The Beginning or the End? Is my life at the end or am I just approaching a bend in a long, long road to some other place? Both ways I am afraid. But afraid of what? Death? Or something new? Is nothingness freightening? How can it be if it is nothing? And some other place? More likely just annoying when I get to know it. Either way, no reason to be afraid. But is "nothingness" really nothingness? Do I know such a "ness"? And is some new place really so new? I've seen so many places, they all seem much the same now. They are more like rearranged furniture, the pillow fluffed, a new picture on the wall. You're not fooling me at this hotel. The owner, ultimately the bank, is the same one. And the scenarios, too, are the same: "Do you love me?" she asks, hesitating to love me. "I only want ..." she says, asking for everything. If I'm going somewhere new, I want it to be really new. There will be no more drapes where I'm going. And there will be no more roast beef, mashed potatoes, and gravy. The language will be a new one too. I don't want to hear, "Hey, dude, what the fuck ..." ever again. And please take off that baseball cap—you are no slugger in the batter's box or farmer on a tractor in the field—and throw it away. And girl, quit talking baby talk. I'm not your father. He left your mom long ago. I want a world that I have never seen before where flowers, if there are flowers, hang down from the sky, which is green, not blue. And where the clouds, red, not white, don't drift across the sky but are raised and lowered like theatre curtains, each time revealing some great truth till all is known, and every actor is a blade of grass clapping for me and you ... I want a world that I have never known before where the truth is indisputable and falsehood is exposed immediately, where ... But I don't want that world either. I want a world of music and beautiful melodies. I want to be the A string on a violin played by the lovely Lang Lang, perfectly tuned and vibrating orgasmically. "Baby, play the A string, the A string, one more time. I'm almost there." And that is where I will live, either coming in a crescendo at a concert in Carnegie Hall or living in the violin case of Lang Lang, occasionally sleeping in bed with her under her left breast and tickling her nipple. "Stop it, you silly elfin fool. I have concert a tomorrow. He he he he he ..." And if that is not possible, I'll be in the other place, the land of "ness," where there is nothing or no thing. But I don't really believe that. Nothingness is hard to come by. Things just keep drifting back inside.
	—Louis Martin