Pink’s narrator is a noticer, a recorder, a performer of his observations in a world where little beyond the moment matters, conversation is mostly a matter of trading wisecracks and insults, and circumstances are beyond one’s control. Pink can make perfect little sentences (“Phones babysit bored kids.”) or poke fun at the tools of his craft (“I pass the sole gas station, with the whoevers from wherever going wherever buying whatever for whatever.”). He can be funny, faux-profound, loopily self-aware (“If I was jumping rope, then I’d be jumping rope, and nothing else could be happening.”). And, finally, against the drumbeat of “no real fate,” he can insist:

“There is more than this.

And I matter absolutely, until I don’t.”