A Look in the Mirror, Pt. 2 

or, A Girl Needs a Gun These Days on Account of All the Rattlesnakes

I don't think I'm one of those people who doesn't know himself. But sometimes I catch myself doing things that would be perfectly reasonable to do—if I were someone else. If only.

But, as me, they're ridiculous.

Like the other night, I did two loads of laundry at the laundromat, and paid $4.50 in quarters. I waited two hours and I read a magazine and two short stories.

I have a washer and dryer at home.

Weird, right? Not for other people, people of different circumstance. For them, a trip to the laundromat would be perfectly reasonable. The right thing to do. But for me: weird choice.

Or like kissing that girl, tonight.

Sometimes I wonder if I'd even recognize myself, if I walked by me on the street. I figure I probably would; I just wouldn't like myself very much.

Drink-to-Sleep Index 

Drink-to-Sleep Index. Expressed as a ratio, or sometimes a number: the number of drinks over the number of hours of sleep. Thus, seven drinks and four hours sleep nets an index of 1.75. Also known as the "Wreckage Index" or the "Sclerosis Score."

See also, autoschadenfreude.

Whiskeytown 

If you average four drinks a night, you may or may not have a drinking problem.

Four drinks a night may or may not be detrimental to your health. The behavior might be symptomatic of a "larger issue." Or it might not.

An average of four drinks a night means an average of two and a half ounces of pure alcohol, and an average of five hundred calories, each night. It means an average of slightly slurred speech, poor balance, and somewhat uninhibited behavior. It means an average of evenings of impaired judgment, and an average of headachy mornings.

Averaging four drinks per night means twenty-eight drinks per week, a hundred and twenty drinks per month, and nearly fifteen hundred drinks per year.

Consuming an average of four drinks each night means that you don't actually have four drinks each night. Some nights, you don't drink at all. (For each of these nights, there is another night when you have eight.)

Averaging four drinks a night might mean that you are hiding from something. Or it might not. It might just be how many drinks you like to have, before stopping. It might not mean anything at all.

Who is to say?

You Say Tomato, I Say Euthanasia 

In my dream, I walked into the drug store seeking Chloraseptic^®, that noxious-tasting throat spray that temporarily numbs your mouth, making it possible to swallow when strep throat or other illness makes swallowing otherwise too painful.

The problem was, in my dream, I couldn't remember that it was called Chloraseptic. Instead, I kept asking the pharmacist for "Euthanasia."

"Excuse me—where do you keep the Euthanasia?"

One after the other, each drug store turned me away: "We don't sell that here!"

Lucky for me, New York City has a Duane Reade on every corner. Finally, a chemist of dubious ethics heard my request, invited me in hushed tones into his office, and sold me a bottle of Euthanasia^®.

(Coincidentally, it came in a clear plastic spray bottle full of cherry-red liquid, with instructions to "spray liberally 2-3 times in to the back of the throat.")

I thanked him, took it home, struggled with the plastic child-proof (and always somewhat adult-proof) safety seal, and sprayed into my mouth—five or six times, because who ever follows the instructions on their medication?

The pain did leave my throat, as I'd hoped, but it was only as the edges blurred at the outside of my vision that I realized my mistake: "Oh! I meant to ask for Chloraseptic!"

And then I fell into a deep dreamless sleep (which was, really, all I'd wanted...)

Absence Seizure 

The nights are restless, dark and deep. I've been sharing my bed with a strange bedfellow, Insomnia, who kicks and snores through the night, and waits till I've just dozed off to shake me and ask, "Are you asleep?" Not any more...

Insomnia creeps into strange places: when I do sleep, I keep having a recurring dream that I've just woken from a seizure—so in my dream, I wake to the memory of having lost my memory. Huh?

Reliably, I get up around 5am, more like sleep-walking than actual waking. I get up not because I'm awake, but because I've been forcibly ejected from my sleep. If I turn on a light, my eyes are slow to adjust, like a mole's, so I wander the apartment in the dark, aimlessly, not even consciously, taking a mindless inventory of things—assessing that the pieces of my life, so carefully arranged during my waking hours, are all still in place, and haven't been stolen from me by a thief in the night, stolen from me like my peace of mind was stolen, that sense of safe optimism, which was taken not all at once but a few coins at a time, month after month; and I realize now, it is not our peace of mind that we should lock up in the fireproof safe—because peace of mind needs air and sunshine—but rather, the worries that should be kept locked up and out of sight: they are the thieves; and it is the thieves, not the treasures, that should be locked away.

