Drafts 1-8

They told me 'put your heart and soul into your writing,' so I did. But it bored me to tears; my grand statements about how I saw the beauty of the universe in the reflection of the spoon that I was using to eat cornflakes, or just how much inner torment I was experiencing, were so, so pointless. Everyone has pondered the mysteries of life at three AM over cereal. Everyone has experienced crushing despair for some banal reason or another. Your heart and your soul are the same as everyone else's. Fuck your heart and soul. Language is more interesting than that.

Dango Margraves at the End of the World.

The often misinterpreted, misunderstand and generally maligned Dango Margraves is a fictional character. I made him up. His endeavours and exploits are entirely unrelated to real life events. Having said that, he stands at the end of the world, lighting another cigarette.

'Hey,' says a nervous man who looks like some kind of janitor or caretaker, 'you can't smoke here.'

Dango raises an eyebrow. He makes as if to extinguish the smoke, but pushes the man off the edge of the end of the world instead. He falls for so long that his flesh decays and his bones rot away into a fine dust. The end of the world is infinite in terms of both time and space; it is always happening and it is happening everywhere, and if they have banned smoking at an event which is omnipresent then they have banned smoking in totality and this is something that Dango will not stand for. Cigarettes are his central conceit. Without them he is literally nothing.