Jungle Diary: Joyride

February 2026

I’m enraged and I hate him.

I’m trembling with incipient, violent rage, but instead of picking up the broken hair brush that sits there, tempting me to turn to savagery, I spin on my heel, grab the keys, and exit stage left. I leave my coat behind.

It’s unseasonably warm out, for February—almost tropical. The truck starts (great—hard to drive away when the truck won’t start), and I feel sick with madness and defiance and the terrible emptiness of freedom. I pull out slowly and carefully—no need to alert the neighbours of my defection.

I hate him. I hate him and I head south. Only the gangsters and I are out now, in the dark, right before midnight in a perfect world. I hate him I hate him I hate him. He said some words and they were the wrong words according to me the imperator and arbiter of words around here and now I hate him and I’m driving very carefully south, now and forever.

I hate him for saying exactly the right words that prove what I’ve known to be true all along—the hopelessness and futility of it all, his delusions, my delusions, the copes and codependencies, the dumbness, the stupidity, the years of trying, the cyclical scripts and stories. He said precisely the words that evidence the hatefulness I’m due, the hatefulness I love, and this time I hate him beyond time and space and in and out and form and nothingness, into the beyond and the before and the eternal now.

The only solution to this is vodka and cigarettes and frightful oblivion, naturally—obviously—so I drive south on Troost, on a mission for venom to keep my hate alive, hating him so much, coasting past the darkened buildings and the huddled junkies and the lone homie in the Chevy caprice quivering with bass, that peels away as I pass by, late for a deal or a dalliance. Dale Pues, bruh, go get it. I hate him.