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He felt somehow…denser inside than when he was a kid, like there was too much stuff packed in. Not necessarily good stuff or bad stuff or even particularly interesting stuff…just events and then the decay of those events in some sort of an inexorable progression of which he surely knew the end. Fuck. He never used to think like this. He KNEW he shouldn’t have come back…this was worse than those pictures flipping through his head at night. Wasn `t this what he had spent whole decades of his life trying to avoid? This kind of mournful, melancholic crap…

He picked up speed as he reached the top of the hill, hugging the laptop tightly to his chest, the dark closing in, time thickening, turning into some howling void, filled with crickets, deafening cicadas, like the 3 K background radiation of the universe, now a godforsaked screeching; even the stars seemed to have lost that timeless feeling for which he had always valued them, turning into ash heaps of radiation, harbingers of BAD infinity…

He always liked that three mile walk back, even with the occasional pick-up truck whizzing by, a finger or two lifted off the steering wheel in an almost familial greeting. It was almost completely dark when he finally walked up the driveway. Lights out. Nobody home. He guessed she had forgotten about the dinner engagement. The lights came on automatically as he entered, sitting the laptop on the table on the way to the kitchen to get a beer. Popping it open as he sat down, he opened the computer, saw he had a response from his recent uplink but moved to another file and began to type:

He got up from the computer, stretched, and walked over to the old couch covered with a large faded country blanket. He laid down, crossed his legs and laid his arm over his eyes. Immediately he felt exhausted. It seemed like he hadn’t had any sleep in days. And there it was again …like some monstrous cyclonic force, lines of agitation, brute force, destruction, crackling lines of lightning forking through turbulence, constrained by some force not endemic to its own construction but finally, and awesomely: nothing but a thin shell swirling around an empty center. And it moves of course, the center moves, thereby it seems, um, `alive’ or at least some sort of rudimentary will seems to be present; but a strange volition, one based on the crackling energies of the surrounding rotational winds. Yes, that’s how it felt sometimes when he got up in the morning, like somehow there had been an emptying during the night, an evisceration of himself through the aegis of surrounding high tension currents/differentia somehow sucking everything out and zapping them, some sort of metaphysical soulbug killer (was he really being emptied or was it just a realization of how empty he was, that there was not, never had been anything at the core–and worse, that the same was true for everyone, that there were nothing but these thin violent crusts interacting? Had Something left–or was it just hiding?) Even the dreams had mostly deserted him, the one signpost he had that he might still be alive at night and not really fully occupied by some monstrous anabatic Other that seemed to be continually pulling him apart into strings of Brownian motion, then taking the particles, shards into the updraft of that thin shell of interactive systems that increasingly seemed to be a “him”. He remembered reading about the Great Red Spot on Jupiter and that it might be the result of something called a Taylor Column, a fairly stable pattern that showed all the way through the turbulent layers of atmosphere, and was itself the result of extremely high winds that were somehow `caught’ around some surface feature. But maybe, maybe, that was some kind of hope! If we were all Taylor Columns didn’t that mean there was some sort of `surface feature’ helping to generate it? But such speculation was useless–one could never make it through the turbulent layers to ever find that feature. And to make it worse, the winds seemed to be picking up, the electrical activity increased to a a web of scintillating lines criss-crossing, penetrating the shell, yes, taking on a life of its own almost (But wait a minute! After all it was HIS life wasn’t it?–but it seemed to be collapsing into a not-his-life somehow, into the life of that fluttering, crackling crust. Which meant maybe a was-never-his-life. He didn’t know whether he was terrified or ecstatic. And maybe there was a very fine line between those two anyway. Like Dorothy being swept from the flat plains of Kansas, surrounded by bits and pieces of her life, swirling by, fire fed by wind, a blowtorch melting experience, words, lives into a fine ash, a crematorium of souls whipped into dark clouds moving at fever pitch toward an ever receding horizon/Emerald City maybe searching for that surface feature to hook onto but everything had become a desert, a flat bleakness scoured into a geometrical precision by millenia of passing vortexes gathering speed as the terrain becomes increasing leveled, speedier, fed by roving skeins of electrical currents. He felt a great mystical fervor overcoming him, the emptying, hollowing only one part (necessary perhaps; inevitable certainly, in the long run–which was actually very short–of mortality, `consciousness’) of a great Battery of energies and their flows, circulation patterns becoming visible, absences and presences all forming the same sort of vortextual collapse structure, the old in/out, out/in matey, ego becoming a vacated site and the vacancy of more importance (though `not of the moment’ as was the ego–the interactivity skills of the vacancy seeming to belong to another dimensional structure) than its recent occupant. And besides it didn’t seem to be completely, truly vacant. The desert of the center seemed to teem with ghostly bedouins, remnants, revenants of previous collapses, though now gaining their/its own form of diaphanous `solidity’, possessing a peculiar `granularity,’ particulateness through aridity, like all deserts. And like all deserts it no doubt teemed with life, but life of a different order, rhythm, and tension.

Moonlight filtered through scudding clouds momentarily illuminating the woodgrain floor, shiny plastic coating reflecting back halfopened curtain window pane dividers as he crossed to the laptop, flipped it open while standing, pulled a chair over while he simultaneously logged on.