this actually is my thing, and hell, really, in practice a lot of Discovery is impressive stuff.

There are two problems I have with the record, though: first, it seems criminally front-loaded – the thing disintegrates into Homework-esque formlessness after the first five or so songs. Second, the particular aesthetic they went for is a little too saccharine for me, a little too cloying. I can take a couple of those sugar-coated dance-pop songs once, but over the course of an entire album I feel worn out.

Still, I won’t deny that it’s got some great moments. “Digital Love” is so pretty, and in such an affably naive way – when I hear it, I kind of want to give the song a hug. And I really liked “Harder, Better, Faster Stronger” until Kanye West ruined it for me. (And I even sort of like that guy under most circumstances. That particular sample, though: shit’s about as clumsy and as lazy as it gets.)

Anyway, it seems like the “general” “consensus” is that Discovery is the best thing Daft Punk ever did. I can understand that. It’s a warm, fun collection of songs. Human After All is the complete opposite of this, so yeah, I can understand why people told me that it sucked and that I should stay away from it.

The Daft Punk guys (I’m not really enough of a fan to actually know these dudes’ names, so in my mind I just kind of classify them as “the Daft Punk guys” or sometimes as “those two French dudes”) claim that Human After All was a deliberate attempt to make something really stripped-down and spare, compared to Discovery‘s lush maximalism. They also say it was conceived, written, recorded, and engineered in six weeks.

This kind of shows in the resulting music: most of the songs on Human After All are fragmentary, repetitive things that are a pretty damned far cry from the structured precision of “Digital Love” or whatever. But that’s what makes it so great!

The song that, yesterday, got me interested enough to download the album was “Robot Rock.” I had stumbled across the video on YouTube. “Robot Rock” is basically just a riff. The riff is a sample: the first thirty seconds of this song played over and over again.

The result is kind of boneheaded, and kind of relentless, and kind of boneheadedly relentless, and kind of relentlessly boneheaded. There’s a vocodored voice over the top of the riff, singing “rock / robot rock,” several times. Those are the only lyrics.

What really makes the song come together is that video, because the video is hilarious. There’s just the dude in the robot suit, pretending to play that riff with a double-necked guitar. He gets really into it, even though the song is so mechanical and straightforward that this makes no contextual sense. He starts making all these rock star stage-moves. The irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife. That’s what I like about the song. I’m kind of a hipster doofus that way. Hipster doofuses love their irony.

All the songs on Human After All share ”Robot Rock”‘s simplicity. In the title track, which opens the album, a voice (heavily processed and vocodered, like all the vocals on this album) repeatedly says: “we are human / after all / flesh uncovered / after all.”

Up until about the last minute and a half, those are the song’s only lyrics. At the end there, the voice simply starts to frantically repeat “human after all,” though every time it says “human” it actually says “human” about fifteen times. The voice keeps shifting up in pitch. The music keeps getting denser and louder.

I wonder, what the hell is this supposed to mean? Is the guy singing not a “human after all” but he wants to reassure himself that he is? Or is he is “human after all” but he feels like he’s losing his humanity amongst all the processed noise that surrounds him?

The former proposition makes more sense, given Daft Punk’s sense of humor: one of the dudes in the band famously stated, in some Discovery-era interview, that he and the other guy are literally, actually robots. (He said, deadpan, that they “did not ask to be robots”: it was just that the two of them were caught in an electrical storm sometime in 1999 and when they woke up they were no longer human.)

The latter proposition is more interesting, particularly if you ignore most of the trite man-versus-machine, dehumanization bullshit that it implies, and just think about it in the context of pop music. There are only so many ways you can express something using the form of pop music. There are only so many chords, only so many melodies, et cetera, right?

Maybe, having built up a method of pop songwriting with the transition from Homework to Discovery, Daft Punk found they had nowhere left to go?

Maybe “Robot Rock” and “Human After All” are the sound of two French guys hitting a wall, over and over again?

Two French guys ripping their art apart and, instead of reconstructing it, just putting the fragments to record?

Two French guys half-trying to find their humanity somewhere in the resulting compressed sonic chaos, and half-saying, “to hell with it,” and recording video of themselves pretending to rock out in robot suits?

Man, I can’t say any of that with a straight face. That’s all pretentious bullshit and I have no idea what I am talking about. This is one of the many reasons why I could never be a rock critic.

But here’s what I know: Human After All is ten tracks and 45 minutes long, which is just my kind of length. It loses Discovery‘s gloss and structure, but in return for that, it’s more crunchy and abrasive, which is just my kind of thing. It’s not the kind of music that makes you feel good, but I don’t think that’s what they were going for.

