Quitting 

Every day lately, I wonder if I need to quit caffeine. Every day, I feel one cup shy of a nervous breakdown, like the tiniest overpour might overwhelm my fragments of peace of mind. I'm not even clear why: the normal pressures that make up my life—the job worries and the art angst, the money shortages, the girl troubles, the social anxieties—these are so common to me by now that it'd be wrong to call them stressors upon my life: more accurately, they are my life. 

In fact, I've come to realize: the things that I sometimes think of as "stressors" are exactly the things that I choose for myself, to keep my life from becoming mind-numbingly boring. If I really had the peaceful life that I sometimes pretend to want, then I'd almost certainly have to hang myself. Or, more accurately, I'd commit the smaller suicides that have become the recurring themes of my life's history: I'd change my city, quit my job, end my relationship, neglect my bills, drive out of town, write poems, kin with nature, and then come back—tanned and kissed by freedom, and safely now distant from the stability I, in equal parts, crave and dread.

Is life this complicated for other people?, I sometimes wonder: the consternations, perplexations, machinations, the planning and replanning, so much systematic constructing and deconstructing and destructing. Maybe it is.

[Is life this complicated for ants? Maybe it is.]

And while my pot of coffee is brewing, I realize, too: the only way that I've learned to get by in the world is not to live in it, but rather to live parallel, beside it, at arm's length, able to pluck and reach from its passing conveyer belt like it's a cafeteria, but being sure not to getting caught up in it, tangled and dragged, and certainly being sure to avoid stepping on.

Peanut Butter and Fizzy Water 

More thoughts on the Apocalypse

The weird, sad fact is, I want nothing more than I want the Apocalypse. The end of all things means the end of obligations, failures, and future disappointments. No further payments will be remitted. I won't need to match my socks, and I can eat peanut butter and chocolate for as many consecutive meals as I want.

After people, there's no one left to dislike you.

I can see now that I've been gradually transforming my apartment into an austere bomb shelter (with thin walls and lots of windows, useless against actual bombs): a stockpile of canned beans, fizzy water, wine, and still-unread books just waiting till I have some free time. And what is the Apocalypse, if not a sudden excess of free time? "Finally, some peace and quiet!"

It's only now it occurs to me that I've been making a few probably-erronious assumptions:

1. That I will continue to exist after the Apocalypse (thereby to enjoy my stockpile of beans, books, and time); and
2. My obligations will not. I've been assuming that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse will round up the creditors first and the debtors later

—but since the extant literature gives us plenty of reason to believe the Apocalypse is more bad than good, I suppose it's better to assume that when the end comes, there won't be a whole lot of free reading time (nor light in which to do it); and now it seems completely possible that the bills will continue to arrive in the mail long after the sun has flared out. Death and taxes, they say, and student loans, too.

So, this revelation: the Apocalypse won't be the spa vacation I'd imagined.

Backpacking to Nowhere 

or, Emergency Preparedness, pt. 2

Maybe it's because I'm back in California, or maybe because of the recent Japanese quake and tsunami, or maybe because there are only a countable number of months between now and the end of that Mayan calendar—or maybe it's because it's the job of all news media to incite me into a mad panic—but I have been completely distractedly preoccupied with a sense of impending disaster. Everywhere I go now, I wonder: what if the earthquake hits now? I drive on freeways and wonder if the road will continue to hold up underneath me; I look out at the distant Los Angeles skyline and wonder if I'll see it sway and break. The rumbles of passing planes or trucks sound, to me, tectonic. I'm having trouble sleeping.

The feeling reminds me of those months after September 11: it's a Chicken Little "sky-is-falling" feeling. The sense back then was that planes might crash and buildings might fall on a scale we hadn't previously imagined; and now it's a looming awareness that the earth might shake harder and the waves might roll higher; but the general form of the feeling is this: there is a certain amount of stability which I am used to being able to take for granted, and now I can't; and it turns out maybe I need to be able to assume a certain amount of stability if I want to sleep or plan for my future or function in the world in any sort of way.

