At the Mexican place around the corner and the neighboring table’s food arrives and the cute stupid young couple can’t take their eyes off their phones. They haven’t spoken to each other at all, and I suddenly realize I want to do something rash, something risky and dangerous, like pull off a heist or murder that couple or maybe just steal a car, then flee the country, something to break the monotony. But read a few books and watch a few people and you’ll see it’s all been done before, a billion times over; maybe that’s what our ignorance is all about now—we lack historical perspective, we shun knowledge of things beyond ourselves so we can be perfectly free of the responsibility of knowing better and not even have to bother pretending we’re original, but to actually believe that it is so, no contrary evidence in our way. But this sense of history, this understanding that it’s all been thought and felt and done—even the risky, crazy stuff—is too much. It’s simply too much. A fascination with the past affords knowledge of the present’s very real futility.

I’m having the chimichanga with methadone. It’s the especial.