The text message hits after ten PM, but I answer it ’cause I’m still awake and ’cause that’s what I do. It says, pub?, and I’m all, hell yes, but instead I text back about putting on clothes, ’cause I’m in bed, in my pajamas, just futzing around on the internet, and the possibility of hitting the pub at this hour seems more attractive than continuing to write emails I don’t feel like writing anymore. The pub isn’t really a pub at this hour of the evening. They’ve shut down the public bar, the outside areas. Reduced the venue down to the gambling lounge full of pokies, open ’til late for the folks who can’t stay away, but we ignore the rows of brightly coloured machines and make our beeline for the bar, ordering pints and taking them outside so you can smoke and I can sit there, watching the empty car-park that’s only really empty when we show up

There’s this window in my office that looks out over the breezeway, and every day I come in and stare at it and wonder how hard it’d be to break the big panes of glass with an office chair tossed from the vicinity of my desk. I know how this sounds, ’cause I mentioned it once at an office meeting, and people have already given me the look even if they’ve come to understand what’s really behind the impulse. I mean, I don’t want to throw a chair ’cause I’m feeling violent or because I particularly want to engage in a little wholesale destruction, or because I go to work and find myself in a state of uncontrolled rage. I just want to do it ’cause the window is there, and I don’t know for sure if I could break it, and I’d like to know, maybe. To do it for science, as it where, and know what breaking the