But the most confusing thing about this feeling is that, since I can't persuade myself that disaster won't come—I can't rationally explain that there won't be an earthquake, etc.—instead I start to believe the only relief will be when the earthquake does come. When the disaster strikes, then the tension that's been building up in me will be relieved, just like the tension building up in the tectonic plates will be relieved. The changes this disaster will bring will be unpredictable and maybe catastrophic, but at least they'll be here, now, instead of looming in the unseeable future, and transformed from vague fear into solvable problems. Disaster offers, if nothing else, relief from ambiguous worry, and finally a clarity of focus: can I survive? Can I help my friends and loved ones to survive?¹

How calming the arrival of actual disaster will be.

Till then, the best I can do is fill this backpack with emergency supplies: water, nonperishable food, flashlight, batteries, cellphone charger… The list goes on. I'm packing for a trip I hope never to take, a trip to nowhere in particular, itinerary unknown.²

---

1. The funniest joke I've heard recently was a friend telling me she'd put together an earthquake safety kit: "It's a month's supply of wine and chocolate." Then I realized she wasn't joking.

2. Contingency plans, like insurance and aesthetic minimalism, are a luxury of the bourgeoisie.

What I Wish They'd Said at My Graduation 

“Stop being scared that you won't live up to your potential. You won't. So being scared is no help.

A Pacific Gyre 

MP3 audio track

All these days of not writing. It makes me wonder what's going on—what's wrong. But it doesn't make me wonder enough to write about it. "It's just a phase," friends tell me. But the only way you can say with any assurance that something is "just a phase" is after it's over, and you've moved into a new phase. If it's never over, then it's not a phase at all. It's the new you.

Or, if it is a phase, it's the last phase. 

So, this  "phase": sleeping late, cooking, eating, napping, watering the garden, weeding the garden, showering, shopping, hiking, dreaming, and not writing.

[What we spend our time doing is more indicative of what we want than what we spend our time dreaming.]

I've heard that sometimes a plastic Coke bottle will find its way to the ocean, and the currents carry it away, so it starts in, say, San Francisco, and gets carried down the coast below Mexico and then all the way across the Pacific, bobbing around in the Philippines, and then swept into another current out to the Indian Ocean, before eventually washing up on shore in, say, Madagascar, where the letters of the label, written in English, would be impossible to read even if they weren't sun-bleached and salt-stained from the long journey, because the bottle had arrived in a foreign land after a great adventure. But then another bottle, drifting out to sea from the exact same spot, will get stuck in a dead zone between currents and never go any farther, but just bob up and down while the world spins underneath it; and other trash begins to gather nearby, and stay there, gradually building a whole continent of floating plastics, unwanted, ungrounded, without direction, and powerless ever to move out of that single spot.

Private Conversation 

I think I need to go shopping but I don't need to go shopping.

There's a part of my brain that says, "You're out of cereal! You need to get breakfast cereal."

It's true that I did finish a bag of cereal this morning. (My cereal comes in bags. Don't get hung up on this.) But there's also still other cereal in there—a different kind, but plenty to get me through tomorrow, and probably the next day, too. So my brain needs to chill the fuck out.

"You need to chill the fuck out," I tell my brain.

My brain says, "You were going to buy white pepper today and you didn't. You need white pepper!"

"Nobody needs white pepper."

Earlier today there was a part of my brain that said I needed garden soil, so I stopped what I was doing, drove to Home Depot, and I bought six cubic yards of garden soil. While I stood in line, my brain chirped, "Perlite!", so I bought a bag of perlite.

I spend more time and money buying dirt than I ever imagined I would.

When I got back home, my brain said, "You need a hoe."

Another part of my brain is fixated on a smell in my apartment. "Does it smell like garbage in here?" Maybe it does smell a little like garbage. I can't tell. "You should take the trash out!", this part of my brain screams. But the trash bag is empty, and anyway, I'm not really sure it even smells. "Let's say it does smell a tiny bit like garbage—and I'm not saying it does—but if it does, that's not the worst thing in the world."

