I am constantly wracked with suffering, hunched over with a cloud of dust and grime following behind me like a 14th century halo of flies, my red skin puckering and peeling, my bloodshot eyes staring out at the wasteland before me and the waste I leave behind. My worth is debatable. Every paycheck I recieve fills me with a vast and inexpressible guilt. I truly believe that my place is in the gutter. As my continual degeneration proceeds, the few virtues that I had managed to preserve flake away like so much black, salty dandruff. I lazily squeeze the rolls of fat accumulating on my stomach, the legacy of 700 bowls of Fruity Pebbles and soy milk branding me forever as an inmate of sadland. Slowly rising from my bed, encrusted in fear-sweat, reeking of broken dreams, I hunch my way to the shower to rinse off the patina of failure. In the shower, I gaze down at my lumpy, deformity-riddled carcass and I frantically scrub myself with a washrag, trying to make myself at least presentable to the outside world. After a while, I get tired and stop. I put in my contact lenses, my one concession to cheap and unattainable vanity, and fit myself into some unstylish, worn-out clothes. Maybe I'll put something in my hair to tame the explosion of dandruffy tendrils; maybe I won't. I brush my teeth, for all the good it seems to do. I shave. And I go to work. I'm always so embarrassed for myself while I'm at work. I'm the low man on the office totem pole, in a business filled with geniuses, explorers and pioneers, I'm a fat receptionist with a stupid name. People come to me for soy nuts and reassuring platitudes and not much else. Nobody here actually thinks I know how to do my job; I'm such a poor excuse even for a lowly receptionist that it's a wonder I'm not out on the street selling pencils by now. But who would buy a pencil from me? Who would willingly take a pencil from these gnawed, leprous hands? And so passes my workday, mind lost in an unenviable miasma of castigation, popping out of my murk on occasion to answer the phone or refill the copy machine toner. And then it's over and I've managed to pull another day's worth of paycheck scam and another million year's penance in lazy man's hell after I die. Then I go home. Sometimes I eat. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I pretend like I'm going to draw some comics or write some songs but it never happens. I crawl into my bed and pull the blankets over my head and suffocate in myself. Eventually my eyes close. Maybe they'll open.