Everything around us is chaotic and painful,
So keep your arms tucked in and your seatbelt on,
Or it might hit you how **** everything is.

Give me one more drink,
I think I might find the bottom.
What a comfort to sink just beneath
Breathing in this cool and burning filth.
Through the warm portal
I can slip down into forever
with my arms outstretched.
It's endless
and unbearably deep.
You can taste it,
it's coming.
I can feel it.

"Don," she began. "Do you find me attractive?"
Gene told me the next day that I got it wrong. But he was not in a taxi, after an evening of total sensory overload, with the most beautiful woman in the world. I believed I did well. I detected the trick question. I wanted Rosie to like me, and I remembered her passionate statement about men treating women as objects. She was testing to see if I saw her as an object or as a person. Obviously the correct answer was the latter.

‘I haven’t really noticed,’ I told the most beautiful woman in the world.