The cat is stretched out on the dark carpet napping, a golden-white brilliance illuminated by the setting sun. Behind me the dishwasher jets churn round-and-round, a soft tinkling of plates and glasses sitting just above the drone. The grass is freshly cut, a couple of hours spent walking the lawn last night and the trash was picked up today. My son's toys are put away, he's in bed upstairs near my wife writing freelance test questions. When I was young, I didn't understand what Henry Dave Thoreau meant. Now I do: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

I spent the hottest summer of my life in Philadelphia living in a second-story walk-up flat without air conditioning. It was a record-breaking heatwave, one with a high mortality rate for the city's old folks, in the high crime neighborhoods especially, where they would be afraid to open their windows. It was so hot that I had to resign myself to being hot or going crazy. So I drank to help fall asleep. I'd go out into the sweltering nights to buy malt liquor, the heat radiating from the pavement, the sewers reeking and the cockroaches scurrying along the sidewalks.

Barbers weird me out, they give off a creepy guy vibe that I can't get past. That, and I can't seem to trust that they'll give me a good cut. Probably because my dad had a brush cut for years, swearing by barbers. As soon as I could, I quit the barber, opting for a stylist and trendy haircuts. A few months ago I decided I didn't want to pay $25 for a haircut, so I started going to a barber. I've had pretty good luck, until this last one. I told him just a trim, but it's too short.

I'm feeling very unsure of myself, somehow less than everybody else. Work is a pit of fear teeming with dark wraths, dangerous and sinister shades, imaginary insults, non-existent slights. Something is going on with me, I'm not sure if it is my old friend depression or if there is something else going on. Life feels meaningless except for my family, my one life preserver. I've been told so many times that a job doesn't have to have meaning, that it is a means to an end. Yet I feel so empty, that what I do doesn't matter, I'm not valued.

I'm not sure I've really experienced this before, I know I can't explain it, the change, the growth, but something is different. I met my wife and son for lunch today and I realized how much love being with them. I'm a loner, an introvert, loath to trust anyone but myself, isolating myself emotionally to avoid pain. Maybe for the first time I don't want to live without someone, that I want to be around someone. I see them and everything else means nothing, not wanting to do anything but spend as much time with them as I possibly can.

I've been staring at the same script and PowerPoint presentation for roughly 15 hours now. It wouldn't have been so bad, except my trusty car isn't very trusty at the moment and my wife was out to dinner with a friend so I had to come home to hold down the fort and work, which means I've spend the last four hours sending 6MB files over a 56K modem (read: throughput of 40K at best 28.8K at worst). My workload is so odd, it warps, pulses, gets larger then retreats, oozes over, I spend hours attached to my laptop keyboard.

Everyone is going to be out of the office tomorrow, so I'm facing a day to myself. There was a time I would have relished this situation, actively sought this out like when I was in grad school in Philadelphia. I lived alone with no close friends, fewer than five actual people that I socialized with, no real drinking buddies, just me in a three-room apartment. I liked the solitude, but hated the loneliness. That loneliness had abated until recently – I'm finding myself so removed at work, so lonely, so utterly detached, spilling over, finding myself locked inside my head.

I'm feeling extremely anxious. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do everything I need this weekend: birthday dinner and cake, state fair, church, prep for an upcoming job interview. I know my life hasn't changed that much in the last month, but I'm feeling like I'm constantly running behind, like I can't get ahead or get motivated to do anything in particular, even write or think creatively. I get to feeling discombobulated and I shut down and go into slacker mode. I'm being passive, floating along, not paying attention, hiding out from the world, underneath the radar.

Upon reaching his majority that first year in college, he was quite certain that anything was possible, that the world was opening up in front of him to take as he pleased, that he could achieve many great things. He took it as an act of faith, the kind that only youth can understand in its excitement to see and do and conquer. But now, staring squarely into early middle age that he had been wrong, that the world was not his, but that he belonged to it, a twist he wasn't expecting, that he did not want to discover.

A friend invited me to see Aimee Mann tonight. She put on a really good show, really rocked out. It's been a while since I've seen a show. I quit going a lot when I got married and then when I quit drinking I pretty much stopped. Concerts remind me of my drinking past, which scares me. But tonight I became wrapped up in the performance, absorbed into the music. I've only been able to forget all the drinking bullshit and live in the moment at a show one other time since I've been sober, at a Steve Earle show.

I was having a conversation with someone I just met and she asks me if I know a certain person from my old job with a snide comment. I agree that he's a namedropper, the worst kind, the kind that will only associate with you if he can drop your name. But he also has an odd sense of style, favoring preppy-ish clothes straight from a 1983 Izod catalogue. She tells me her sister has a theory on the way people dress – most people dress the same way they did the moment they graduated from college, freezing them in time.

