The minutes drag, the days fly, as the old adage goes. I've slept the better part of the year on a couch, Judah's couch as I'm reminded often. Growing up on the couch as it were. My penance, for what I don't know, has been paid. My current penury has limited my ability to pay in regard to the more tangibles though, rent for instance. I still have my pride, I would like to proclaim. Maybe my good name depending on who you ask. I pretend to live in a certain amount of comfort. Must keep up the appearances, the visages, stroke my pretensions that I sacrifice a regular diet to afford and enough beer to lubricate my interaction with the rest of the world and keep my mental health in a salubrious condition. It helps to ease the pain of living as an unabashed parasite on the goodwill all those around me have extended. It's a bleak bleak life. I'm morose most of the time. On the good days I'm dour. Through the tears, as I take my blows standing up, I persevere. Maybe that could be the theme for this year: perseverance. It's a good moral lesson to learn, I suppose. Although of late I've grown weary of it.

Yes, it has been that hard but perhaps worth the effort, the exertion that I've put into surviving, eating, living. I mean I'm forced to rummage through my pickings of Starbuck's. Jeff can't get any of the sandwiches I like and don't even bother about asking for the cheese tray. Useless, hopeless, pointless. Cruel, cruel fate. But I leave soon, to where I'm unsure, to another couch as it seems fate would like to spite me once again.

What do I have to show after a year at Apartment 106? Over a ton of Starbuck's consumed? A running tab with David? A deep-seated mistrust of Andrew? A raging antipathy towards Jeff? A begrudging indifference to whatever ridiculousness Judah is raving on about? Certainly all these things have become ingrained in my person. Who indeed would I be without them? Who indeed. . . it's a question I ask myself on my tear stained couch at night. This biography of myself has tended towards the negative, or perhaps it will be judged that way by some, those who don't know me, don't understand me. For the real coinsure of Ryan though, they will see something completely different, something profound, poignant, almost transcendent in its beauty and radiance. So I come back to the original question posed, I got momentarily lost in the mire of my own bullshit. I will allude to one of my true heros, Malcolm Lowery, in the hope that through the extreme alcoholic haze of his writing, I will find solace, a resolution to the year. To wit: "Why am I here, says the silence, what I have I done, echoes the emptiness, why have I ruined myself in this wilful manner, chuckles the money in the till, why have I been brought so low, wheedles the thoroughfare, to which the only answer was - The square gave him no answer."