Above the entrance to the communal laundry facility there is a flickering flourescent bulb in a small, clear plastic case. I can see it from the big window by my front door. Last night as I read I kept getting up to adjust the blinds, trying to block out its pestering flourine fluctuations. But tonight, smoking beneath its intermittent, hesitant light, I felt a sympathy for this poor machine, ill-equipped to handle the ubiquitous wet cold of the past month. My own spirit is flickering, faltering, failing. Over the past few weeks I have become depressed; slowly at first, then undeniably. I am smoking more, eating more, drinking more, sleeping more. I haven't done too much productive. I struggle just to wash a few dishes in the sink, and feel a dispproportionate sense of accomplishment at the end of even that small task. I'm feeling my own weight, which is increasing. I don't like dragging my body around everywhere, so I keep it inside, mostly, where at least it can stay warm and reclined. I'm finally tuning into the emptiness of this place, the same emptiness that I fled from in Chicago and St. Louis. St. Louis had an open, rarefied, electric emptiness, full of teenage verve and apocalyptic potential, so vacuous that you could imagine anything jumping out of it. Chicago was a different emptiness: thicker, darker, more oppressive, the levity of loneliness replaced by the indominatable weight of the irresistable, inescapable presence of manking and all his diseases, machine and all its encumbrances; a frustrating, maddening press of perpetual, nauseous motion, the kind of nausea you get when you haven't eaten but you feel almost livid, hyped up on caffeine and cigarettes. And then there is the Springfield emptiness that I am just getting to know, a young emptiness just learning how to exploit and destroy, still retaining the more beautiful and attractive vestiges of nature from which it rises, off which it preys--the still breathing victim of an as-yet not all-encompasing naked evil. Yes, I fled here in the hopes that the emptiness was not yet that strong, that nature still had her clothes on and was pulling out a can of mace, but it seems she's been pinned down for a long time, tortured and abused, and all that's left to see are her broken lips, bloody face, and bruised skin stretched out on the executioner's table. Emptiness, hello.