The plywood didn’t move but made a sound crunch like cereal popping between teeth. Five layers laminated form billboards standing six feet high march along the cobblestone roadway under the Rome winter sky. My fist skins feel hot--seared, branded, worn out. I continue to hit the big boards hard; shadow-boxing immovable objects with drunk fury and unbalanced knuckle punches. I stumble sway smashing signs til the final figure in the row--this billboard is last special, I’ll turn it up to eleven. I step back and launch a fist missile; a right hook meant for clear-cutting sapele-sourced rainforests. The wooden sign sways brief and stills. My hand feels strange, dead, napalmed--a drunken, limp-dicked bush branch on Vietnam fire. It is difficult to ignore the dumbass reality of a bone break but I do my best as the pulverized right transforms into a flesh weight meat sack you can’t ditch; with a dulled pain like an acid trip toe stub. I remove the black leather belt from my jean loops and wrap the dead right man branch tight, carefully closing the latch over the two-hole brass clasp. To make a fist squeeze is damn near impossible which leads me to the undeniable clarity that the hand bone is rift cut split up the calcium trunk. But I’ll sleep on it just to be sure.

Waking up around noon I drink a latte and eat a chocolate-filled brioche at the cafe down the street from the apartment. It is a warm day with tourists consuming the sidewalk space and locals drinking beers on stone Roman patios. There is a cute water fountain in the middle of piazza Santa Maria. It is a cool place. I throw up in the bathroom from the fist pain nausea and decide it’s time for a hospital visit.

I don't often make friends with coworkers. I don't often make friends with anyone; although I do try to make sure that people like me which is strange because I don't care whether to like them or not. It is an awful yet sincere situation in which I find myself caught between the morality of making friends because you want to have friends; or making friends because people have friends and this is what is expected. I've heard some things about friends. Some friends are good to go out with and party and drink and dance. Some friends are good to go to cry and sob and moan. Some friends are good to ridicule until you feel better. Some friends are good to take to brunch and talk about women and drugs and sex over a hangover. Sometimes I tend to joke about not having friends because I think this is probably the safest route to avoid confusion from those who consider me their friend. My "friends" will often say "but I'm your friend, right?" and as I try to appease their wishes for confirmation of friendship I realize that I feel no one way or the other. We are social creatures, I get that part of it, I just don't want to be a part of it; it's weird. I feel as though making friends used to be this evolutionary device to make sure no fellow chimp is standing behind you holding a knife ready to take your banana. In this scenario, having a friend may just save your life; and your banana. It leads me to the personal discovery that man is inherently evil and we invented the idea of the friend to try to protect ourselves from being evil toward one another. Friends would band together into tribes and hunt. I have no doubt that occasionally these friends would meet other non-friends in the wilderness and kill them for whatever they had; bananas or otherwise. We used to kill our non-friends for bananas, now we kill our non-friends for meat. We kill pigs, rabbits, geese, moose, cows, chickens and mostly anything that isn't our friend because we can; and we do it with Hitleresque efficiency. Factories full of chickens laying eggs until their time is up. Factories full of cows laying calves until their time is up. Factories full of pigs laying piglets until their time is up. We even give them tattoos and track their existence. The efficiency of the human killing machine is all very depressing, but so is the absence of bacon at a Sunday morning brunch with friends. If only piglets could make friends perhaps they could protect their species to a greater extent, then they too could enjoy a pleasant Sunday morning brunch on a sun-filled patio as they cure their hangovers over bloody Caesars and mimosas talking about all the babes they fucked and all the babes they want to fuck. To be fair I don't think I could ever go to a restaurant that hosts pigs to breakfast on Sunday morning; that's when we go to church.