It Is an Honest Ghost

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An old story: disappointments in love, debts unpaid, a series of lousy apartments, a series of lousy jobs, betrayals, some rancour, some sickness, etc. He in many ways was typical but it was in fact the amassing of these specific typical experiences that made him an individual, he liked to think. After a long winter, with its blizzards and periodic power outages and frozen pipes and eternal darkness, spring had arrived, with its budding branches and populated streets and clear blue skies and women in skirts. Something like hope. By mid-May, after weeks of drinking in bars again and trying to meet new women, he once again fell into his solitary winter ways. The promise of the new was not dead and buried, though it once again felt distant, he decided, one mild afternoon, sitting at his kitchen table. The days passed and each day he’d go through his routine, or one of the four or five routines he’d formed and mixed up, in a sense, to keep from confronting the fact that he was a creature of habit, and perhaps temperament, who had much in common with a marmot. Still, even with his varied routines, he thought about a certain inescapable mundanity that he feared came from within but hated to confront so he rarely did, that is to say, confront it.

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