Can I come back to school now? I am fine, but the Oklahoma City metropolitan area is very stupid. I am not sure that the days are passing at all. I sleep; I drive my brother around; I wait for my mother to leave, leave, leave leave leave! She promised she would move to Yuma to stay with Dad, but she keeps making up excuses. "We can’t afford to rent a car right now," she says. "You never wake up in time to take John to school," she says. "You never wake up in time to pick him up. You think it’s OK to go to job interviews in sweatpants. You keep trying to microwave foil. If I leave you here you will burn down the house and sleep through the fire, and your brother will start taking drugs and hanging out with criminals and have to go to the University of Oklahoma." She has never said it out loud, but I can see it in her eyes, and I can hear it in her voice every time she knocks on the door and asks me when I plan on leaving for the grocery store, which she has asked me roughly sixteen times in the last half-hour. She does not understand that I have important lying around to do. And we don’t even need to go to the store. I mean, we have soup. What’s wrong with her?

Anyway, it is a good thing that all of my thoughts and feelings are so intensely interesting, because I am spending all of my time hanging out with myself. I’ve got a couple of old friends at OU, but as much as I enjoy listening to them have the same argument about the Cure that they have been having for five and a half years, I cannot bring myself to call them up. It is a long drive to that apartment complex, a drive that largely precludes the consumption of liquor, and what is the point in having friends if you cannot drink all of their tequila and throw up in their fish tank? And in their bathtub? And into their outstretched arms? I miss College University.

Mostly I miss my room. We are living in a new house now, and my new bedroom is pink. I didn’t ask my parents to paint it, but I do not see why they had to fill it with stuffed animals and porcelain horse figurines that I have not seen since I was ten years old. "Could you make my room as horrible and infantilizing as possible?" I do not recall asking my parents. "Otherwise I might forget that I quit school to live at home with my mother and no job." As soon as I make some money I am going to go out and buy some cigarettes and some white lipstick and some posters of people with guns. My brother says he knows a kid who pierces ears with a stapler.

In the meantime, I am trying to keep myself busy. Mostly I just read, but I am also building things. In the last week alone I have invented the Lazy Susan for ants, the ant condominium, and the antmobile, which is a Matchbox car with an ant on it. Our backyard has a lot of ants. In other scientific news, I have finally discovered the cure for a disease that was also invented by me, and which you are probably better off not knowing about, since it involves ants, and the word "transmogrification." P.S. I don’t know whether it’s important to you, but the ant condominium is made of: crackers.

I am also working on a novella. It is about a character who decides to take up jogging and then has a heart attack halfway down the street and falls into a drainage ditch. It is based on a real stomach cramp I had while walking up the driveway yesterday, and all of the action takes place within the first three sentences. The next 60 pages consist largely of recipes, phone numbers, and the words to "I Need a Lover That Won’t Drive Me Crazy" by John Cougar Mellencamp, which I have taken the liberty of translating into French, which I do not actually speak. ("Je need un paramour qui appelles pomme d’erd," says Jean-Cougar Mellencampé. "Kommen Sie an, Baby.") All of the recipes are for Lego Soup. What you do is, you take one box of Legos–space Legos, castle Legos, fancy pneumatic-truck Legos, they are all equally delicious–and you dump them into a bowl of water with, I don’t know, a chicken or something. Whatever else is supposed to be in soup. Then you put the bowl in the microwave, if you do not live with your mother, because she can be a real "stuffed shirt" when it comes to kitchen fires, and you wait around until something happens. The phone numbers, meanwhile, are based on actual phone numbers from the Oklahoma City telephone book, and while some of them are only five or six digits long, I am not going to go back and correct them, because that would be boring. You tell the editor of The Paris Review that he or she can go to hell. I have electric razors for ants to invent.

Next issue: how to build your own fort out of cushions from the couch, plus one wall and possibly the side of the couch also. My fort is called "Fort Desperate."