Human After All‘s final track is a seven-minute long dirge called “Emotion.” It’s pretty simple. A processed vocal sings the single word “emotion” over and over again. You could say that that voice is faking emotion the way I used to fake having taste in music; it thinks that if it says the word “emotion” enough times, maybe it’ll feel something.

And I think you can interpret Human After All’s title it in two ways – either that title is just some straightforward irony BS, like, “we called our most robotic work ever ‘Human After All!’ ha! ha!” or it’s really just trying to draw your attention to the human spirit buried in the core of these songs.

I mean, as mechanical as something like “Robot Rock” sounds, it has a playfulness about it that betrays that a machine could not have actually written that shit. And no matter how rough and dehumanizing you try to make your music, no matter how ugly you make the synthesizers, how sparse you make the arrangements, you can’t erase the fingerprints of the humans that were behind it.

Videogames as we know them were born in September 1972, when a guy named Nolan Bushnell convinced the owner of a bar in Sunnyvale, California to let him put a weird machine in the corner next to the jukebox. But let’s jump back for a moment to get some context here.

When Nolan Bushnell was in college, he had studied electrical engineering at the University of Utah. As such, he spent a lot of time with computers: in the 60s, the technology was still nascent; computer science was barely a field, and it was exclusively the domain of techy college kids, egghead professors, and brainy researchers.

Back then, there was no such thing as a PC; the machine Bushnell used at school was a room-filling mainframe system, and though it was both absurdly large and absurdly expensive, it wasn’t much better than a modern calculator. But there was one thing it could do that a modern calculator can’t: it could play Spacewar.

Spacewar was the first videogame ever made by anyone. It was written in 1962, on a PDP-1 mainframe, by a bunch of MIT students. They had programmed the thing in their free time. Like, for fun. Think of these guys as pioneers: they were the original computer nerds.

Anyway, Spacewar was an elaborate game meant to be played by two people; it simulated a duel between two spaceships. One player controlled a thin, pointy ship called the Needle, and another player controlled a short, fat one called the Wedge. The Needle’s goal in life, its sole reason for existence, was to destroy the Wedge. The Wedge’s one true calling, its God-given destiny, was to destroy the Needle.

Both the Needle and the Wedge could fly around a screen – the world’s first computer monitor had actually been made just for Spacewar - and shoot missiles at each other. Making the scenario a bit more interesting, a star was nearby: its gravitational pull tugged at both ships and players had to compensate accordingly for this as they flew around, adjusting their momentum this way and that, all the while trying to blow up the other ship.

Spacewar became so popular that Digital Equipment Corporation, the company that manufactured the PDP-1, began using it internally to test their machines: under the hood, Spacewar actually made some pretty demanding physics calculations, so the game served as a good diagnostic test for the hardware.

Soon, the Spacewar program was built into every new PDP-1 sold. People at universities and research labs all over the country began to play it, and one of those people was Nolan Bushnell. 

Though he was an engineering major, Bushnell had the mind of a businessman: when he saw Spacewar, he immediately felt the game had commercial potential. He founded a company called “Syzygy,” which released a version of Spacewar that had been squeezed down and rewritten to run without needing a mainframe; this new version could fit into a small cabinet that could be set up in, say, a bar, alongside a pinball machine. This new game was called Computer Space.

Bushnell shopped Computer Space around to various bars and restaurants – any establishment that he thought might be interested – and while he did make some sales, Computer Space ultimately didn’t make much money. The game was just too much. Bar patrons might sidle up to one of the machines and drop in a quarter out of curiosity, but the overly-complex rules were a turn-off. Maybe they would play Computer Space once, but they wouldn’t play it again. 

Unfazed, Bushnell moved to California and started another company called “Atari,” with the intention to start over, this time by designing a heavily stripped-down and simplified Computer Space: a straightforward, no-BS game that would, he hoped, suck quarters down like a goddamn vacuum cleaner. Bushnell delegated this task to Allan Alcorn, one of the first engineers Atari had hired. The game Alcorn came up with was called Pong, and the first Pong cabinet was what Bushnell placed in that Sunnyvale bar thirty-six years ago.

That Pong cabinet proved to be incredibly popular: legend has it that the machine broke after just a couple of weeks, and when Alcorn came in to fix it, he discovered that it had short-circuited because it was jammed with hundreds of quarters. Atari started mass-producing Pong cabinets, then designing more games, and the rest was history.

