We've been displaced! Swallowed by the sprawl!
 I feel dragged all the way out lately.  Not even writing is helping.  I stay up late and read articles about how the world is throwing up the old abort, retry, fail routine.  I obsess about achievement points on my Xbox for no reason.  I dream about a character in a movie who thinks he's the subject and then is slowly pushed out and out until he's just background dressing.  In his last scene Dustin Hoffman says "You look familiar," and he responds, "I was in a movie once."  Hoffman asks if it was any good and he says, "We'll see."  Telling this dream is not some artistic statement (tellings of dreams rarely are).  It's more about encapsulating that feeling I get when I walk by the treeless yards in my neighborhood.  For sale signs and big wooden cheerleaders and football helmets stand in for vegetation on crabby yellowing squares of grass.  A guy in an F-350 CMX P Diddy edition keeps parking in the handicap space next to my building like a cancerous cell.  I think his wife is pregnant.  It's no wonder people say we're the world-enders.

As for me, I'm gonna go watch MTV.