In the spring of that year, the Year of the Dragon. . .

"In the spring of that year, the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese calendar, was old-fashioned--then the summer was eccentric. It snowed twice in July, and once the dawn never came, so the night lasted for forty-eight hours. And so on, day after day. Nothing happened. Just like in earlier years, when the summers were more respectable. Our tiny whims exist just to camouflage our desperate emptiness. I thought: when the time comes, I will have nothing to write about, and my next book, like the preceding ones, will be brimming with loneliness, boredom, and nullity. Now, it is possible that wasn't thinking about that; I was gathering material for future works of fiction: an abundance of nausea, loads of fears, huge bins overflowing with feelings of failure and numbness--all the tedious material of modern storytelling. But I wrote nothing down. God is my witness. Suddenly, an interesting reason to write popped up. My friend, N.V., made sure of that. He committed suicide. A classic: a hundred barbiturates and sliced veins. But that's still no kind of story line. What's strange about that, that one of my friends kills themselves? A year does not pass without two or three of them committing suicide."

~~ from The Mongolian Travel Guide by Svetislav Basara