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It had been more than four months since Dave had written anything new. Not that it really mattered; his work was almost never published anyway.

It wasn’t for a lack of effort – practically every notebook and legal pad he owned was stained by ideas; ideas which he had tirelessly wrestled with, ideas that he had repeatedly scribbled and circled over, highlighted and underlined: bubbled, graphed, webbed, and yes – even blocked. And yet Dave had proven utterly incapable of developing any of them. Eventually Charlie came to refer to these scribblings of Dave’s as his “mental miscarriages” or “verbal abortions.” But for the first time in weeks Dave had found a project that consumed him. After having made a pilgrimage to the refrigerator in search of divine inspiration – finding instead only a bottle of ketchup and an onion – he returned to his laptop to continue working on the fifth, and what he hoped would now prove to be the final draft, of his very own suicide note.

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