The Far End of the Curve 

Ode to the Infinite Jester

"Successful, obscenely well-educated, and sort of adrift." - David Foster Wallace, describing himself and his readers

Why do we continue to feel shock and disappointment when our heroes choose to end their own lives? Why do we respond every time as if this trope were impossible to imagine? How many times will we be surprised by these repeated acts, and what is it that keeps us from understanding them as commonplace? Suicide: quite ordinary. But strange every time.

We're so quickly numbed by school shootings and genocides—the nightly news and its mundane varieties of death bore us—everything bores us—but give us David Foster Wallace, hanging from a rope, and we're thrown agape as if it hadn't always been a foregone conclusion.

[How does such a thing as a suicide gene continue in a species? How is it possible that Darwinism—"survival of the fittest—could favor members of the species who have such low regard for their own life? Because these same people invigorate us, even while they destroy themselves.]

To see and feel things so keenly.... To live and think so freakishly far at the end of the bell curve, till you are lauded for the thing that alienates you. The bell curve, an island where the mob gathers at the safety of altitude, watching while you spelunk the slippery shore. The mob won't immolate you, though you frighten them; you immolate yourself, burn up on your own fuel, and the mob uses you to warm its fingers.

Awash in a Sea of Nothing 

If you drink enough, you stop feeling your skin, and that's a good thing: it is the falling away of the last boundary between the world and your own permeability. Without skin, you're free to melt and meld with the world; your identity is unexpectedly diluted—you're unsure where you end and where the world begins. And that's a good thing. In that moment, through your blurry eyes and stupid tongue, colors are crisper, music is truer, intentions are clearer, and for a moment, if only for a moment, maybe you feel your heart. Maybe you are alive—if only temporarily, and only on account of this gentle poisoning—you are alive. Alive and awash in a sea of nothing.

That's a good thing.

Fire Drill 

or, These Are My Hands, Pt. 2

Why do these things always happen to me?

I'm in my kitchen and my hand is on fire.

All things considered, I could be much worse off. For instance, all my fingers are still attached to my flaming hand. Many victims of many kitchen accidents are not so lucky. So, on the plus side, at least I'm not trying to staunch a flow of blood while I pack my own severed fingers into the ice of my freezer, only to discover (sure enough) I forgot to refill the ice tray.

At least that's not happening.

I'm not choking, or poisoned, or having an allergic reaction that would require me to shoot adrenaline into my own heart. So there's that. No, the only real problem I have to contend with is the fact that my hand is on fire.

Seen with a little perspective, this isn't such a big deal.

Seen with a little perspective,1 you'd also see that it's not just my hand, but the small baking sheet that the hand is holding, too. It's a 13x9" baking sheet full of grease, and when I pulled it from the broiler, it was on fire; and since I pulled it from the fire with my hand, now my hand is on fire, too.

Since I pulled it from the fire using a heat-resistant oven mitt, technically only my oven mitt (and the baking sheet) are on fire, and not the hand itself. Not yet, anyway. It's a crucial distinction, but one that's hard to make with the eyes alone: visually, I look down the length of my arm, and sure enough, to all appearances, my hand is engulfed in flames.

Which is unusual, to say the least. (And that's a good thing.)2

It doesn't hurt, yet, but it is getting kind of hot. And since the tray in my hand is full of flaming liquid, I'm not immediately clear what sort of options I have at my disposal. So I hold it and watch it burn for a few moments, and think, and hope that in the meanwhile maybe it will burn itself out (though I know even while I'm thinking this that I won't actually be so lucky).

The flames burn, and I think: I wish I had marshmallows.

The flames burn, and I think: this proves it for sure, our smoke alarms really don't work. I should check the batteries.

The flames burn, and I think: I hope no one sees this. It's kind of embarrassing.

Somehow, with almost too much calm—almost psychotically-detached calm—I begin using my good hand (the one that's not on fire) to rearrange the appliances and clutter on the counter. Toaster goes here, check. Coffee grinder goes here, check. Non-flammable pot holder goes here, check.

Finally I clear enough space to put down the 13x9" fireball I've been holding, at which point I calmly remove my flaming glove, stamp out the fire, and then, to soothe my mild burn, reach into the freezer to grab a few ice cubes. But there aren't any ice cubes: I've left the ice tray empty again. Sure enough...

---

1. If you could see past the flames, which are about twelve inches high...

2. But not that unusual...

These Are My Hands 

There's a fire in my kitchen. This is a thing that happens sometimes. There are several pots on several burners and something somewhere has overflowed, and instead of simply making a mess, it has made a fire.