But Pong itself isn’t much: it’s basically a digital version of table tennis. This is the way it works: one player controls a paddle on the left end of the screen, and the other player controls one on the right. A little ball bounces back and forth between the paddles. The goal, just as in table tennis, is to keep returning that ball. If a player misses, the other player gets a point, and whoever ends up with the most points wins.

The now-famous instructions printed on the Pong cabinet said it all. Instead of the paragraph of text that Computer Space needed to explain itself, Pong just needed a single line: “avoid missing ball for high score.” 

It’s tempting to say that Pong was ground-zero of videogames. This is, in fact, sort of the conventional wisdom, and I, in particular, would look kind of like an ass to say otherwise, because I wrote an article based on this exact premise a few years ago.

But, you know what? That was a few years ago! And what I said there is still true, because Pong is a great, illustrative way to talk about what videogame “narrative” is (and what it isn’t), et cetera. But there’s more to it than Pong: there’s a nuance.

Spacewar, Computer Space, and Pong are not “really” videogames in the way most people think of videogames because of something kind of obvious: something so obvious that it’ll seem dumb for me to mention it at all, but I’m mentioning it anyway. The thing is, these games are not really videogames because they are fundamentally about competition between two players.

The “game” component never quite enters into it, and as such, Spacewar and its progeny are a little closer to board games or sports than they are to what we’ve come to think of as “videogames.” With Pong, say, the ”game” is not something you can interact with. It’s just a spartan table-tennis framework that exists for you to try to kick a friend’s ass.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this: this is a workable paradigm that plenty of successful modern games use and, if nothing else, it shifts hella units: these days, thirteen-year-olds pretend-killing each other in Halo on Xbox Live are a pretty-incredibly lucrative demographic for the videogame industry. But this ain’t the whole story.

The next logical step after Pong was Breakout. The game was apparently Bushnell’s own personal idea: he envisioned a one-player version of Pong and told some of Atari’s designers to make it so. And thus, in 1976, Atari put out Breakout.  

Instead of two paddles on either end of the screen, Breakout features one paddle on the bottom of the screen and a brick wall on top, with two adjuvant walls on the sides. Since boucing a ball against a static brick wall would get old fast, someone decided to make the wall’s individual bricks destructible: so every time you get the ball to hit a brick, it disintegrates.

The goal is to destroy all the bricks, and to do that, you have to think about the ball’s angle and ricochet it off the walls, as though you’re playing some bizarre verison of billiards.

When you destroy all the bricks, you’ve completed level one, and the wall reappears. When you destroy all those bricks a second time, you’ve completed level two.

After that, you’re done. You’ve finished the game. No more bricks will ever appear. The ball’s just going to bounce off the side walls, forever. Or until you get off the machine and let someone else try, at least.

Of all Atari’s “classic” games, Breakout has had the most longevity. This is partly because I see versions of that damn thing everywhere – my cell phone came with a version of it, and so did my iPod – but mostly for another reason that I’m going to hold off on discussing for a moment while I change gears, because there was another step after Breakout, and that was Space Invaders.

Space Invaders is a little different from Breakout in that it wasn’t designed by Atari at all but rather by a guy named Tomohiro Nishikado who worked for Taito. Taito was a Japanese company that originally made vending machines and ukeboxes, but that decided to branch out and make games in the early seventies, because hell if that Pong-fueled international videogame craze wasn’t gaining steam.

The first game Taito put out – also designed by Nishikado – was a simple Pong clone called Soccer; the second was Space Invaders. Nishikado has claimed, in interviews, that just as Soccer is a carbon copy of Pong, Space Invaders is a carbon copy of Breakout: he says they’re pretty much the same game, except maybe Space Invaders is a little better-looking. The man has no idea what he’s talking about.

Space Invaders, which came out in 1978, is one of the most terrifying videogames ever, but this is not something that sinks in immediately.

In terms of structure, the game is indeed similar to Breakout. As the player, you control what is essentially a Breakout paddle with a laser gun of some kind mounted on it, so instead of sliding a paddle back and forth and letting a ball bounce off of it, you slide this laser-paddle back and forth and hit a button to fire shots. Instead of bricks, you have several rows of aliens at the top of the screen. (And it must be said: those aliens are actually rather adorable: they’re the reason why I say Space Invaders is merely “one of’ the most terrifying videogames ever, as opposed to “the” most terrifying game ever – because the game can only be so scary and oppressive when those aliens are so damn cute.)

When the game begins, those aliens start slowly moving in formation. They glide back and forth, and, more importantly, they glide down. As they glide, they fire shots at you. If a shot hits you, you will explode and die, so you have to dodge as quickly as you can, while shooting back. Every alien you hit explodes. Once you clear the whole screen of aliens, a second wave appears, analogous to Breakout‘s level two.

