After college, Carly came to New York to study journalism, at which point we embarked on one of those long, messy postgraduate friendships where you have just enough sex to thoroughly confuse the hell out of each other and ultimately, through a sequence of poor timing and third-party complications, fuck the life out of what was once the purest thing you'd ever known.

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Keeping one eye on the road, I reach absently into the messy heap of CDs scattered on the seat beside me, an eclectic assortment symptomatic of a vague and misguided effort to transcend my actual age. It's not necessarily that I'm afraid of aging; I just refuse to do it alone. And so, at thirty-four, I'm listening to Everclear, Blink 182, Dashboard Confessional, Foo Fighters, and a host of other contemporary stuff. My audio Rogaine.

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Everyone always wants to know how you can tell when it's true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn't fade and the scars don't heal, and it's too damned late.

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I haven't always been this dispassionate; I'm fairly certain of tht. Is it a function of time and distance, or have I simple shed over the years what general sensitivity I once possessed? I try to recall a time in recent memory that I expressed any heartfelt emotion to another person, and I can't come up with a single instance of sentiment or passion. Turning right onto Churchill, I'm troubled by the notion that while I wasn't looking, I seem to have become an asshole. This leads to a brief, syllogic argument. The fact that I suspect I'm an asshole means I probably am not, because a real asshole doesn't think he's an asshole, does he? Therefore, by realizing that I'm an asshole, I am in fact negating that very realization, am I not? Descartes' Asshole Axiom: I think I am; therefore, I'm not one.

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On the door to my room, held up by thumbtacks, its white border ragged and otrn in countless places from random human contact, is a Star Wars poster, just like in the song by Everclear. I hum the words softly to myself. "I want the things that I had before / like a Star Wars poster on my bedroom door." You have to question the originality of your life when it can be captured perfectly in the lyrics of a rock song.

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He stands up and sighs. "How did you get so fucked up?" he asks me, not unkindly.
"It takes a high level of discipline," I tell him as he heads for the door. "And absolute commitment. It's like my own special super power."

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