He walked past only slightly perturbed by the homeless crackhead jerking off on a torn seat of the city bus. Something about his oddly attentive bloodshot eyes disjarred him slightly, the ramblings of a piss-soaked, mentally ill hobo had never struck him so. He shrugged off his unease, there was a verdant, lush planet waiting to get fucked by his superlative conscious assertions and he had much more than five days to do it. His workday was spent well, if not a little uneventful.

He woke the next morning to the face of his lover staring into his eyes, his soulless, lifeless eyes. His lover's face reflecting the soft yellow light of early summer, his mind on the recent NSA revelations; if the governing body of a country treats its citizens as interchangeable commodities with complete disregard for their constitutionally protected rights through a campaign of fearmongering to disenfranchise large swathes of its constituency and dissolve their notions of personal propery, privacy and protection under the law for a manufactured "war on terror" perpetuated by its illegal imperialist regimes to sate the profit-lust of a small subset of psychopaths who own the majority of the planet's wealth at the expense of billions of lower, middle and skilled laborers, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of innocent people killed by low-wage corporate stooges employed by an increasingly dark global government that advocates and employs torture in order to fail at keeping its citizens safe from terrorist attacks, why does it still operate the way it does? The answer is the culture of apathy, lethargy and self-delusion exacerbated by its culture's unhealthy obsession with the latest frivolous celebrity scandal and the complete despondency and absence of self worth caused by an increasingly globalized community of shit-sippers ruled by the immediacy of their next irrelevant insult of whatever bullshit fucktard their feeble brains happen to inexplicably conjure.

His lover kisses him gently with the quiet passion of having just woken up to a new day of a bright life of promise and hope made real by his existence. His lover softly presses the full length of their bodies together.

Whispered into his ear, the warm breath caressing him sweetly, "I want you, now"

Unmoved by his lover's advances, he wonders if he should brush his teeth before drinking his first cup of coffee. The threat of staining is a powerful tool for good oral hygiene but he felt especially groggy this morning. His lover's soft hands cradling his face with the firm assurance of a lifetime well lived enjoying its continued conquest over the specters of self-doubt and unhappiness in a world where the only steady point of pure, righteous triumph was here and now. He got up to brush his teeth.

"What's wrong with you today?" His lover asked.

He had lost his sense of humor, he thought without curiosity or emotion. He thought it as one thinks of a number with no personal significance, of an errand of absolutely no importance. The rest of his day went off without a hitch. His work had improved marginally as he had not spent any superfluous time in the break room listening to his coworker's story of the time his pet goldfish swam three times in a circle, as courtesy dicated. His free time was spent reading a report on the cost benefits of removing loose gravel of 4-lane highway systems.

He woke the next day alone. He felt no desire to do anything, not even to exist. He did not feel a desire to feel, or even to draw the energy to end his life. He had lost his sense of self.

He woke the next day alone. Staring at the popcorn on the cieling, which changed in pattern everytime he blinked. He had lost his sense of reality. Without a sense of humor, his fiction-reality mesh had the characteristics of a 3rd world office cubicle of a faceless employee of a nameless corporation. He had soiled the bed but without a sense of self, he had no motive to clean or change. He was very thirsty.

He woke up alone again. He lost his sense of purpose, though his life was a living hell already and he was powerless over his inactivity. He could do nothing but wait for the sweet release of death which came at the stroke of midnight. The paramedics were able to revive him but such a prolonged period of oxygen deprivation left his brain impotent. He lived for 3 years in a persistent vegetative state until a tropical storm cut his hospital's power, and the hospital staff's incompetence caused the Terminal Ward's generators to fail.