April 16. I’ve been out of sorts lately, flat-out depressed. That’s why I decided to pick up my health journal again and record my last days. Sometimes I want to eat a quarter pound of barbiturates and various supplementary poisons, chased with absinthe, and then relax to Rammstein in the closed garage with my Citroën 2CV full throttle.

April 21. Does an ant have a soul? Do good ants upgrade into a higher life-form? A lobster, say? Endless reincarnations suck. Every female I have ever met tells me she used to be Cleopatra. I was a yak tender of no distinction living on the steppes of Mongolia, where there was nothing to eat except clay.

April 25. Most Americans don’t know it, but noise is a leading cause of strokes and heart attacks. People get used to noise, but it kills them all the same. A person in an inner city can sleep only to the lullaby of sirens and gunfire. At five in the morning I hear fucking birds chirping, crows cawing, while a woodpecker tattoos the aluminum rain gutter just outside my bedroom. My Dutch neighbor Elsa says somebody has been vomiting outside her window at five in the morning. It’s probably her neighbor, who used to attend two AA meetings a day. “Why would someone vomit outside?” she asks me. “It makes a mess. You could just puke in the toilet and flush it.” Elsa says she was about to go outside to investigate but saw a large wolf looking at her through her sliding glass door. “Thom, he just wouldn’t quit staring at me.”

April 29. The UPS guy knows I don’t exactly work, so he asks if I can drop by in the morning to help move his wife’s grand piano up to the third floor. “While we’re in the attic, I’d like to move my anvil collection from upstairs down to the basement. If there’s time, I want to knock down a chimney. Bring a respirator.” If I piss Homer off, he’ll throw my pharmaceutical shipments off a bridge into the river. The fish will begin doing odd things. They could grow feet and walk around town like thugs. Who knows?

April 30. Goddamn it. My fucking back is killing me, and I squashed my thumb trying to haul two anvils at once. No “under the spreading chestnut tree,” just a busted thumb.

May 4. Killer back pain.

June 6. Oh, for Christ’s sake, not only is my back still killing me, I’ve got a whopping summer cold!

June 7. Raw throat, fever, and nasal congestion. A seven on the Thom Jones Misery Index.

June 8. Cold worse. I have to lay all day.

June 10. Canker sore on right tongue edge. My tongue looks like elephant leather.

June 11. Now a cough. I knew this would happen.