The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater will become that treasure which neither moths nor maggots can consume -- your capital.

It takes such an effort of self-hypnosis to write. Not hypnosis of the sort "I am a good writer." It's something else. And now, the additional difficulty of having to prize away the grip of this blog-person, witty and wry reader of news and popular culture. She is my enemy. She makes it impossible for me to write. She has it so easy: who cannot make detournements of New York Times headlines? (the New York Times? That's shooting fish in a barrel.) Who cannot allude to a few films and books and thereby confect an intellectual persona? She is my day job, my alibi. She writes her careless blog, carelessly because it is not the real work, while I labor at my fiction with the few meager resources that have not been squandered by her bon mots and her better mots. An expense of spirit in a waste of shame. And so each of us ruins the other, each of us is the alibi for and ruin of the other.

There are other enemies. My neighbors. When will life in this apartment become unbearable again, as it did yesterday and the day before. When am I going to be miserable? I know it is soon and yet I do not know when. I know it is soon and yet I also hope that it will never arrive, that too is torment, the possibility that it is over already, it is over and I do not know it yet but soon I will know that this anticipation has been for naught, it is all over already, the child next door is dead or paralyzed or has been kidnapped, what do I care which of these happy accidents has befallen her. My torturer.

The one writes posts is not my enemy. She is something worse: she is outsourced labor.

Look at her now, all I had to do was utter the word "torturer" and already she's just bubbling over with commentary and citations: a Cahiers du Cinema interview from the seventies, in which Foucault asks "why does all pornography nowadays take place under the sign of the Nazi, when the Nazis themselves were such Victorian spinsters?", which interview she will cleverly, she thinks, use to launch a description of today's tawdry and stupid torturers, "one wants there to have been a sinister master," she will write, "someone diabolical, clever, malignant yet darkly meaningful," she will write, boots worth licking, she will write in some fucked-up sexual allusion designed to make you wonder what she gets up to when she isn't at the computer. Nothing, that's what, nothing at all, I am here to tell you, she is false from first to last.

There really is another person in this city with my same first and last name and middle initial. I am not being cute or Borgesian now. I met her once, back when you used to have to do add/drop in person at the University of Washington. I still run into her phantasmally, whenever I have the utilities turned on or off. She probably has the worse end of this deal, given my credit rating.

There is still another who does what I do. All kidding aside. I'd be more precise, but one or both of us has signed a non-disclosure agreement.