The catch, though – the huge, significant thing that makes Space Invaders fundamentally different from Breakout – is this: the aliens never, ever stop coming. There’s always another wave, and the next wave always moves a little more quickly than the one before it. 

At the beginning of the game, there are some bunkers set up between you and the aliens, and they’re not much, but you can slide under them to take some limited cover if you need to. But as the space invaders continue their descent, and as they keep firing shots, these bunkers slowly disintegrate. Eventually, once you’re a few waves in, those bunkers are gone and they will not ever come back: so you’re naked. It’s just you and the aliens.

What makes Space Invaders so chilling is that you cannot win. You will never be able to win, because the game goes on forever. There’s always another wave of aliens up ahead and eventually they will grind you down.

Eventually, they’ll be moving so fast that it won’t be physically possible for you to dodge them quickly enough. Your human reflexes will fail you, because they have limits. You’ll explode and die. You’re fighting a futile battle, and every time you play the game, before even putting your quarter in, you know you will lose.

There are other videogames that invoke this same existential horror.

Tempest (1980, Atari) involves flying a spaceship through levels and destroying your enemies. The game seems to have a fixed number of levels, but when you finish all of them, they just repeat, only now the enemies are faster. The levels will never stop repeating, until you’re dead.

Missile Command (1980, Atari) has you defending six cities from missiles by intercepting them before they can hit. The game ends when all six cities are wiped out. This will always happen eventually. It’s just a question of when. You can’t save them.

Robotron 2084 (1982, Williams) apparently tells the story of a future in which robots have turned on their human masters. You play as a human in the center of the screen who just gets mobbed by wave after wave of robots, until you’re dead. As in Space Invaders, all you can do is try to beat your adversaries down enough to maybe get a high score, but you will always, eventually, die.

There haven’t been a lot of videogames like this since the early 80s. Since then, the Breakout structure has really taken over. Pretty much every single-player videogame released today is achievement-oriented rather than survival-oriented: they’re concerned with throwing discrete, manageable challenges at you until you reach some kind of ending.

But between Pong, Breakout, and Space Invaders, you’ve pretty much got three categories into which you can stick any videogame you want. And when you trace a line from Spacewar to Computer Space to Pong to Breakout to Space Invaders, that’s about as complete a history of videogames as you’ll get. There are other details, yeah, but I think that link from Space to Space – from War to Invaders - covers the big picture.

I don’t know. Even though Breakout‘s spiritual successors have taken over, I’m pretty fond of Space Invaders-style masochism. About a week ago, I acquired an Atari 7800 – pretty exciting – though I didn’t get around to plugging it in and turning it on until today.

It was a little complicated. The audio/video cable coming from the 7800 wouldn’t fit into anything on the back of my TV, so I had to go to Radio Shack to grab a coaxial adapter. The controller is a little janky, too, but apparently Sega Genesis controllers actually plug right into those old Atari consoles, which sounds insane, but is kind of amazing if it’s true. I don’t have my Genesis in my apartment at the moment, so I’ll take care of that later.

The game I got the 7800 with was Centipede (the actual 7800 port, rather than the 2600 one), and don’t get me wrong, I love the hell out of some Centipede, but as a shallow consumerist American I’m perpetually dissatisfied and always want more than what I’ve got.

So, yeah, I drove to a used videogame store in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, and yeah, behind racks and racks of Xbox and Playstation titles, past the Genesis carts, past the SNES section, and at the bottom of a shelf of Dreamcast and Saturn and 3DO games, was a lonely shelf lined with Atari cartridges.

There weren’t a lot of them, but most of them were in great condition and each one was ninety-nine cents, which is my kind of price. You can’t beat that shit. And, yeah one of them was the home port of Space Invaders. It ain’t no perfect port, to be sure, but, hey, it’s Space Invaders, man.

I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have grown up in the late seventies or early eighties; to have played all this stuff when it was new, before broadband and wireless and headsets and HDTVs and Xbox Live and “downloadable content,” all of this the culmination of the years of technology since Space Invaders.

As it is, the low-fidelity of this Atari stuff has a weird charm to it. My television gives off this hissy whine when I turn it on with the 7800 plugged in; the games look flickery and weird on it, grainy and gritty and analog. Ugly as sin, too, but that goes without saying.

