Where did all these bright green birds come from? I worry about us, though I suppose if we keep leaving all our toxics right outside the compound we'll have only ourselves to blame. And when the last great herds come charging over the plain, believe me, I feel my responsibility. What's that the philosopher said? "Pornography makes the whole world a pornographic place." I think our chances of surviving would be a damn sight better if someone kept track of that kind of information: certainly my ancestors knew how to make themselves scarce when the pink fluorescent drinks were handed out.

The tragedy is, in my generation, we were trained to look at secondary processes only, so that we developed world-class critical faculties and found ourselves with nothing to say. O take my car keys, eat what's in the freezer, garnish my wages, but let me be free! I just don't have it in me anymore to pretend that ostrich meat is the next big thing. I mean, as good as we are at our jobs, we only work at them eight hours a day, and stalkers do theirs twenty-four hours a day, and it's a lot more than a job to them. This has been true for a long time: even in the days before the blast you could see the symptoms everywhere, everyone was ashnihasinkée, a term meaning "pressed upon by industry" and derived from the expression, "I'll wash this later and just leave it in the sink for now, ok?"

And in the aftermath of this, we are all as tired of each other as only two young men can suddenly be. Except for that girl, remember the one, she was named after a noble gas I think, who chopped off all her hair and was last spotted on the number 43 reading Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. I'll never forget the day she leaned out the window and just Kissed the Police. Right there in front of the whole stock exchange, and not on dress-down Friday, either. With her disappearance I felt the entire promise of a liberation movement go up in a cloud of belladonna...

Well, one more festschrift and I'm done with the whole business. There's a desert out there to explore, and nobody knows the lizard tracks like I do. I would love to bring you along, but until the itching stops I think it's best we keep to our corners, don't you? Which is not to say I imagine anything but the brightest future together. We should totally be sister cities.