Nothing vanishes without a trace.

It was during the beginning of the third straight hour of Law and Order that Mike began to ponder how his life got this way. Sitting on his old couch with pizza boxes and cartons of Chinese takeout strewn across his room that he began to wonder why. At first he had refused to watch Law and Order refused to give in. But as he slowly became aware of the pitiful array of television programming offered during the day he gave in. He took a sip of his 40. The cold liquid felt good going down and the warmth spread to the rest of him. It was his second of the day and as he was halfway through it the effects were finally starting to materialize. TV was a strange beast Mike thought. Every channel seemed to be straight blocks of the same programming and all of the shows used in those vast blocks seemed to be the ones with the least artistic merit. Still he had slowly gotten used to Law and Order and gotten into the cases. Still it seemed strange that they had to run it so many times in the day and that there were so many versions of it. Damn I am so unemployed, Mike thought taking another long draw from the 40. They had fired him at the supermarket for drinking at the end of June and he had been just barely able to pay for the July rent. Then a few weeks after he had gotten his unemployment. Now as August approached he knew the next week was going to be tough. The endless commercials irritated him too, all of the ones for schools, and training programs. It was as if the marketers knew that a vast bloc of unemployed losers was watching TV at a given time and wanted to capitalize on it. Mike got up from the couch and found a few roaches from the other day on the living room table. They were small but just barely enough to satisfy his craving. He picked up his bong the ground and placed it on the table. Time for good times he thought