Brad thought he'd extended an olive branch, or maybe even hit on her. But Marion seemed colder, not warmer to him as he'd expected. She gave him a brief, ball-constricting, dismissive glance, and she turned all the way away from him. He felt his stomach clench as she did, and he hunched his shoulders down into the day's new posture of normalcy: defeat.

About 700 people lined up outside Hammond’s most popular nightclub, The Buzz, one Friday night in late March. It was, as my grandfather used to say, “a Pearl Harbor evening.” (That’s an old racial slur against the Japanese to describe a cold night. It literally means, “There’s a ‘nip’ in the air.” Japanese (nip), airplanes…get it?) That particular Friday night, ’90s rap star Vanilla Ice was topping the bill.

Clearly,Civilization^®wasn't cutting it. Brad closed it and stared at a blank desktop for a bit through his polycarbonate goggles. He imagined his skin, betrayer that it was, being burnt off by high-energy radiation, perhaps a few DNA strands unraveling in the process. Maybe a mutation would creep in.

Being infinitely resourceful, Brad had found the best solution available to him: a sixty- or seventy-year-old UV tanning lamp, which consisted mostly of a badly damaged power cable with numerous bits of exposed metal he figured would electrocute him at some point, a base, a timer dial, and then a metal housing, holding a bulb which consisted, as far as he could tell, of nothing more than a giant gobbet of mercury with a couple of electrodes in a blown-glass bulb. Unlike modern, commercial, mercury-vapor bulbs, this was like a test tube with some mercury in it. When switched on, you stared directly into the ionized mercury itself. From his own research, Brad knew this to be (from a health standpoint) an idea of particularly ill merit.

What happened to you, VH1 and MTV? You used to play music videos so teenagers could sit around and get stoned in their parents’ basements to entertain themselves. Now I’m forced to watch ridiculous reality shows while I sit around and get stoned.

Brad got up, went to his CD player, and popped out the disc inside. Flipping through the clamshell case that held his spare CDs, he found The Cure’s Pornography and put it in. If you are going to be depressed, it is very important to have the right soundtrack. Soundtracks are everything: without them, movies suck.

It’s easy to say, “Oops! I did it again,” if you’re Britney Spears. Can you believe it? Britney Spears and her bullsh–t are still managing to damage the national image of the people of Louisiana.

Thanks, bitch.

Brad stared at the wall for a minute, contemplating suicide. As was usually the case, it sounded like more work than it was worth. He also had his doubts as to its implications: That whole meeting God thing left him with a sneaking suspicion about what would happen if he did take his own life. He'd be punished. In fact, he was more than slightly afraid that the punishment was already under way. So maybe he was already destined to end it that way.

Thanks to the peculiarities of the Catholic calendar, Mardi Gras is extraordinarily early this year. Fat Tuesday falls on February 5, which means that we don’t even get a full month of King Cake season. With so many diabetics in Louisiana, though, maybe that’s a good thing.

Brad stared at his computer screen, eyes red, smoking another cigarette. It all seemed too hopeless at the moment. During college, on acid, he'd briefly met God. Or maybe one of God's regional sales managers. Whatever the case, he'd been offered a choice as to how his life was going to turn out. He remembered that part. It had involved sitting over this sort of holographic or glass-floored room, with four different paths to follow. God had sort of shrugged and let him pick the one he wanted. He had.