stolen from an email to a dear friend [slightly modified and without the benefit of context]
not to lessen the importance of the intended audience, but because it’s on my mind

I'm happy living alone. I mean ridiculously happy. I don't feel sad when I come home to an empty apartment. I don't feel sad when I crawl into bed at night and there's no one else there. I don't mind cleaning up after only myself or ignoring the dishes. Or doing the dishes. Or taking a shower at 3 in the morning, simply because the mood or desire strikes me. I am not sad. Nor lonely. Maybe I'm living in a dream.

I don't go out much. That too doesn't bother me. Instead I spend inordinate amounts of time on the phone talking to various friends from home or otherwise -- or to my mother. Mostly, I let the phone go to the machine. I've become one of *those* people. I screen my calls. I hide behind the confines of the internet, the computer, the machine -- distance myself from anything real. Maybe I mean realistic. And I'm okay with that right now. So, I sit in front of the computer and read Walden. Read from my Ecocriticism reader for class and write papers about how people need to go out and experience nature. That's a lie. I don't. I write papers in defense of writers like Delillo and Wideman and Carver who maybe didn't go out to the wilderness to live and get away from the trappings of men, but instead write about that world from within -- exposing the places for what they are. But it's still about place. It's still, inherently, about the absence of what Thoreau is talking about. You don't have to have trees to find place relevant. Right? I think that's what I think. But I'm sitting in front of a computer and likely I'll not go outside during daylight hours for any more than spans of 7-10 minutes while consuming cigarettes.