In a little town in Texas, after the second or third day of driving, I’d stopped for the evening and had gone out for a steak dinner and had drank two tall beers, and then had returned to my hotel and had fallen asleep on top of the covers on the bed in my room, without undressing or even taking off my shoes. In the middle of the night I’d woken in the dark and for a moment didn’t remember where I was. Then, when I remembered, I continued to lie there for a long time without getting up, thinking of how strange my own life seemed to me, how odd, yet also how predictable and uninspiring.