I love going to the state fair, it reminds me a lot about what I wanted to be when I grew up. When my family moved back to Ohio I wanted to be a farmer. I used to help my grandfather do chores – baling hay, feeding livestock, plowing fields. But my parents didn't farm so I eventually moved on to school and football, forgetting about farming. But still like to identify all the farm equipment, the livestock breeds and watching the crops grow in the fields. And once a year I get to pretend I know a little about agriculture.

Going into the sheep barn at the state fair we saw several men where trimming their sheep, readying them for the show ring. The sheep looked uncomfortable, bucking in defiance, their heads and hams restrained by a shearing stand. My son watched in wrapped attention and I remembered a time when I was young when I watched a group of Amish men shear my grandfather's sheep. It seemed like an enormous operation, men crawling around the barn like ants, leading sheep back and forth, the wool accumulating in big mounds with a restrained violence, the air thick with buzzing clippers.

Once when my mom and sister came to visit me in Philly, I took them down to Passyunk and 9th to grab a cheesesteak. After painfully explaining how to order, we sat at a bench eating and watching people. Across the neighborhood playground, a woman walked off with her dog after it took a shit on the sidewalk. Immediately another woman jutted out of a second-story window screaming something about how all you assholes come down here to let your dogs shit all over. I was amused, but my relatives got real nervous, just waiting for the bullets to fly.

It seems like I've been more tired lately than normal, a constant state of confused grogginess that leaves me wondering what exactly I was doing a few minutes ago, if I really had that conversation with someone or did I imagine it while sitting in front of the computer or in the shower or in a dream, the kind of low gray fog that lifts from time to time during the day for lucid conversations that are promptly forgotten as soon as I check my e-mail, wishing that I would go to bed earlier but finding myself staring at midnight.

By two o'clock, the sun had reappeared, baking my neck a brilliant shade of red, and making the humidity unbearable. This whole thing was taking about twice as long as it should and was slowly turning into a cavalcade of nonsense. All we really needed to do was cut all the bullshit and approach this in a straightforward manner, after all, this wasn't brain surgery, it was simple home improvement. But then again, we had been taken hostage by indecision, no one making a plan and communicating it, spending the majority of our time standing around looking at each other.

His heart rate always jumped when he passed that invisible line that separated campus from the surrounding neighborhood, a not so subtle change from clean sidewalks to crack house doorways. His breathing became shallow, his mouth dry. Even in the daylight you would have to be extremely careful to walk the one-half block off campus to the bodega. But it was well after dark and he was out of beer, so this was the closest option to hoping the subway downtown. He'd have to move quickly, not draw any attention, get his payload and return safe across that invisible line.

My son is inquisitive, constantly exploring the world around him, testing things, trying things out, experimenting. He is interested in big moving objects, especially things that make big sounds: trucks, buses, tractors, cars. Any time he hears a plane overhead he stops and looks skyward for it. Tonight in the yard, I showed him the buckeyes growing on our tree, him touching them and pointing them out. I also showed him the cicada chrysalis on the side of our house, which he wanted to touch but I wouldn't let him. I am so thankful that he is curious and learns.

He wondered if he was capable of violent passion, the terrible reckoning of a moment in time filled with love and lust and rage, the blackout of reason replaced with animal instinct. He loathed confrontation to the point of avoidance, but somehow felt the vague anger of someone who had spent his life making others happy. When he looked at her, he knew she was not faithful, yet he couldn't believe it to be true, let alone feel that he didn't somehow deserve to be cheated on by her. He wasn't sure what he was feeling, so he drank alone.

Noise. The fuzzy bleed over of media, seeping information, saturating the collective unconsciousness. It's the low buzz just below the surface, a kind of spiritual electromagnetic interference that is slowly damaging my psyche, re-routing positive thinking patterns into negative channels. I can't think inside the continuous stream of binary code, and the analog signals on frequency modulation, amplitude modulation, ultra-high frequency, very-high frequency. My soul is picking up all the RF noise, even when nothing is switched on I can hear the broadcasts rushing out into space, through me to be picked up by millions of minds programmed to recieve.

Stopping on the one-lane bridge, they rolled down the windows, turning the lights off but keeping the engine running. The clock on the instrument panel illuminated the inside of the car with an eerie green that made the three girls sitting in back nervous and excited at the same time. Then one of the boys in front began to tell the story of an Amish baby falling out of a horse-drawn buggy on this very bridge and drowning the creek and that on the night of a full moon, if you are very quiet, you can hear that baby cry.