Yet there’s a certain timelessness to stuff like Space Invaders. I don’t mean that in some stupid, hokey “because it’s such a classic” or whatever sense. I mean that in the sense that these games will go on forever. When I turn the system on and watch the static on my TV assemble itself into the shape of Space Invaders, and when I pick up the controller, I know I’m going to lose, every time. The game will last longer I will. There’s poetry in that.

It’s always pretty weird and depressing the night after a big test. I’m vaguely aware that other people are probably out partying or something, and I’m here in my apartment, surrounded by dirty clothes and Solo cups half-filled with water, a stack of cereal bowls on the kitchen island, clutter everywhere. My own clutter, because I’m too lazy to pick any of it up.

I live in a ground-floor studio, so I’m always seeing or hearing people outside, walking past. Can they see me? They probably could, if they wanted to – if they really wanted to, they could peek through my blinds and see the entire contents of this one room in which I live: all bright and well-lit. And yet, if I look outside, I can barely make anything out – it’s just dark.

A test was today and it’s just a week and a half until the next one. This is my little window. This is my tiny little chance for decompression: I can relax tonight. I can let loose. That’s just in theory, though – I’ve never really known how to pull that into action; sometimes I don’t even feel like I have a body in physical space – I’m just a recursive, self-involved brain floating around inside of a shell that can seemingly do little apart from sleep and type stupid shit into a text box on the Internet.  I’m still in this bubble. I can’t even slack off right.

This is getting kind of retarded.

Have a test on Wednesday. Don’t know if I’m ready for it. When I sit down and try to read, my head hurts, and I keep falling asleep. Nothing’s sinking in. There’s a switch in my brain somewhere that’ll engage me, that’ll turn everything on and get the wheels turning. I know the switch is there because every once in a while I do somehow manage to flip that thing, but I don’t know how to get at it now. Maybe it’s not there anymore?

Earlier this afternoon, I took a break and I decided to take a walk. I went to the parking garage, and took the elevator to the seventh floor, which is the top floor, which is the roof. And up there I could see the med school: this brick thing, this heavy artifact of the 1970s; enormous and dark. Not too interesting to me. Somewhere else – another edge, maybe; another corner; another view. I walked across pretty easily, because, hey, no cars up there, because no one needs to park up on the seventh floor. People barely park on the sixth floor. You’re always guaranteed to get a  parking spot on the first five floors. Why even have a seventh floor? Why bother to paint the parking spaces up here? Why bother to let the elevator get up here?

The new vantage point, then: downtown Kansas City. Yeah – all glinting steel and skyscrapers. But even further, off to the side – highways and the cars rushing back and forth on them; moving in the distance, gliding, and weirdly surreal: surreal because they were real. Those cars weren’t special effects. I’ve seen these city-wide panoramas more in movies and in videogames than I have in real life. And right then I was seeing the real deal, with no digital manipulation behind the scenes. It was real reality. I almost never see it. Kind of awe-inspiring -a trite thing to say, but a true thing, too.

I could see highway signs and road signs. The roads themselves curving away into the distance, concrete ribbons, quintessentially Midwestern stuff: Kansas City, a little island in the middle of the flat ocean of nothingness that is Missouri, that is middle America in general. Everything in the Midwest is either big and huge and concrete or it’s a flat field dotted with cows. Not really any in-between.

So many people. Hundreds of thousands of people downtown and all those people in all those cars, every car driven by a different dude or a different chick, every person with a different story, every person driving to another destination. So many people, and they were so remote, too – because they were so removed from me. They were abstract concepts more than they were people.

I didn’t know those people – I could not, cannot, touch them and they cannot touch me. They exist only in theory. I know that this afternoon I saw those people driving those cars but they’ll never meet me and I’ll never meet them. I was just some guy standing on top of a parking garage. They were just some people driving. Our paths will never intersect. And what about all those people probably downtown – how many? How many hundreds of thousands of people I couldn’t directly see, but were there nonetheless? How many of those people will I never meet in my life? Ninety nine point nine percent of them?

How is it possible, in a metropolitan locale of so incredibly many people, to feel so alone? How is it possible, in a city so huge, not to be connected to anyone? To feel so removed? It doesn’t make any damn sense mathematically, does it? This place is just teeming with homo sapiens. Hell, I live on a planet full of ‘em. Six billion of us and counting: and of those six billion . . .nothing? Can that be right? Where are you? Why can’t I find you, and why can’t you find me?

Though, hey: not a productive line of thought – you can’t think that way when you’ve got ten thousand pounds of pathology ready to come down on your head, I don’t think. Not something I can afford to do.

I went inside. I tried to study. And now here I am, lying in the dark for no reason, typing on my laptop for no reason. I have to get up early tomorrow.