Some passages from Afternoon Hours of a Hermit by Patrick Cottrell

Some passages from Afternoon Hours of a Hermit by Patrick Cottrell: * “Friendship has been a form of poison to me, I thought as I tried to picture my friends, especially my writer friends. I kept trying to picture them, my writer friends from the contemporary literature and adjunct scene in Brooklyn. No, the writer friends I pictured only reminded me of the palpable anxiety and awkwardness I felt whenever I interacted with them.” * “Perhaps part of the problem was I had surrounded myself with the fiction writers instead of the poets. I had chosen the wrong world to immerse myself in; the poets were nightclub docents of mourning and melancholia and the fiction writers were real estate agents.” * “I was ecstatic with joy whenever I had the opportunity to overhear what people said about me as if I weren’t there. Whenever I ran out of things to talk about during my creative writing workshop with the troubled youth, I would, without warning, get up from the conference table and wander out…