“I’m very good at my job. A terrific lab director. A still youthful, ahem. I don’t look over forty, because. Nobody ages on the inside, it would be unbearable if one were to notice how time was slipping away, and realized that it was all a big joke, this Life, in which everyone believes a big yellow bird will come and reveal the meaning. Nothing comes. No bird. The only enjoyable thing is the fact that you barely notice the way time passes, because most people are just filler, tiny cogs, meaningless, not even affixed to the earth’s surface. Just organisms. Goddamned organisms. Over forty. The time when most people, unless they’re complete idiots, know whether their way of life, whether chosen or stumbled into by accident, works. Most people I know and with whom I don’t intensely interact are nose-diving. They’re getting out of shape, losing their hair, they’re quickly trying to have a child, getting divorced, being broken up with, they stand around morosely at gay parties and worry that all the dreams they had for their lives have turned out to be nothing more than a pile of laundry, left wet in the dryer. Nobody pulled it off. Nobody except a few assholes with companies that develop Mars rockets or eavesdropping equipment with cute women’s names. Nobody from the so-called middle class managed it. The insurance agents and craftsmen have been swapped out for a new type of person who studied, works in IT or nanotechnology, is mid-thirties, and now partakes of gluten-free food in various downtowns. People like us have clearly not made it. We’re the new underclass. And sink deeper by the day into the morass, knowing that we still have half of our lives ahead of us. How is it supposed to go, if somebody like me grows more unsightly by the day, and gets sick, and it’s too late to start over, too early to die, one can’t just stay in bed, particularly when that bed is in jeopardy, the bed no longer stands in its ancestral location, not since the harassment. Excrement was shoved through the mail slot at my flat, the windows smashed in, dead rats left in the corridor, grime came from the empty flat next door. Twenty-four hours a day. When the water and electricity were shut off, I gave up. Nearly all of my, shall we say, acquaintances, that is people I know from shops and the university, have been kicked out of their flats. Half the city has been evicted, you never know. Perhaps there are a few fucking Russians who’d be interested in the shitholes if you smeared some antique pink on the walls and put up tasseled curtains. And then the usual thing happens. Showings every day. In the end I found something in Luton.

Mate. Luton.

Nothing against Muslims, but. Fuck. So many of them?