A busy street is crowded with people, with faces, with rank odors, grating voices and incomplete personalities. It is a frantic chaos of colorful sound, a blank canvas painted bright with the bland cheer of repetition.

Busy streets are the same no matter where you go. They are a place to sell individuality and buy indifference, a place to hide things and a place to find them. No one sees the street, and the street does not care. The hectic frenzy of movement and blurs does not care. Nobody stops. Nobody listens. There are things to do, things to sell and buy, things to hide and things to find.

There are too many things.

There are too many sights, too many sounds, too many experiences wrapped in gaudy novelty and distinguished only by their overwhelming quantity. There is emptiness in this sea of humanity, emptiness in these streets filled with busy people. There is no time.

I walk these busy streets, and I walk them alone.

And so there are too many things I cannot do, too many things I cannot say, too many words to use and too little meaning in any of them. I have a graceless incompetence that smells like trees. Some days I would like to put my hands in my pockets and start jingling the dirty change that lies there, because maybe the sound will be enough to drown the rain with cheerful ringing.

But I need my hands to stop the bellowing. Sometimes I realize that bellowing is me.

Now I despise emotions. On a busy street, in a busy world, seeing everything through a bright veil of ignorance and keeping people at an arm's distance makes life go by a lot more efficiently, even when efficiency bends me over its iron-clad knee to have its way with me.

That, unfortunately, will never change.

I am too old to dream.

I don't know if I will ever write again.