He told me about a guy named Gary. A guy whose life is a maze comprised entirely of dead end hallways. New directions turn out only to be new failures. The mark on his face reads disappointment, and he wears it like a medicine man wearing a ceremonial mask. You can't miss it. The frustration of mounting experience awarded only with daydream stares at a pool hall in the back of a bar. The pretty woman is not looking at him. She is focused entirely on the movie in her mind. He gets hung on the reel and thinks she is trying to pull him in, but then the film breaks along with her stare and she turns to kiss the young muscular kid standing beside her. These encounters become expected when you're only the projection screen for everyone else's daydreams. And so the game continues. He is in control of the balls on the table. Triple bank shots. Amazing skill that makes him a king for a few hours every night. He puts the eight ball as well as the night's gambling profits into the pocket and returns home. He sits on his old leather couch, grabs a handful of popsicle sticks and draws little blueprints in his mind. Construction will soon commence. But he can't find the glue. Where did he put that damn glue? As he searches he trips over last week's project - a gazebo with a crush velvet platform that neatly transforms into a jewelry box when you remove the top - and crushes it beneath his concrete work boots. Platforms doubling as wrecking balls - the story of his life. The alcohol begins to distort his perception. It's times like this when he feels sane again. He throws pitchers of beer onto the dead end walls, and it eats them like acid while he sleeps off the night before. The illusion of progress is a highly addictive drug. It's like hopping on a train, knowing it's going somewhere new. Somewhere you can start over. Somewhere you can scrape off your old face paint and vow once again to avoid becoming the clown. But the train derails every time. The starting line becomes your home. There is no map. No legend. No out. The exit is in someone else's backyard, guarded by a giant toothy bulldog.

You are Gary. You are loneliness.