Literature, at its best, and despite the recent attempts of critics, can never be murdered and dissected, as it’s an immortal yet organic thing, drawing on the richness and complexity of Experience yet somehow managing to transcend its mundane origins like an alchemist transmuting base metals.

If we’re to avoid becoming fiction robots in a corporate world, we must stop adding to our educational excesses, eschew the assembly line of MFAs and bottom-line publishing houses, commit ourselves to a way of writing that engages in a valiant struggle to push the limits of plot and language so as to awaken, not anaesthetize, the reader.

I was sick to the bone of disappearing by degrees, dissolving into library walls, playing my sad little violin of loneliness as time’s invisible ink wrote out my meaningless days even as it erased them. We imaginary people must live the Adventure passionately, set ourselves down with the liquefied marrow of Experience, or else lament the Moment’s passing with a whimper as our unrecorded voices are swallowed by silence.

Reading The Dark Knight Returns had woken up something or someone inside me. It had woken up my own Dark Knight, I suppose, the part of me that yearned to take on the universe, walk on the wild side, live dangerously, leap knowing full well the net would never appear, that its not appearing was precisely the point. Suddenly I craved to become a specialist in the Leap of Faith, to plummet headlong into my unknown destiny at twice the speed of death, to be a regular predator feasting for the duration of my short mammalian existence on fate’s tissues …

One must appreciate life's little ironies, even at one's own expense.

Not that we were being insincere. Or maybe I should say we were being sincere in our insincerity.

I can still see-feel-hear-smell-taste her, her maddest of bodies that made divinest sense to a parched and withered me. My mind swam like a drunk octopus with images of the two of us in a dizzying array of compromising--possibly illegal--positions.

It would be Halloween. It’s always Halloween in my imaginary life. Even in my earliest years, the ones I never technically experienced but only heard about from my biographers, it was Halloween—Halloween a metaphor for donning a mask of “reality” and becoming a spy in order to expose the “real” world’s fictitious underbelly.

My throat was parched and my entire body was leprous with cuts, yet my mind was exceedingly clear. I knew I was in deep s**t. I didn’t know how deep--just that I still hadn’t touched bottom.

Nothing bonds two solitary individuals like a good shared drunk. This is a scientific fact. It’s important, even necessary for the long-term welfare of the planet to get good and s**t-faced with your neighbor every now and then.