The following can also be found in the book Chicago Stories 1996. Click here to learn more, and to download a free electronic copy.

The snow.

The snow is snowing sideways.

It's sideways, man, it really is, I kid you not, the gently falling present from God joke is joking on me, turning on me like a bastard child.

Satan is afraid of Chicago in February.

Snow hits my face little bullets thousands of little bullets torturing me and punishing me for a crime I will commit when I'm forty-three years old. I don't know what the crime is yet. But it's bad 'cause the snow punishes me every February until I turn forty-three. And then I die.

Coffee was invented to slowly kill me.

I can feel it.

I can feel it, slowly inching its way down my pipes my piping my piping hot friend enemy enema who laughs at me and laughs with me stares at me with its black face of midnight evil, children being raped in their own bedrooms, children with their throats slit in Colorado and stuffed up the chimney.

I have THE FEVER.

It bubbles and it boils, right under my skin. THE FEVER. If I put my sweaty palm to my sweaty forehead I can feel it coursing, bubbling, boiling, pushing my skin up in unnatural ridges and rhythms.

THE FEVER is ALIVE.

It's a living, breathing creature that has invaded me, baby boy, won't let go and will take me over until I have nothing left. THE FEVER eats me, chomps away at the inside of me and the only way it can stay alive is to kill me but once I'm dead it won't be able to live any more. THE FEVER is a stupid creature though and can't think that far ahead. And my whole life's been filled with stupid creatures trying to kill me, so why should this be any different?

But you know better, baby boy. This time it's gotten INSIDE you, it crawls around up and down and all over your body baby body baby boy and nothing is sacred, it will use anything and everything it can find to kill you, exploit every weakness, poke holes, shoot arrows, boil the pouring oil and avast ye scurry, baton rouge the mainlining smackheads and let the pillaging rejoice!

It sees things you don't want it to, baby boy.

Oh, my tender emotional vulnerable baby boy. You want to hide, crawl inside the pompadour and circumstance, crawl inside Buddy Holly and wrap yourself in buffalo plaid and condoms.

I got you right where I want you, fucker.

You pathetic wimp fool. I take you in my arms like a fucking lever and push the pivot to hurt you exactly the way you can be helped. I make you cry like the fucking baby you are, crawl into your nonexistent womb and suck your dick and cry for your mommy. I make your eyelids bleed with liquid flame so hot when you squeeze them shut like you'll set your eyes on fire. I make your chest squeeze shut make you gasp for wheezy breath and curse everything and everyone you ever loved in your life make you want to die make your muscles ache and burn brightly in the presence of strangers, give off a curious light all your own that they can smell like a dog in heat. They smell it and like blood they go crazy swoop in for the kill, stab and flick and plunge and beat hit pummel horse spin and break your fucking ankle 'cause you're no better than a sniveling uptight babydoll fourteen year old virgin, for Chrissakes. You make me sick.

THE FEVER tricks my body because it is smart, much smarter than I'll ever be. A flood of cold ripples up my body from my toes to my head in 2.2 seconds flashing a wave of goosebumps and shivering and POP right out of my head again.

THE FEVER makes me want to go over to the guy at the next table and punch him in the face as hard as I can. Just because. Just because he is EVIL he is the embodiment of everything I hate I hate hate HATE about humanity of which I am a distant cousin.

Nyquil makes coffee taste bad.

Nyquil's supposed to make ya high, I'm told, but it didn't work.

Maybe only if you take it when you're not sick.

There was a puddle of water at my el stop that kept forming silhouettes of famous people like clouds on a warm July day in McNair Park with Kellie on top of my chest. Pre-pubescent sex is the best sex of all, 'cause you don't have to actually do it to get an orgasm. Kellie could look at me in a certain way and I'd get an orgasm.

Kellie: with light blue eyes that could pierce right through your skin.

Kellie: the only woman I've ever loved.

My body is starting to fall. It's starting to drop from the weight of THE FEVER and if I don't get home soon gravity will simply overcome me and leave me horizontal on this floor, never to get up.

I fear that I have pneumonia.

I fear that I have bronchitis.

I fear that I am dying, even as we speak. Well, of course I'm dying as we speak. I mean rapidly dying.

I fear that I am sterile. What in my life so far proves that I'm not?

