Excerpts from the Correspondence of Matt Reed 2001-2002

Annie: "The greatest joke of all is that we are here and fools... The joke part is that we forget."

O lost and waste of life, o ruthless and barren world, that such is the state of human creatures as we drag ourselves through our desperate business among the thin towns and desolate plains! O worthless existence for which every man and woman is a stranger, where even our dearest friends are unknown to us, lost in the retched world in which nothing is held dear. When beer is not cherished, what is there left for us to cling?

I haven't had a job literally since the last millennium. I have only six dollars and some change. And although being alone for me usually doesn't translate into loneliness, I often feel like I have no where to turn. Aside from the fact that I am poor, I feel no need for independence, but I do need newness. To tell you the truth, I am about 2 months away from giving up, selling everything I own, and moving to Argentina.

"Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap." Well, another week has slipped by. For that matter, six months have slipped away. It has almost been six months since I started working, and I feel like I've accomplished nothing, and perhaps lost ground.

Dante placed Ulysses in the eighth circle of hell because his quest for knowledge had no limits. I would say that about half my problems are caused by thinking too much.

The difference between fact and Truth. (I just remembered that splendid sentence: "Hello," I lied). Yes, and I understand exactly what you mean what you mean when you say "what abstraction is better than facts." I have felt the same thing. But the problem is the number of facts that exist. When you say this is a fact and therefore a truth, you are being untruthful because you are pointing about one fact among an infinite number of facts and saying it alone is relevant.

Nothing is changed with me. Probably everything I wrote to you last, or said to you last, as the case may be, is still true.

It is difficult to write a sentence these days without sounding trite. "Count it a blessing that you're such a failure your second change might never have come." Hmm.

An easy victory is never a great victory.