When that Monday mornin’ fog rolls back over the downtown rooftops into the gray vault of unified cloud, I sit back at the bus stop, all smiles, and count the rain dogs, real gone, as they ramble through the cement sea of suburbia. Sail through the six o’clock streets. Beats, hungering for sex and salvation. Some young kid about twenty years old sits muttering twisted cruelty, the Jehovah’s Witness standing idly by. He spots me: calculator, notebook, textbook in hand, deep in undisturbed thought. Obviously a sheep in need of a shepherd.  “The world is filled with wisdom, divine mutterings, for math is the language of God, and science is his genius.” I couldn’t agree more, but interpersonal rationality is one thing, a massive institution devoted solely and wholly to one universal interpretation another. He gives me the propaganda packet and I toss it into my backpack, thanking him. I’ve read ‘em all before. No, God isn’t to blame for my suffering. God feels my pain, and it saddens him. God is right there with me, within me, always. “What suffering?” I ask myself. “I’ve created all my pain. I deserve that tragedy which befalls me. I see it coming like a train down a track. I sin. I smile. I usher it on, unto myself. I paint my own blues. I do not need God’s pity, I need my own.” Still I watch them. I watch them all as I think. The rain dogs: the bums, the bandits, the five cent meth whores, the beggars, the transients, the dumpster divers, all drifting through life like driftwood upon the ocean. “I control this.” I say. “I control it all: my thoughts, my actions, my destiny. I decide.” I decide to chuckle. The water’s pouring down now. Ain’t nothin’ any of us can do to change that. The rain dogs mutter, the rain dogs sputter in the gray, the rain dogs grunt, and the world turns round as my consciousness streams off into romanticism and logic until I no longer have a clue. Right as it was all coming together. Right as it was all making sense. But no matter. It'll all start over again tomorrow, when I ride once more with the early mornin’ rain dogs. I can still see their faces silhouetted against my eyelids. Gray. Gone. Grizzled ghosts of mortal life. Spent mortal hours. I shall die, as shall all of us. Does anyone else see it? The great impending black doom of mortality? Our inevitable lack of existence? “Fools!” I scream, my mind filled to the brim with high minded idealism and philosophical nonsense. My peers, full of blissful ignorance, each blind. Myself as well, I know it. Blind to the worlds perceived by others. Sex, relationships, social emotion. I’m just searching for someone who gets me. A girl who can sit down and see all the same things I see. A person with whom I can share my perception. Understanding another’s perception is what we call friendship, acceptance of another’s perception is what we call love. A myriad of words and numbers, reactions and social exchanges, and what does it all culminate in? A waste of ink? A waste of ink, a waste of ink, and a sheet of wordy chaos. Another mortal hour lost. Sip of coffee. Nine thirty on a Friday night. Celestial meanderings. I’m writing the mental flood. When all of my thoughts, useless and misleading, are excreted onto paper, I’ll finally be able to rest. The typewriter flies, steely keys beneath my fingers. Click clack, click clack. Ding, ding, ding. Well, they all told me to keep writing. Goddamn words are cheap, a cheap commodity in a rushed economy. What a useless talent. No one from my generation reads. Irony. But where was I? Ah, yes, writing some words that’ll never be read. Some words that will eventually cease to exist, along with the rest of us scum. Real gone. The rest of rain dogs. Shakespeare burns the night of the nukes. Nothing will last. Even the institution, filled with contrived security, will eventually implode upon itself. A massive societal suicide, for it’s designed by rain dogs, it’s built by rain dogs, and it’s driven and directed by rain dogs. It’s filled with rain dogs, and I’m a rain dog too. Take it, take it all, take it all out into the black...