This is now: You climb Everest, then you do laundry for the rest of your life. (The first time you go to a Laundromat, without speed, you hate that the spinning laundry is boring... It used to explain the universe. That’s how you knew you were really off speed. You had no fucking clue about the universe, except that it made you self-conscious. Speed and Laundromats. Because sometimes you just have to do something. And washing clothes is always the right thing to…

Describe “the burden of nonstop awareness.” Why? Just go look at the lights at Rite Aid at four in the morning, when it’s just you and the eighty year old security man watching a hunched up guy with shades and a leg-brace screw the top off his Robitussin-DM, guzzle half a bottle like it’s Thunderbird, then smack his lips and take off his sunglasses. Eyes that peeled back don’t come without a lot of speed work. You recognize each other like Masons. The pharmacist, whose nametag says Bairj Donabedian, stares at you and picks up a telephone. When did life get this good?

ALL FUCKED OUT AND STILL AWAKE. Why is everything you remember bad? Now it comes back to you. What was her name? The ex-lawyer who dragged her little boy to the motel. Gave the kid an already-colored-in Yogi Bear coloring book? Even after the boy’d gone through half the book, he still had this hopeful look on his face before he turned every page. You were all in this motel room with a dozen other versions of you. All white guys. All waiting. But you couldn’t help notice this kid. Every time he turned a page on that coloring book, he had his crayon in the air, ready to go. And every time, he was just shattered when he saw that it was already colored on. Have you ever seen a five year old age?

You were just there to cop. But you saw anyway. Each filled-in Yogi and Boo-Boo killed the kid a little more… Watching this, even your cells hated themselves… (Just because you give somebody something for the first time doesn’t make you responsible if what you give them destroys their entire life. Does it?) Carmine—that was her name. Why do you do this to yourself? Carmine gave the child to the grinning simp in the Cowboy hat. And what did you do? (You could have said something. You didn’t. If you were staring straight at a pedophile—and there had to be at least a chance—if you were, you had other priorities. But still…) There’s right behavior. And behavior that’s right on methamphetamine. You did your job! You took advantage—of empathy! You glared at the little boy’s mother—if Carmine really was his mother, and not his pimp. You registered the youngster’s wince when Smiling Cowboy Man plopped a hand on his hunched-up, scared shitless little boy shoulders. But while you glowered at the woman who handed him to strangers, as if she were somehow morally reprehensible, what did you do? You stole. You wet-fingered
a wedge of fresh meth off the motel desk like you practiced with a speed-thief trainer. You glowered at Carmine while you stole her drugs. It was a kind of morality. Was it stealing if they didn’t know you did it? How much of your mental activity is spent worrying what other people can see? Is it pathology? Or is it Memorex?