My social relations have flat lined, lost all their peaks and valleys. Rather than experiencing things with friends, struggle, danger, or even making the long journey through the night on a raft of booze, I have compartmentalized every cooperative human experience—friends belong during the day, with a drink, with a cup of coffee, shared human experience an excuse to ‘check-in’, “You good? Yeah I’m good” and thus stagnated—we share nothing, experience nothing, and essentially just share our small victories and our nagging problems with each other over and over in different ways, a Groundhog day of doing-things-with-other-people rather than the magic, binding adventure that it could be. I feel sorry for the lonely masses, but at least they dwell up on a spire of Cold Mountain rather than this kind of social Midwest, dull and flat and bland in all directions, and all my fault. I took no risks, I got no rewards. And the process itself was unpleasant.