January 27. Feel deathly ill. I spend the entire day on the Slumberking. Every once in a while I have to sit up and look at the callus on my foot.

January 28. I pick at the callus with a small knife. The pain is unbearable. I can’t get anything done. I just hobble from one room to the next looking for stuff I have misplaced.

January 29. A sharp triangle of glass begins to emerge from the callus. I finally dig it out with my knife. It is a dime-size piece of amber beer-bottle glass. My senior year in high school I was wading in Aurora’s Mastodon Lake and stepped on something sharp. The foot bled copiously. The next day red streaks were working their way up my leg. My doctor gave me antibiotics. From then on, touching that spot with a fingertip sent me flying through the ceiling. It was a lot like stepping on a punji stick. Glass doesn’t show up on X-rays. I had to order custom-made shoes from plaster of paris molds. The shoes looked like Frankenstein boots. People ridiculed them openly. I learned how to find normal shoes that would accommodate the sore spot. After forty-two years the glass works its way out. Amazing!

February 5. No matter how you cut it, it hurts to die. Asphyxiation is usually involved. With type 1 diabetes I will most likely have a stroke or fatal heart attack. Get out of the easy chair to take a whizzer and “Ahhhh!” Ka-plop. Two weeks later firemen will break inside trying to find the cloying odor that has the neighborhood up in arms. “Jesus, will you look at that? His head is bigger than a pumpkin! I wonder how they will ever squash him into a coffin.”

So there you have it. The aeons of nonexistence, birth, Shakespeare’s seven ages of man (which boil down to years of suffering in various forms), dreams that seldom come true, and just enough good stuff to keep you going. Then death and the foreverness of all eternity, painless and carefree. No more problems. No demonic tortures. Just nothing, pure and simple. How can you top that?

HERE LIES THOM JONES RIP

HE PACKED 2,000 YEARS OF AGONY

INTO THE SUBSTANDARD 62

The Junkman of Chengdu