I had already taken myself to a historic library-cum-Airbnb in central Vermont to see what could be done about the novel and to test my ass-in-chair endurance. While productive, I also spent much of the stay in the clawfoot bathtub, disconsolate with the morning’s drivel and watching the clock for the appropriate hour to walk across the street to the receiving end of the quiet, backroom bar belonging to an utterly empty inn. The English bartender there served himself two drinks for each of mine and regaled me with stories of questionable veracity.

Later I was in a tacked-together shack separated from civilization by a difficult 30-minute walk across the Provincetown Dunes. The historic dune shacks on the Cape Cod National Seashore are known for housing writers and artists from Thoreau and Eugene O'Neill through Jackson Pollock and Norman Mailer. These artists and their Fellini ensembles would throw days-long bacchanalias, traipsing naked through the dunes from shack to shack, carnivals of mirth and tambourines, red wine and dark banners streaming in the warm wind against a coastal summer moon.

Me, I had food poisoning and was alone. I had puked on my shoes on the side of 6A and fought my stomach throughout the severely undulating ride to the shack, which required the driver, John, to empty the air from his Forerunner tires by half so as not to sink into the sand.

John was born in P-town. He had an oxygen tank and described himself as a “lunger.” He pointed out the dune where they found the human- and insect-mangled “Lady of the Dunes” corpse in the seventies. For decades people had whispered about Whitey Bulger connections. Weeks after my trip, the body’s identity as Ruth Marie Terry would be officially uncovered and announced. Her culprit, a serial wife-murdering husband.

We unloaded my things and when John left I built a fire in the wood stove. I huddled before it, shivering in my sleeping bag. It was May but the weather was in the 40s and raining with cyclone-speed winds, dashing plans to spend the week on the porch with my guitar, working down afternoon bottles of Txakolina sip by salty sip.

My culprit was a quiche purchased from a bakery that is no longer in business. Quiche had somehow become the de facto breakfast at my parents’ house, and I hadn’t had it in me to convey my adversity to the dish to my mother, who had provided the guilty tart, perhaps because I remain unable to articulate the source of this discontent.

A fundamental problem is breakfast’s ranking as the worst meal. Indulgence should follow labor, and sleep is rarely labor. Eating breakfast is laborious. A necessary chore for fueling the fleshy temple so that it might withstand the daily demands of moving and thinking, which five times out of seven involves tickling an anonymous keyboard on an anonymous desk among anonymous people.

The greatest salvation of the meal’s original sin is the humble burrito. A large tortilla with a square of pepper jack melted onto it. Eggs with the yolk barely broken. Good guacamole that is not cold. Some manifestation of pig. Sautéed spinach. Peppers and onions if they’ll fit. An appropriate application of sour cream that will not run through the folds. Gobs of Frank’s on each bite. No tomatoes. No potatoes (an apparent mandate on all restaurant iterations of the meal). I could eat 50 of these more heartily than I can eat a single sliver of quiche prepared with the same essential constitution.

A foundational quarry of the week's bleak prospects included having nothing in particular to work on. I had just handed in the Cedar Key draft of my manuscript, and the second novel I had started was still in a research phase that I could not mobilize without electricity. But I had just purchased a Martin and decided I would spend the week writing songs. I would sit outside and listen to the waves. I would await inspiration. I would not retch bile into a trashcan with a citrus-scented liner. I would not scuttle incessantly to the outhouse in a cold sweat. I would not stare at the walls in empty delusion. But yes I would.

The only comfort on the first afternoon was a battery-powered radio transmitting the Red Sox game. I drifted in and out of sleep, the barfing abated, and the Sox were in a rally when the radio died. Night fell at a menacing pace and I lit the kerosene lamps against it as the roaring wind replaced Dave O'Brien's baritone. And then the mice came out.

First it was scratching in the walls, and then skittering over my sleeping bag and the floor around me. Hung above the bed upstairs was a mosquito net that I decided was a mouse net. I abandoned my post on the couch and crawled up the steep steps to the cold attic. The stove's radiant heat had a drop-off point of about 3 inches, and with walls as insulating as chain link fencing, I was utterly outdoors. I covered my arms and head with the netting and let the mice have the run of my legs and torso.

The next day was Mother’s Day. I hiked back to civilization and met my parents at the Red Inn. I was queasy but confident that two Bloody Marys were a proper antidote. My father was now afflicted, though not as severely, and together the three of us deliberated and charged the quiche formally. Though I considered pretending that the episode had turned me off to the ovum pie, I cannot tell a lie, and I let it be known that quiche was, and had been, among mushrooms and squid as the few foods I will endure but will rarely enjoy.

The sickness lifted but the weather never did, and after four days and nights of negligible productivity, grave solitude, and the final morning of waking up to rainwater running the netting from the sopping ceiling, I called John for evacuation.

"I'm getting the fuck out of here," I said to the mice.

My mother, who had entered my name into the selective retreat lottery as a gift, agreed that roughing it in such conditions wasn’t worth the increasingly coveted commodity of solitude. It was a sweet gesture, and my stay out on the edge of America might have been worthy of Italian neorealism. But conditions beyond any mother’s control proved otherwise. I had at least written a batch of cold and mournful seaside songs, one of them called Lunger.

Before hitting the road I drank a cold Corona in a hot bath at my folks’ house, reading the final few pages of Richard Thompson’s uneven memoir. The temperatures in Vermont had been unseasonably warm all week, and my foot was leaden on the gas as I punched the Subaru back to the spring warmth of the ever-greening mountains.