Baatar stepped his right foot to the edge, shifted his weight to his right foot and pivoted on his right foot. In his pivot, his gaze swept into the abyss that was now directly off his right boot and Baatar the Immortal Monster, the Slayer, the Will, the Psyche, the Lust for Living, the Hero of His Own Story, the Only Character in the Only Story, paused. Baatar paused and stared. The tip of his sword dipped to the stone floor. There was Nothing to be seen.

But something must matter, mustn't it? And I must care about something, mustn't I? I care about beauty, but surely beauty doesn't matter. I care about poetry. Nothing could matter less than poetry.

Intelligence cannot be faked. But I try.

Do coincidences mean anything to you? I'll offer: they mean nothing to me. No evidence of secret order to the universe, no guiding forces, no supernatural intelligences. The human mind, so successful at increasing the evolutionary adaptability of the human species because it is so adept at identifying patterns, is also so flawed by the same talent because it so often sees patterns where none exist.

But maybe you believe in Magic?

What a great love I once had.

What a common belief.

I like listening to the goings-on of the world at 2:30 at night.

Tell me about it, the loneliness of literature.

I do not recycle for the same reason that I do not play the lottery: because I understand mathematics.

The United States produces annually 254,000,000.00 short tons of garbage. One United States resident produces annually 0.84 short tons of garbage.(1)

For comparison, represent the garbage that one U.S. resident annually produces as one second. The garbage that the U.S. annually produces is then represented as nine and a half years. The difference that one second makes over a span of nine and a half years is incomprehensibly inconsequential. The garbage that any single U.S. resident produces is incomprehensibly inconsequential.

To act, one must be so vain as to believe that one's actions are of consequence; to recycle, you must believe that you make a difference, despite the mathematical truth that you do not make a difference.

Humans motivate their actions through egregious irrationality or outrageous vanity.

To be rational and undeluded about your relative value as a member of human society is to be philosophically closer to oblivion.

(1) United States Environmental Protection Agency, Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2007

Is it really okay? It's a missed connection, isn't it? It's a fear and a sadness, and a sense that each individual is not worth so very much, because there are so many individuals, and how to distinguish them?

People are generally not interested in other people, so to be forthcoming is to be boring, because no one really cares. At the same time, people are generally vain, so they like to be forthcoming. This means that people are generally boring to one another.

The most difficult thing about being alone is remaining alone; other people regularly challenge your aloneness.

Humans are not very interesting creatures. Their behavior is simple and repetitive, and established and basically unchangeable by the time they're eight years old.

I have a bad and worsening habit of ignoring people.

I have a good and improving habit of ignoring people.

What I write is not disturbing. Conscious existence is disturbing.

I don't understand other humans' emotions and motivations. I can perceive them and ape them and cognitively diagram them, but I can't overlook the pointlessness. These soft organic unhardy precariously organized creatures are going to die. They know they are going to die. Why do they not act like they are going to die?

I have a terminal condition. It is my life. Why does this condition bother me when the same condition does not bother you? You do not think about the circumscribed epoch of your life. I think about it.

Nothing exists beyond this moment, so nothing can be lost.

I do not like religious fantasy, and all religious thought is fantasy.

You do not want to know my thoughts, you would not like them, you would never accept them, and, most hopeless of all, you could not understand them.

On every occasion, accept chewing gum when it is offered.

Maintain in your possession a tangible symbol of life yet to come. A train schedule, a folded map, an unopened condom—each in its iconization of promise may serve as a talisman against daily pain.

We don't bury goods with the dead; we keep those for the living. We don't believe in sentiment; we don't feel it. We don't lose time over emotion for there is only limited time for action. We don't weep, we don't agonize, we don't idealize; we kill whenever there is benefit in it. We eat you, because you are made of meat.