the blood jet

Being alive was hard. It took work even to get out of bed in the morning, and even more to face the sun. The sun was happy even when you weren’t, and it would keep rising each day even when you felt you couldn’t. Cloudy mornings with no sun felt right for being alive. There was little talk of not being alive. Not being alive was the same thing as being dead, and not many wanted to not be alive more than they didn’t want to be dead, so there was little talk of it. And nobody who had tried not being alive ever let you know if it was any easier, anyway. So you kept on being alive, even though it was hard and took work.

—What happen then, Mr Bones?
—I had a most marvelous piece of luck. I died.

‘The world must be all fucked up,’ he said then, ‘when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.’

This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.