"Oh yeah? What is the worst thing in the world?"

I consider this for a moment, then realize it's even more distracting than taking out the trash.

"That woman is coming over!" I'm not sure which part of my brain screams this at me—quite possibly more than one of them. "You should straighten up!" "You should make the bed!" "You should floss!" "You should definitely take out the garbage!"

"I should floss?"

"Well, the ones you want to keep..." my brain mumbles back, a sheepish aphorism.

There's another part of my brain, thinks it would be a good idea to go for a walk. "You know, work off some of that tension."

"What tension?" I ask. But we all know the answer to that question: my brain and its screaming is beginning to stress me out. Maybe I will go for a walk. While I'm out, I can even pick up some breakfast cereal. Maybe some dirt.

Hemicrania simplex 

or, How's L.A.?

People keep asking me, "How are you?" and "How is Los Angeles?," so I figure I better start coming up with answers. (If only so they'll leave me alone.) I have a headache, is one answer. I've had a headache since Thanksgiving, so, about three weeks straight. It's severe and chronic and the kind of headache that makes people joke, "Brain tumor," and then wonder if maybe they shouldn't have said that, in case it's true. But it's not true: if I had a brain tumor, then wouldn't I begin doing things that were really uncharacteristic?, like I'd bark like a dog, or start beating my wife, or I'd sign a lease for an apartment in Los Angeles. You know: weird, unpredictable stuff.

Oh, that reminds me: on one of the days that the headache wasn't so bad, I went apartment-hunting in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles and I found a place I love, and I'm moving in. You should come and visit when you're in the neighborhood.

If this headache were from a brain tumor, then I'd begin doing things that are really uncharacteristic, like inviting people over for a visit.

After I applied for this apartment, I started to think a lot about an ex-girlfriend. I really wanted to get her opinion on this apartment. That's weird for several reasons, not least of which is, it's hands-down a great apartment, so everyone's opinion of this apartment would probably be more or less the same. What I wanted wasn't her opinion on the apartment, but her opinion on the move, in general—on the life choice. On the choice to live here, in this apartment in Los Feliz, rather than with her, in an apartment anywhere.

Not that living in an apartment with this ex-girlfriend is or was ever an option... That's just another reason that this whole line of thinking was somewhat weird. That's to say, considering how much of my life is given to second-guessing (it's the real, mostly-unstated, raison d'être for this blog, right?), this particular moment of second-guessing stood out as unusual, because I'm usually pretty disciplined about knowing which topics are worth second-guessing and which aren't. It's my own personal interpretation of that Irish blessing: God, grant me the cowardice to question the things I cannot change, the fear to ignore the things I can, and the vocabulary to obfuscate the difference." etc.

The cause of headaches is still largely a mystery to physicians, though common triggers include stress, allergens, and brain tumors—and I figure by moving into a new apartment, I'll change the balance on the first two, at least.

The place I'm staying now is the guest house of a beautiful home in Hancock Park. It's lovely in so many ways, and I wouldn't complain, except that complaining is the real, mostly-unstated raison d'être of any blog: the guest house is windowless and damp, and I call it the Mushroom Den; and spending too much time in it makes me wonder if my body is growing lichen, inside or out. Meanwhile, the entire neighborhood of Hancock Park is completely overrun with an alien species of cyborgic lifeforms known as "Leaf-Blowers," who crawl the lawns constantly, hunched under the weight of their loud gasoline-powered life-support systems: they troll around and ensure that no leaf or pollen ever comes to rest on the ground, but rather instead stays constantly airborne, till inhaled by the local residents—even the temporary residents who are living in the guest houses. I, with well-documented allergies to most natural things (and especially to leaves, pollen, grass and mold) have considered filing a restraining order against these Leaf Blower People; but I'm afraid that would make me an ungracious guest, and I'd rather suffer a three-plus-week headache than appear ungracious. So I martyr myself by staying in this beautiful guest house, with chronic hemicrania simplex, St. Christopher of the Lawn.

