On Saturday, April 30, 2005
he dreamt that, in the year 2020, his wife gave birth to a healthy boy, whom they named Holden. Holden grew up to be the youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in history, for a book written at the age of 23 that condemned Pete as a father and described a nightmare childhood.

On Friday, April 29, 2005
he read the following passage in War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges, "We are tempted to reduce life to a simple search for happiness. Happiness, however, withers if there is no meaning. The other temptation is to disavow the search for happiness in order to be faithful to that which provides meaning. But to live only for meaning - indifferent to all happiness - makes us fanatic, self-righteous, and cold. It leaves us cut off from our own humanity and the humanity of others. We must hope for grace, for our lives to be sustained by moments of meaning and happiness, both equally worth of human communion."

On Thursday, April 28, 2005
romance dumped poverty, after discovering that poverty had been courting misery behind its back.

On Wednesday, April 27, 2005
he became the past. The past went to live at the bottom of a lake in northern Wisconsin, whose edges cast a jagged skirt of reflected pine trees shimmering at the sky. The lake was in the shape of a tear drop, drained at one end by a small stream, and desolate save two vacant summer cottages, their wooden docks standing sentry across from each other. The past lived at the bottom of this lake, in the mud with algae and sunken logs and rocks, company of perch of and musky. Its only physical feature was a clear, watery hand, reaching up, always enclosing.

On Tuesday, April 26, 2005
he spent the morning in a doctor's office, being tested for Lyme's disease.

On Sunday, April 24, 2005
okay so maybe she hit him over the head with an umbrella, twice, but he got an Ohio hoodie out of it, so he came out ahead on the deal.

On Saturday, April 23, 2005
he heard a great story. Finding North, an Athens rock trio, once offered to "rock" a hotel in exchange for a free room.

On Thursday, April 21, 2005
he read the following passage in a short story by John L'Heureux . . . "He is irreverent, sometimes, in the way he thinks; it is the psyche's accommodation to absurdity, or perhaps pain, or bitterness. Anyway, he will be back in Boston in no time, and then he will go to his room and have a good belt of Scoth, and then a couple of hours in bed to recover for the Easter Vigil."

and . . .

"Fire and water. Burning and drowning. Light in the darkness. The water that gives rebirth. It is a symbolism so ancient, so basic, that is must guarantee a reality, he thinks."

On Wednesday, April 20, 2005
he went to bed at 2:50. He was still awake at 6:10, the sky light, birds chirping.

On Sunday, April 17, 2005
a fit of spontaneity struck as he drove home from several hours of Halo 2 at Joe's over in Dudley. Coming through Boston at 1:16 AM, he pulled the car off 93, took a wrong turn, corrected and drove into Charleston. He drove around the Bunker Hill square, its giant obelisk lit against the night sky. He drove aimlessly through narrow twisting streets, up and down hills, the cobblestones, the antique street lamps, thinking, I want to live there, I want to live there, I want to live there, as he crawled at 15 mph past dark windowed brownstones and other old style buildings he can't name.

Charleston is a neighborhood in Boston that looks like what he can only imagine is a comparatively clean and sanitary version of Victorian London. "Who are you people?" he asked the unseen inhabitants, "and how does it feel to come home to this place? Oh you ungrateful bastards, you undeserving interlopers! You should be evicted and replaced by me and a cadre of my hand-picked friends. I don't care if you've lived here your entire lives, you have not invited me into your homes, you have not alleviated my loneliness, and so I deem you unworthy. You will be transplanted by me and my own. Out from Wisconsin boys, you're coming out to Boston, all of you, and we will live in the recently vacated apartments and houses of Charleston, all my friends, my beloved, pick up and move, for this is your reborn life waiting on the coast, our resurrected community. We will live with unprecedented dignity and valor, walking the cobblestone streets, greeting each other as neighbors, showing our new homes proudly, these intrepid, vigorous men and women from Wisconsin, seducing the young attractive segment of nearby Boston's population, making coffee in the morning with open windows, reading novels and doing push-ups in the afternoon, exhultant in our victory over the forces of exclusion and insularity. Just as soon as we kick out the assholes."

On Saturday, April 16, 2005
he thought about dodging the cars, but lost his nerve at the last second and stepped out of traffic.

On Friday, April 15, 2005
after changing into his suit, he left his t-shirt on the floor of the men's room for the entirety of the show. He found it afterwards. No one had peed on it.

On Thursday, April 14, 2005
he dreamt the Kissers played a show in Merrill. They set up in the corner of a classroom in Pete's former high school. Then Ken wanted ice cream, so they drove to a (fictional) Ben and Jerry's in the sixth ward where Ken checked the tired pressure on the van before ordering a cup of Cherry Garcia. At the show, they played one set before drinking themselves into a stupor during an inordinately long break. It was 2:00 in the morning by the time they returned onstage, and all had left except for five or six young adults, one of whom slouched, asleep in her chair.

On Wednesday, April 13, 2005
he rode the Staten Island ferry past the Statue of Liberty, watched its silhouette in the sunset, and wondered how many millions of immigrants allowed themselves to be overwhelmed by the symbolism of it all, the supposed end to their misery and privation embodied in the statue, and how many had their dreams dashed soon after disembarking.

On Tuesday, April 12, 2005
he spent an afternoon playing Chopin and Bach preludes on a well tuned upright, in a warehouse loft in Brooklyn.

On Monday, April 11, 2005
he seethed with incredulity, that the Rollingstone Immortals Artist issue failed to include either R.E.M. or Tom Petty. Those depraved corporate whores!

On Sunday, April 10, 2005
he visited the Boston Public library, the oldest library in the country. He walked through Boston Commons watching good looking young couples in expensive clothes kiss and feed each other ice cream. Economically, romantically, his was a primary sense of exclusion. He sat in the shade and fed most of his granola bar to a gray squirrel.

On Saturday, April 09, 2005
he lay on the couch in the house on Winter Street, listening to music, past midnight, imagining himself being tackled to the gritty brick sidewalks of Harvard Square by old friends who came all the way to Boston to ascertain that, goddamnit, with his face pressed to the pavement, he was not forgotten.

On Friday, April 08, 2005
while reading the Hunter S.Thompson commemorative issue of Rolling Stone, he made a point to memorize such scathing epithets as "you decadent pig . . . you worthless scumsucking bastard . . . you thieving pile of albino warts!"

On Wednesday, April 06, 2005
he ran past a cemetary in Massachusetts. A giant checkbook rose from an open grave and clobbered him on the head.

On Monday, April 04, 2005
he read a quote by Irish patriot Terence MacSwiney, "It is not those who can inflict the most but those who can suffer the most, who will conquer."

On Friday, April 01, 2005
he met a drunk man who told Pete, "I no longer love my wife. You should have seen her back then, she was gorgeous. Now she's a fucking cow. She's the size of a barn. I get sick just looking at her." Pete politely extricated himself from the conversation.