Saturday was the night in high school. Me and a bunch of friends would meet at Jac-N-Dos Pizza on the square to stand on the sidewalk with the other high school kids from the county to watch an endless stream of cars cruise the square. When we got bored, we hopped in someone's car to make the two-block loop from the west side of the square around the Elks and by the newspaper. It was harmless fun, watching for girls and horsing around. Hearts were broken, letter jackets worn, beer drank, and pizza eaten. It was the small-town Saturday night.

Today flew by, leaving me feel tired. Couldn't get up and when I did, I took my son for a haircut, but, he wouldn't sit still long enough to get it cut at the barber, so we had to go to a kid's haircut place where he was fine. Swept and mopped the downstairs floor before we went and when we got back, went to the hospital to see my sister-in-law. Ate at Bob Evans, filled the car at the Flying J and took a nap. Woke up very slowly and took a walk, then gave my son a bath.

The school district we live in just opened a new high school, its second, slated to house more than a thousand students. We took a tour today during its open house and we were astounded. It's a huge campus complete with what seems like the amenities of a small college. I couldn't help feel a little jealous because my high school wasn't like that, but more than anything, shocked at the extravagance. Deep down inside, I just can't help thinking that these "things" don't make kids better students, that they can't really understand the complex before they learn the basics.

I sit here with a blank afternoon, nothing to accomplish save the killing of slow moments until I can power down for the day. Time is facinorous in this building, slowing down when I have nothing to do, speeding up when I have too much. There is never balance, only the last minute surprise of which speed it will travel when I arrive in the morning, with slow days outnumbering the fast. I know others have acclimated to the slowness, but I can't, my days must be filled or I invent ways to feel useless because I have no work.

Even in the daytime it made him edgy to walk in this deserted neighborhood, shells of once prosperous houses caressing the sidewalk, the cancerous, musty reek oozing out from broken windows, gaping holes, empty doorways. Maybe it was his imagination, but he could sense a presence from within, watching. Passing by a cleft he saw points of light from a collapsed roof illuminating a carpet of trash. A shadow darted. He was only a block away from his destination, an oasis in this barren wasteland of abandoned buildings and makeshift abodes. If he could watch his back, he'd be safe.

Going back to work in a corporate setting has been my own private joke, a punch line populated with herds of lemmings, lifers and the occasional shark. I didn't take it too seriously, after all I was unemployed at the time and they offered me cash money, so I'd just make it my own sitcom. But, the gags are running thin and I'm stuck in a continual laugh track that can't make this worn out routine remotely funny. It's pointless. It really is. My work means nothing to anyone in the company. I'm frustrated. I don't see any future here.

Tonight is the first night in a long time that I felt killing myself. I'm emotionally overloaded with the blackest feelings of despair, worthlessness, and hurt, churning up a rage in my belly that is sitting on my chest and not letting me breath. I know its unhealthy self-pity, a childish tantrum at not being allowed at the table, to look from the outside, to not have my ass kissed. But I can't shake this insane thinking, that I'd be better off dead, that this isn't self-righteous anger. If I can just make it until bedtime, I should be okay.

This weekend is the highlight of the social season in my hometown – the Kenton National Coon Dog Trials. A competitive hunting event of epic proportions, where outdoorsmen from all over the nation test their coon dogs with feats of hunting dog skill and strength. Of course for the locals its an excuse to drink lots of beer while selling and trading guns, knives, motorcycles and (legend has it) women. It's been going on for years, but it's tamer now – my father likes to recount how it was pretty normal to find dead bodies out there when they emptied the dumpsters.

The job I worked in high school was at McDonalds, manning the grill, frying hamburgers, making the occasional batch of McNuggets. Back on the grill, we weren't responsible for the fries, the cashiers (usually young, female and moderately attractive) would handle fries, the drinks and the drive-thru. Except for during the Coon Dog Trials. One year they taught me (a guy) to use the register and headset and put me pack in the drive-thru hole to handle the rowdies – it seems a couple of years before some good ol' boys tried to pull one of the girls through the window.

Another weekend of suburban excitement, the wife and I finally weeded our major flowerbeds, taking the opportunity to re-mulch. In the past two days we've used about three cubic yards of mulch (why is it that everything related to home-improvement is in cubic yards?). We started with two cubic yards delivered by dump truck, a giant black mass on our driveway. It's been cool, so the mulch steamed when we shoveled it – a slightly disconcerting sight. And it was hot to the touch. I know it picks up heat from the sun, but I couldn't help thinking of cow manure.