A doctor on Oprah said that one of the signs of a man afraid of commitment is that they obsessively seek commitment, that they demand it much more quickly than is normal in a relationship. It makes no sense to me, but then again, Oprah believes him. Am I afraid of commitment? My neck hurts, very badly. And my back. And now I think of it now all my muscles start hurting at once, the ones on the bottom of my feet, the one in the fleshy part between my thumb and forefinger, my throat, my knees my God I am dying it's not just my imagination. I consider, right now, going to a hospital. But I'm a hypochondriac, so what the fuck do I know. It's Oprah's world and we all merely live in it.

John F. Kennedy Jr. was on Rosie today.

Jenny Jones had on daughters who beat up their mothers.

Wednesday I slept seventeen hours.

And I'm still sick.

There are thirty-four people in this coffeehouse. I have my back turned so that all I can see is one guy right in the corner of my eye. And now even he's wiggling his foot.

God, I really do hate people.

Whenever my Walkman's in a certain position on the table, I can hear a tiny, high squeal cutting over the music. It occurs to me that this might be a message from aliens trying to communicate and that I might be the only thing stopping their entire race from being exterminated.

Caryn believes in aliens. She asked me why I didn't and I said 'cause I'm an atheist and she didn't understand that. And I thought, if I have to explain it more than that then I'll never be able to explain it.

There's a lot of things about me that I can't explain. And I'm getting tired of trying. In fact, I'm just getting tired. I want to go home but I don't want to get up. It just seems like too much expenditure of energy.

The aliens are talking to me again. "HELP, JASON, HELP. SAVE US."

I am not Horton and they are not Whos.

I knew John Kennedy. And you, sir, are no John Kennedy.

I am Spartacus!

No, I am Spartacus!

Dr. Seuss and Dr. Who have never been seen at a party together. I'm not trying to imply anything. I'm just saying.

I want to write a children's book. Right now. I want to start right now and not put my pen down until it's finished. Children's books are the only kind of books that will make a writer immortal. It's a C.S. Lewis thing. I'm sure you wouldn't understand, dear.

And stop calling me Shirley.

And blue, I'll paint the ceiling blue. I want to go to Silver Dollar City RIGHT NOW.

I'm writing on top of a book of e.e. cummings poetry. When I was in college I owned the complete works of e.e. cummings and I carried that fucking thing around like it was the fucking Bible. Which, of course, it is.

Every time I'd read a poem and finally digest it, finally understand it, I'd circle its title in the table of contents.

The last time I remember, there were 136 titles circled.

Fall, 1989. I carried a notebook and I carried The Complete Works of e.e. cummings and that's what we'd do, we'd go to Shattered and sit on stage, get trashed, read e.e. cummings out loud and write poetry and bad talk women and shoo them away when they'd come over. The He-Man Woman Haters Club. God, it's been a long time since I thought about that. Me and Ted and Rock and Lee and Drew and Matt and Croy. We lived the purest artist life those two years that I ever will -- nihilistic and drunk and uncaring about anything practical whatsoever. It was liberating, and also surprising how much we actually got done having that attitude. I'll never be able to live like that again, even though sometimes I want to. It's why I'm at a coffeehouse tonight when THE FEVER wracks my body. Tonight I want to live that artistic life where nothing is sacred except THE IDEA, the Great and Almighty IDEA which can topple anything else in life. We spent two years doing nothing but discussing THE IDEAS, arguing them, enacting them, explaining them, defending them.

The cover of my e.e. cummings book ripped off one night, and the only tape around was this stuff for newspaper layout that was only an eighth of an inch thick. So I taped the cover back on with that. It must have taken 50 or 60 pieces of tape.

I tried to find my e.e. cummings book last Christmas, but it's lost, either in my parents' basement or someone's apartment in Columbia, Missouri.

I'd pay a million bucks to have that book back right now.

I'll flip this e.e. cummings book open and write down a random poem, the first short one I turn to.

THREE VII

Paris;this April sunset completely utters
utters serenely silently a cathedral
before whose upward lean magnificent face
the streets turn young with rain,
spiral acres of bloated rose
coiled within cobalt miles of sky
yield to an heed
the mauve
of twilight(who slenderly descends,
daintily carrying in her eyes the dagnerous first stars)
people move love hurry in a gently
arriving gloom and
see!(the new moon
fills abruptly with sudden silver
these torn pockets of lame and beggin colour)while
there and here the lithe indolent prostitute
Night, argues
with certain houses

If Macintoshes had been around when e.e. cummings was writing, what the hell would've happened?

What would Thomas Jefferson's web site have looked like?

If Kerouac could've self-published a zine out of his bedroom, what would he have called it?

I descend into the abyss. My body screams for me to take it to bed, but I punish it like it punishes me. I am trying to teach it that I am master over it, not the other way around. I'm afraid I'm losing.