I might put out the fire with a towel, but I can't find one, and instead I try to dampen the flames with my bare hands, by pressing them against the hot metal burners. This is an ill-advised solution to the problem. In my own defense, I never decided to put out the fire with my hands. It just sort of happened.

Kind of like that unplanned phone call I just made. Sometimes it's like someone else grabs the steering wheel and drives into oncoming traffic. "I swear, officer—it wasn't me."

My hands have a mind of their own. My hands have Tourette's. My hands are always having an out-of-body experience, doing things I neither plan nor condone. One of these days, I'm sure, my hands will up and slap you. They'll sit down at a keyboard and plunk out a Tom Clancey novel. They'll goose someone on the subway. They'll drive the car off the road.

"I swear, officer—it wasn't me."

What scares me most is that I don't know whether or not that's true. It kind of was me. I don't know which is more me—the hands when I control them, or the hands when they control me. Which is more me—the one putting out the fires, or the one starting them?

Cloudscape 

"The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms." - from "The Library of Babel," by Jorge Luis Borges

I'm sitting in that chair in the corner of my bedroom, and my hand is bleeding. The morning is quiet. The sun shines in through the window and casts the shadow of the pane onto my bed, and I can hear distant traffic, and feel a breeze coming in.

I'm watching the blood run down my hand onto my wrist, onto my arm, a bright red rivulet, so bright, shockingly bright, candy apple red, and I think, "This is so shockingly bright. This is the color of vivid, the color of vitality, and seeing this color, it is a memorable experience. What is happening now is special. It is unique."

The same thing happened yesterday.

I cut my hand two days ago, or maybe it was the day before that, and since then, every morning, when I get out of the shower, I sit in the chair in the corner of my room and I notice again that my hand is bleeding. I see the angle of the sun through the window, I hear far-away cars, feel the gentle breeze, and think that what is happening right now is unique, never having happened before or ever again, though it happened yesterday, and (one might conclude) it will happen tomorrow.

I watch the trickle of blood wind across my wrist and down my arm without fear or concern but only deja vu, as if I am stuck in a single point of time, while the world around me has continued to move and change, almost imperceptibly, like the passing of a cloud.

Right now—is it today or yesterday? And if this has all happened before, why should that make this moment any less unique? If time is truly infinite, then won't this all happen again—not just my bleeding in this chair, but the repetition of the bleeding, and the musing on it? And again and again. If the dimensions of the universe are as boundless as mathematics, then is there not someone else, somewhere else, doing this same thing, even now? And writing about it? Hasn't it all been written before? Even by me.

The bleeding stops, on its own, for now, and I go on about my day.

Working from Home 

I'm new to it, and I'm certainly not going to say that I'd prefer waking every morning to fight my way through the subway en route to the proverbial water cooler. But it occurs to me...

Am I just cutting out one-quarter of my life's excitement?

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the— 

(or, What Doesn't Kill You Makes Your Limp Stronger)

Technically, my birthday had already been over for a few hours when I stepped into the busy street without looking and got hit by the cargo van. Still, during the brief time between when it smacked into me and when I smacked into the ground—that is, during the brief time that I was airborne—I remember thinking that there is a certain poetry to getting run over on your birthday. "Thirty-five," I mused, "That's a sufficient number of years..." (I also remember thinking things that were less poetic, like, "I hope this doesn't break my iPod.")

None of this is historically unprecedented: when my father was a boy, he became famous in his home town by stepping out in front of a dump truck. He also flew through the air, and wound up spending a significant part of his childhood in and out of casts and leg braces. He made it into all the local papers (and in a way, that is how my parents first met...).

No such celebrity for me. Though the sound of the van hitting my body seemed significant at the time (like the sound of crushing a six-foot soda can, like the sound of metal burping), and though I found myself a bit farther down the block than where I'd stepped off the curb, I somehow managed to get away without a scratch. (Well, one scratch.) I expected the driver to be furious—he had every right to be, since I'd walked out in front of him. So when I hit the ground, my first impulse was to apologize. "Sorry to get all up in your grill"...

How many near-death experiences does it take to add up to a whole-death experience? Because, for a youngish middle-class white guy, I wonder if I've had maybe more than my fair share... (Then again, there's something not quite right about the term "near death"—it's a linguistic fallacy along the lines of "near-pregnant": you are or you aren't, and proximity doesn't have much to do with it...)

The fact is, when I was half this age, I was sure I wouldn't live to be this age. And when the end comes, it probably comes with all the advance warning of a speeding cargo van crashing into the left side of your body. Thirty-five is a sufficient number of years. But I'll take more. And today, I'm glad to have them...

A Look in the Mirror 

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