Allowing of course that this blog post is itself not quite gracious.

(St. Christopher, you'll remember, was un-canonized: the Church made him a saint, and then later, they changed their mind, and de-sainted him. We didn't even know that was possible till it happened to him. It's a tough quality in a namesake: the quality of having once been thought to have been important. I imagine that Disney character Pluto feels similarly. Graciousness is unreliable and so is everything else.)

"How are you?", "How's Los Angeles?", "What are you up to?," and all that. It's enough to give a guy a headache. On one of the days that the headache wasn't so bad, I wrote out a list of answers to these questions; but then, later, when it got worse again, I used that sheet of paper to blot out the blood that I was pretty sure was coming out of my ears. To be honest, I couldn't tell you how Los Angeles is. Who am I to say?

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^®, the 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, so 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 

He looked in the mirror for signs of the damage and saw none. It was there, but it had spread covertly like cancer, and in his reflection he couldn't separate the disease from what he saw as his own beauty.

Even harder than tracking it with the naked eye was recalling the specifics of its origin: it had started more as a hunch, a theory, or a hypochondria, that had gradually grown to prove itself true. At no single moment, he had changed into a monster, foreign, alien, unlovable.

What were the symptoms? What were the signs? When did this otherwise normal-looking man begin his transformation into such a subtle gargoyle? He could not be sure. There was no single moment, but there were single moments, planted periodically throughout his personal history, which, normal enough singly, in sequence appear quite ominous in hindsight:

1. He was slow learning to walk, and refused to take a single step until he could walk across a room unassisted.
2. His teachers liked him and he liked that they liked him. Still, he joined and then quit the study of violin, clarinet, soccer, Spanish, and the Boy Scouts. He never could explain why.
3. When he lost his baby teeth, the new ones grew back in just a bit oversized. And yellow.
4. A mole appeared on his neck in 1987, and, in the fall of 1990, when he was still lovable, he persuaded his girlfriend to pluck out the rapidly-appearing back hairs that were growing in dark and thick, as if betraying that some change had already taken place under the skin.
5. Most importantly, his brain ceased to function either as the rational interpreter of daily, causal events, or as a creative instrument. Seemingly-normal events became rife with subplots, convoluted meanings, and paranoia. Nothing was as it appeared to be, and his actions grew to be more and more inappropriate responses to what had triggered them.

As this lapse became more apparent to him, he countered it with an ever-friendlier smile, and would sometimes inexplicably engage in favors for virtual strangers, as if to compensate for whatever internal decay was taking place.

Thus he made no sense but did so with the best intentions, and people were forced to treat him politely, without ever quite knowing why or what he wanted from them.

Faced with his reflection in the mirror, thinking it fairly benign, he started to question his own senses: "Is it possible," he asked, "that these pedestrian features I look at now are not what others see? That my eyes deceive me? That I mask from myself something repugnant, just under the skin?"

He gasped. "I wonder—have I started to rot, from the inside; only I can't smell it? I wonder: are there bones and organs, growing at strange speeds, twisting up all of my inner processes into something elephantine and alien?"

But honestly, he could only honestly locate the damage in his head, and his heart, and his marrow, and his soul. He believed there were no immediately visible traces written on the outsides of his body—no lesions, no tell-tale melanoma. He had an invisible disease that somehow was readily apparent to all of the outer world.

He knew that it was making him smaller, that he would build things he thought had value, as if to say, "This is interesting; therefore, I am interesting"; and meanwhile the things built would grow more grotesque, misshapen, incomprehensible, and alone.

He was getting smaller, and he would continue to do so, until finally there would be no form at all, no need for form, only pure things, pure feeling, pure love, pure need to be adored in any shape at all, while shape still remained, while object still existed, while love still had value as a term that could be understood. Before he disappeared altogether.