It’s time for me to cram my ears with wax and get the hell out of here.

Dear Trevor,

Dear Trevor,

I’m sitting here at The Laughing Gull again, trying to get up my courage to go into the woods.

No, courage is not the right word. I’m trying to break through my walls of inactivity. Gordon would call my state The Modern Malaise. “We’re too separated from necessity,” he would say. “We don’t need anything. We don’t go hungry enough. We don’t fight for survival enough. No one’s trying to burn our village or kill our family. We’ve got nothing worth fighting for, worth working for.” I’ve been wallowing in this meaningless existence for so long that I don’t how to step out of it. I’m going to, though.

Do you have these kinds of days? I remember as a kid getting together with a friend and asking the inevitable question: “So what do you wanna do?” And he’d say, “I dunno. What do YOU wanna do?” We’d swap that question back and forth half a day without doing anything. Every option, no matter how stupid, would have been better than sitting there doing nothing. Drawing hand turkeys. Making toast. Trying to break the record for standing on one foot. Sometimes it doesn’t matter so much what you do, but just that you do, right?

Speaking of broken records, I’m starting to sound like one. Or how would I say that in a way that makes sense to you? I’m starting to sound like a parrot. Or a repeating sound bite.

I pretended that the reason I came down here to the Laughing Gull was to ask Sung-Hee precisely which direction Martin and Julia headed when they went into the woods. She told me that in the first 60 seconds. Right past Martin’s cabin and straight through into the shadows. Since then, I’ve been here for what would probably equal many hours in your world, trying to figure out how to get off of my ass, onto my feet and into the trees.

Instead I’ve been sitting here painting a portrait of Sung-Hee with her own awful coffee. If the picture is imperfect, it serves her right. I’ll include the picture with my letter to you. Hopefully it will be a going away present, as I go away into the woods.

Sometimes—today is one of those times—Sung-Hee sings while she cooks. She has a love of awful, old, pop songs and she sings them in her rickety voice with a Chinese accent. “IF-a you want my baw-dee AND-a you think I’m sex-eee, COME on sugar, let-a me knowwww…” She’s like a siren. I don’t mean a police siren, although that’s about how bad she sounds. She’s like an ugly mermaid, wooing me into her crummy restaurant with her warbly voice.

It’s time for me to cram my ears with wax and get the hell out of here.

Hopefully, you won’t hear from me soon.

Dad