back to the frontage road

My people relished the destruction of beautiful things. We knew the malice of the buttercup squash. The stubbornness of the root cellar only made them more determined. My sister was a frizzled buff of celebrity annulments. Eventually something worse got the better of her and off she went down the frontage road wearing nothing but a Kia Spectra. It took me years to break in the stiff sentences my older brother handed down, worrying those words on my way to school, but eventually their contours aligned with the air my mouth displaced.

hunches

I used to be a man without hunches, for a while hunchlessness was my bread and butter, and now I've swung all the way the other way. I don't remember deciding to head in a hunchful direction. But I must have, it couldn't have been a hunch after all. And another thing. Don't they require cultivation, some degree of development over time? You don't just wake up one morning in possession of hunches, unless they were percolating in the background somehow, unbeknownst. I have feelings in my bones now. I act without deliberation. Probably I always had solid hunches but never recognized them as such or trusted them or thought them worthy, perhaps a domineering stepparent with a pulsating vein suppressed my hunches with a raised, open palm. That can happen to a sensitive child, a child of unusually delicate sensibilities. But why did it happen to me?

texture was noted

Looking at some cookbooks these days. This one here utilizes a suspicious amount of ketchup. I read the recipes in order, I don't jump around like most people. I like to be introduced to an ingredient for the first time and then delight in running into it again in later chapters. When you look at a cookbook you must cap your gushing fantasies, which can so easily spurt out of control. A new life of sensuous abundance, earthy communion on a radiant morning in the herb garden, spur of the moment trips to Paris. A statistically significant quantity of pleasure is waiting to be had but that's all it is.

I will upgrade the quality of my meals. I don't have meals, first I'll start having meals then I'll work on making them better. These elements are out, those are in. Goodbye forever this, welcome to my alimentary canal that. The other night I savored an entire dinner, start to finish. I tasted forkfuls of steamed vegetables that had been tossed in something non-trivial, a rollicking barn dance of unfamiliar and startling piquancies. I achieved an intimacy with them that felt genuine. I thought, this is what people have been talking about. Texture was noted, flavors too, and without prompting or 3 x 5 notecards. Colors to a lesser degree. I lingered, self-consciously at first, unsure of the currently appropriate tempo of delight. Here I am, I thought, enjoying a delicious dinner, a hearty homemade meal just like people in the 20th century. Still, doing the dishes is where I shine. Pleasure is fine but eradicating all trace of it is something I can really sink my teeth into.

discrete head

Among so many things I am, I am also quite the aficionado of the Craigslist sex ads. I never answer them, and I am usually afraid to look at the photographs. I mean I could answer them, I'm perfectly capable of answering them, I'm as sex-positive as I can be without succumbing to irreversible queasiness, and I like getting crabs as much as the next guy, or getting beaten and robbed at knifepoint, who doesn't love that, deep down we all want to be left for dead at least once, to live is to once have been left for dead as the old saying goes, to come to and find our way back to the main road, or be discovered by a woman out walking her golden retriever in the nauseating morning light, saying upfront that I don't answer them is an interesting thing to do, I wonder why I did that, what instinct made me so eager to make that clarification, usually I can't stand it when people do that "don't get me wrong" thing, what are they afraid of I always think, supposedly it goes against everything I stand for to do such a thing, I who profess not to care what other people think, any simpleton can see that the opposite is true, that in fact it's all I care about, as is now abundantly evident, and what's also abundantly evident is that I don't stand for much of anything least of all for some kind of fierce independence of spirit, talk about self-delusion. There's no one to call me on my bullshit, I live in a fantasy world, that much is true, I want people to like me, what could be more painfully obvious, people who have blogs want attention and lots of it, attention and approval, everything I stand for my ass.

I usually choose the city at random, although I'm thinking of making a more systematic study to look for regional differences. Here in Portland discretion is king, lots of "curious" closet cases, lots of married schlubs wanting some cock on the down-low, which is fine and a longstanding tradition but man are they pussies about it here, you can practically smell the fear of discovery. The pictures can be pretty repulsive, but the language is what it's all about, the words people choose, the lingo, the phraseology, a whole book could be written about it, an article at least, in one of those so-called edgy alt weeklies, those publications are phonier than I am, the language of sex ads, gay sex ads in particular, as if that requires spelling out, you know perfectly well I'm not going to so much as glimpse the other kind. Not for any reason. I'm as gay as I don't know what and always have been, none gayer than me. It makes me less interesting but what are you gonna do.

My favorite phrase from this morning's ads: DISCRETE HEAD.

penny factions

I smolder when I see coins lying around just anywhere. Any coins. First, I hate loose change, second there's a bowl. I mean what is the purpose of even having the bowl. Efforts to rid the country of pennies are thwarted by the penny factions, what chance does my dream of a coin-free world have? And others like me. Paper money can stay. I'm not crazy about it for germ reasons but it can stay for now. Criminals need it, and people who snort cocaine, and gift-giving grandparents who might also be hookers. There's a romance about paper currency, I get it. But coins. Without coins, everything will be rounded. I dream of a rounded, real loosey-goosey sort of life. Not just money, also grades, and time. No one will arrange to meet a friend at 4:15. Fourish, that's the best you can do. No two batches of cookies will taste the same. One super buttery, the next chalky, dry as dust. Imagine the choking. Wouldn't you take your chances in such a world? Precision will be the domain of the scientists, engineers, track and field people. Baseball will remain unchanged except for the sudden absence of the radar gun and its digital display.

stalker dog

Someday (but really never) I'll write the definitive study of dogs in Tarkovsky. Of course there's the dog in the famous last shot of Nostalghia. But the dog in Stalker is in more scenes.

