've lived for twenty-six years. Not that I really have anything to show for it, but the very act of remaining alive for over a quarter of a century should count for something, right?

I was a good child, by most standards. Maybe I daydreamed too much; maybe I spent time drawing dragons and spaceships and Batman that would have been better spent studying. Still, I never got arrested or even suspended, which is better than most, I guess.

Being a teenager would probably count as the deepest pit in Hell for anyone, except you get to leave after a few years, so it's more like Purgatory. I had my circle of friends, and if I was never the lead wolf in the pack, well, I never depended on anyone else to do my killing for me, either.

I went to a college that I didn't like and flunked out. I went to another and graduated and moved away from Small Town, U.S.A. because I thought I was too big to fit there.

I've never smoked, I drink sparingly, and I've never taken any drug stronger than Tylenol. I lost my virginity at sixteen, which is a nice, normal age for that, and it was after the Junior Prom, which is so normal it's incredible. I was young and stupid and horny and I didn't even like her that much, but I knew she would lay back for me and a decade ago that's all that mattered.

I never liked my father, though there's nothing Oedipal in that and if there was, well, Freud says that's okay, too. He thought I was a sissy and a wimp and tried to beat it out of me for about fifteen years. When I graduated high school and left home he moved on to my sister. Now my sister's graduated and moved out and the next one down the line's my little brother, but he's the baby of the family and can still get away with murder.

My mother said we were lucky to have a father at al, but he was more like a dictator. The Generale used to threaten to send us to military school. That's a joke. He needed us around to do his work for him.

I talk to him every month or so. He wants to know why I'm not married yet and why don't you come up and see us, your momma worries about you …

This, like everything else, is typically American.

I live in Tallahassee now and wonder why anyone bothers to draw state lines. People are the same from Kentucky down to the 'glades. I didn't get away from anything; I just found new faces for the same old roles.

Did you know that the guy who played Virgil Tibbs on In the Heat of the Night is dead? I used to love that show. They killed a person a week for years and that little town never got any smaller. I loved The Andy Griffith Show, too. I always hated Matlock.

I don't love or hate much of anything anymore, except maybe myself, and we all do enough of both to ourselves.

Sometimes I go walking on the FSU campus and realize how old I am. People call me "sir" too much. The kid who delivers my ritualistic Friday night pizza calls me "Mr. Daniels" even when I threaten to kick his ass for it. He just laughs, because he's sixteen, and when you're sixteen you can laugh and sing and screw anyone you want and it's all just one big Technicolor blur. When I was getting my first car, he was learning to ride a bike. I told him that once, and he laughed some more.

I always tip him big, because I used to laugh like that, and I wish I'd recorded it. Maybe I should make a tape of him laughing, so they can play it at my funeral. Ding, dong, the witch is dead.

Never mind. He'd probably just think I was a pervert.

My car isn't particularly flashy, but it still impresses college girls with its newness. I make enough money now that it's not all that hard to pick them up. Maybe the five or six years I have on most of them have granted me enough confidence.

The last one I dated was a cheerleader. I don't remember for which sport. We stayed together for three months, mostly because she liked the idea that she was sleeping with a state senator's aide. I think she just wanted to sell her story to Hard Copy.

When I explained to her that what we were doing was neither illegal nor journalistically very interesting, she accused me of treating her like a cheap sex toy. I asked her what else she was good for.

She slapped me and stormed out, and I haven't had to put up with her since. By the way, the senator's aide thing wasn't quite true. I'm an aide to an aide to a state representative from one of the smallest districts in Florida. I've never even met what's-his-name.

I don't have many friends here, but I seem to attract people no one else wants. One guy who works down the hall from me thinks we're the best buddies in the world. He calls me "Sammy" when he knows I hate it. Being named Samuel Daniels is bad enough.

He almost exploded when I told him that Heather and I were broken up. To him, cheerleaders are unreachable goddesses. I used to see them that way, too, when I was fifteen. I went out with a cheerleader twice when I was in high school. At the time, I thought of myself as a poet, and I think she liked the idea of dating someone who would write about how great she was. On the first date she asked me to write something for her. On the second date she got pissed off because what I wrote was short and it didn't rhyme. She told me real poems were supposed to rhyme, didn't I know that?

I told her that real cheerleaders were supposed to put out on the first date, but I wouldn't do her stretched-out lumber-rolled self on a dare.

When I explained to my "buddy" that a woman's a woman, no matter is she waves pom-poms and flashes her panties or not, he just shook his head and looked at me like I'd never understand, which is exactly what I thought of him.

Women. Don't get me wrong; I like 'em. I've even loved one or two, or come so close that it makes no difference. But … women.

I won't even try. I don't even want to think about it.

I realize, of course, that this is a perfectly normal reaction. Nearly everything in my life was and is excruciatingly ordinary, and I think someone once said that it's better to have a horribly bad poem, that may at least make you laugh in derision, than an utterly average one.

At least people remember the ones that suck. It's the boring people who have all the regrets. You know what you have when there are no hills or valleys? A flat horizon. A flat line, and you know what happens when you flatline. Everybody's heard of Mother Teresa and Hitler, but there are about five billion lives between those extremes right now.

God, the regrets. I regret, like everyone else, not telling people I loved them without worrying about how they'd react. I regret being a good child because it hasn't seemed to help me much and wasn't much fun at the time.

I regret wasting my time with girls pretending to be women, and I regret not telling my father where to get off sooner, and I regret leaving the womb for North Carolina and North Carolina for this faceless city.

You know what I miss about living that far north? The legs. Up there, we had actual cold during the winter, but around March or April the girls would start parading around in their short shorts again.

Down here, you see it all year, though. When you eat steak everyday, who cares about another T-bone. When you only eat bread, though, a cold weenie's a treat.

So now I'm a sexist, which is also normal, but at least I admit it, which really isn't.

Kurt Cobain was only a year older than me when he gave himself that homestyle lobotomy. He said he couldn't live up to al the expectations.

Well, you know what? I've lived up to just about every expectation anyone's ever had of me. Every damned one. And that's my biggest regret. My whole life's been a straight line. A flat line.

This'll probably make the papers, seeing as how I work in the state house and all. Maybe it'll be a slow news day and TV'll pick it up and Heather'll get to be on Hard Copy after all. She deserves it.

I wonder if Courtney Love was a cheerleader. It would explain a lot. Oh, yeah, here's a joke my "buddy" down the hall told me: How do you tell which one's the head cheerleader? She's the one with the dirty knees.

Actually, that explains a lot, too.

The girl from high school is married and has a kid now. I hope her husband writes poems for her, and I hope they don't rhyme.

Sorry, Kurt. I don't own a shotgun, and if I did I wouldn't use it. You've made it passe. Remember, it's down the wrist, not across.

I went through nearly eighteen years of school and never read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". I read it tonight. It's about an ordinary old man regretting the things he's never done.

It's by T.S. Eliot. I just wish I had time to read "The Waste Land". Mom, I'm sorry. I hope I don't go to Hell, but I don't see any good way around it.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas. I'm sorry, Mom.

"Oh do not ask, 'What is it?'