HA AGONY

Ceiling and I sat and talked on the curb like we used to every night. She is often the first to hear my new ideas. I open up to her because she is the most writerly non-writer I know. I hope that one day I will be able to return the favor she has done for me and pushher in the direction of writing.

The jittery ideas became solid as I prepared my explanation. "I think I'm gonna write out the past two years of my life and then link 'em together, like a web. When I became a heavy Internet user, the spaces between memorable moments became bigger. Moments of distinct weight and relevance became displaced by the goo of unwritten memories and jiggled around by all the unsorted raw materials surrounding them.

I need to connect them together now. end the agony of distjointed recall

She returned with an example we both witnessed"So it's like when you and me and Floor were walking down the path by North Bethesda and I said 'I'm always afraid I'll get raped by some homeless person on this path' and then one of us said 'It must be horrible to be raped by a hobo" and then I said 'I wonder if there's HOBO PORN?' and then we went online at Alex's and looked it up.

Because we could. I hid in the next room, trying to lose myself in a book, failing (their voices carried through the double-doors)

"Yes, it's like that" I said. "And see, you made a link just now from our conversation to that moment"

"It's not completely non-linear, it's just that the jumps we can make are so much wider than they used to be. We can jump in so many different directions at once that it is rare to fully be in one place.

I'm trying to gather myself somehow using the tools that disassembled myself.

"Yeah, I'll use this as my psychology experiment, INSIDE THE MIND OF ROSS"

And I think it's right that she's at the beginning of this book because she started to help me in this process and there is no end to this process.