I've got a gift
but the gift needs batteries.
In some way I'm sick.
I can't get it out of me.
I've broken all the wishes that I can.
And if you leave me now,
If you would leave me now,
then my death be complete.
But I'm a tin man.
I'm a toy soldier.
And you know where I sleep.

It was the year after I graduated from college.

In January, I go down to Baltimore, to do some voice 
acting for a tiny production company making their first 
game. They operate out a disheveled house, owned by a 
recovering alcoholic--the president of the company's 
father. The president himself is a quietly impish man, 
as hospitable as he is enigmatic. As gaudy as he is 
impeccable, as much a conceptual humorist as a 
businessman. There is a trophy that says "Number One 
Rapist" with his name printed underneath, sitting on 
his desk. Sometimes he wears a dress. His girlfriend is 
fat, but pretty. I spend two weeks drinking, going to 
the mall and watching movies. No one in the company 
seems to do any work, but the vice president does 
receive packages from record labels who think he might 
be in a position to afford licensing their artists, 
from time to time. We're making a dance game. 

Ten days into the trip, my girlfriend comes to visit 
us...and a woman who will eventually become a stripper 
buys her a nightie. She is the ex-girlfriend of the 
vice president. They aren't on good terms but she needs 
a place to stay for the night and he's going to drive 
her to the airport in the morning, after they sleep 
together. Me and my girlfriend sleep together too, as 
do the president and his, the one who is fat but 
pretty. And for one night, the whole company is 
swallowed up in sex. In the morning, which is four PM 
for us, we go down to the basement and record the voice 
overs. The session only lasts about four hours and it's 
the only session. But for the next five months, when 
people ask me what I've been doing since I graduated 
from college, I tell them I've been doing some voice 
acting. 

From February to May, nothing of significance happens. 
My girlfriend flies to Japan to be an exchange student. 
I get a three-month trial membership at a gym and the 
highlight of my day becomes fifty minutes on the 
elliptical. This is because, during this trial period, 
it's the only thing I leave the house for. I spend a 
lot of time chatting online, which I call "networking." 
I change my dietary habits: no cheese or red meat, 
empty carbs or fried food. I eat garlic, and raw 
ginger, and I will live forever. A twenty-dollar rice 
cooker improves my quality of life. I lose fifty 
pounds. I make an appointment to have that hand surgery 
I've been putting off; for two years carpal tunnel's 
been stealing my ability to play guitar, but I can 
still type.

In May, I get a job in a writing lab at a local 
community college. It's a good job. It doesn't give me 
any satisfaction from helping people. I'm not even sure 
I am helping people; I'm probably under qualified to do 
that, but what's important is that it doesn't give me 
the dissatisfaction I would get from working retail—the 
only other viable option. I discover previously 
unimagined nuance regarding correct usage of the 
definite article.

In July, the surgery goes well, but heals badly. I 
can't type anymore. The only potentially marketable 
skills I've ever had become inexpressible, dormant and 
begin to atrophy. I write off this disability as 
temporary until October, when I slip into a slow, 
sustained panic. I start to worry that my limited 
ability to use my left hand is affecting my brain, as 
I've read that doing activities that use both hands in 
consort, like playing piano, or guitar, or typing, 
improve general cognition. Maybe they're vital to 
general cognition; maybe they don't just improve it. At 
work, my change in demeanor does not go unnoticed. I 
overhear my boss saying she's going to fire me and I 
tell her I won't be coming back next semester in order 
to save myself the disgrace, and immediately she cuts 
my hours, leaving me with more time to go crazy. My 
girlfriend returns from Japan to me in this state and 
is not unaffected. She leaves me for a guy named Bob, 
which ruins “Bob” as a throw-away name for me. Which is 
a shame, since “Bob” kind of my go-to throw-away name.

In November I shave my head down to stubble and, for a 
while, I feel monastic. Then I feel cold. I find myself 
sitting several times a week in the same Burger King, 
at the same time of day, eating the same meal: Diet 
Coke, small fries and a BK Veggie. The worst of two 
broad-spectrum dietary paradigms. The healthy eater 
wouldn't get the fries. The big fat guy would get a 
real burger. Typical American martyr. I gain back the 
50 pounds. One weekend I go to Philadelphia with a 
small film production company for a convention, and, in 
the dealer room, I run into the vice president's ex 
girlfriend. She's become a stripper and has a lot of 
money now. I invite her back to our hotel and she has a 
lot of sex with one of the guys from the production 
company in the shower, and on the bathroom sink, and in 
one of the bedrooms and, for the first time in a long 
time, I'm reminded of Maryland, and the vice president, 
and the president, and his fat but pretty girlfriend. 
The next morning it's my birthday. I don't tell anyone, 
letting the rough cut film premieres and hotel room 
drinking proceed sans any potential minor complication. 
And, for the first time, during long on-screen pauses 
that the director asserts, addressing the audience as 
they occur, will be filled up by music in the finished 
version, I feel old. I thought I'd felt old before, on 
previous birthdays, but I hadn't. What I'd felt was the 
fear of feeling old. The severity of the difference 
between the two cannot be emphasized enough. Consider a 
roller coaster vs. a car crash.

I don't do very much in December. I fantasize about web 
log entries I will never make, in which I would 
fantasize about things I would never do, were I to make 
them. A whole new layer of inefficiency opens up to me. 
I shave my head down to the skin, as though doing so 
would prepare me for my own death. I give up writing 
music. The willful cessation of self-defining activity 
as a way to experience one's own death and the 
hereafter. And the hereafter stretches on.