Another thought on Stalker. Forget personality tests, forget the opinion of friends and colleagues. Worthless! The world learns something genuine about your personality when it discovers whether or not you laugh when the phone rings in The Zone.

consider panicking

The years of living dangerlessly, previously discussed, have not diminished my fret capacity. Last night there was a concern about the refrigerator. First the light went out, never a neutral observation, no less disorienting than darkness at noon. The emotion made me chew my lip. Then, in the midst of this cushiony heat, heat you could recline in and be carried down the road, the motor was heard to be distinctly silent. Once you notice the absence you begin to wonder, how often does the motor kick in? Should I hear it, say, right this minute? Or would later be more appropriate? When is the moment to consider panicking? Now? I had no choice but to go to bed and think of other things, like waking up, other ambitions of middle age. This morning what was the first thing I checked? You got that right buster brown.

bejeweled raiment

In old movies and TV shows, people change clothes at various times of the day, depending on what they've been doing or what they're about to do, or for no apparent reason other than it's fun to change, to feel surrounded by a different garment, or for the sake of observers and their scrutinies. I've never once in my life changed clothes unless I had to, for instance because of moisture or filth or sudden weather changes or sometimes the "wrong" feeling, the seam craziness, the twist issues, the movable/unstable waist. Also spattering and similar misadventure, wandering erotic secretions, the plop, mistargeted food or drink, electric toothbrush errors, or The Itch. When I put clothes on in the morning I just assume those will be the same clothes I take off at night, in the same thoughtless way one assumes one will live to see tomorrow, unless I know I'm going to a wedding later, or a funeral. I've never been to a funeral. I think, what will be my first funeral. I mean who. They say you always remember your first funeral. No, that's kiss.

clothes moths

Clothes moths in the bedroom. What a clumsy name, clothes moths. Better than wasp nests. They're tiny and brown and shimmer in the light. It's the larvae you need to kill. I read all about the life cycle. The egg attaches to carpet fibers with a sort of dreadful glue ball, making it difficult to vacuum. The egg hatches, the larva eats the carpet, or other nearby organic material. We have bald spots in the carpeting. Luckily we can't stand the carpeting, it's brown wall to wall carpeting upstairs, installed by the cheap previous owners, the house's prior owners whose cheapness and DIY haplessness is evident in every room. The flying adults don't eat. The adults, who are the only really visible form, are not really the root of the problem of course, they never are in any bug infestation, but that's what we kill because who can see the eggs? Answer: nobody. The adults are ridiculously easy to kill. They don't move, you don't have to sneak up on them. You know how hard it can be to kill a fly. This is the opposite, you just waltz right up to one sitting on the wall, no stealth needed, hold out your tissue or whatever, and take it down. It won't even move. And they turn to powder when you so much as touch them, suddenly they're a smudge on a paper towel. I'm embarrassed for them. But again, we can kill the adults all day long, it won't solve the problem. We can't use just any insecticide. When our dog JB is exuberant he likes to hug the floor with his face. Then he falls on his back and writhes and flips and barks happily. This is usually right before bedtime. So we'd prefer not to poison JB. I was told about a spray that will kill moth larvae but not harm JB. So we moved everything out, sprayed, and moved everything back in. So we'll see. They were in our clothes, in our drawers, in our closet. We had to buy plastic bins to hold our clothes during the infestation. When it's bedtime I have to check under the pillows, sometimes they fly out from underneath. It's a little on the biblical side. I've found crushed, smeared moth carcass under my body when I get up in the morning. It's sickening. Luckily they're very small or I'd be throwing up daily. I know I shouldn't feel dirty but I feel dirty. I feel guilty and dirty, a dirty person who invited vermin into his home, who got the vermin he deserved by being dirty and poorly educated, who feeds his kids from the convenience store, throws colorful bags of salty snacks at his kids to shut them up, and buys many lottery tickets.

rims

I'm not sure I can call what I've been doing "meditating." These are the first tentative efforts. I am an acutely self-conscious person. I have been known to bolt upright from a particularly disturbing and perverse dream, fearful that someone saw me dreaming such a thing. The book keeps mentioning my nostrils. I am not accustomed to my nostrils being the focus of sustained attention, much less the "rims" of my nostrils. Even writing "my nostrils" makes me uncomfortable. I was trying to meditate but I kept imagining the enormous presidential nostrils of Mount Rushmore, and then the climactic scene from North by Northwest, and then Eva Marie Saint, and then George Segal, who starred with her in that movie Loving, from the 70s, in fact a very 70s movie, which also had David Doyle who was Bosley on "Charlie's Angels." It was the artist George Segal who did those lifesize casts of people, like Pompeii victims. Sterling Hayden was also in Loving. I admire Sterling Hayden. I could never be a man like Sterling Hayden, an actor, novelist, brawny adventurer of the high seas. Sterling Hayden lived a full and fearless life. The vigor of a Sterling Hayden is a source of awful shame for a person such as myself. I'm not entirely lacking in admirable qualities but hale I am not.

I am trying to follow the instructions, which are so patient and gentle and full of reminders to refrain from self-reproach. These are not qualities I normally associate with me. Yet I am optimistic.

set a spell

It's 7:50AM and I am going to meditate, as soon as I post this. The house is quiet. The birds are loud but the house is quiet. My cat has not yet begun to do that thing. One of my favorite words is insofar. I'd like to see a Chinese restaurant called In So Far. I love the way it looks, the meaning, the mouth feel, the downhill rush of it. Those of us who love words should remember to keep it platonic. I'm going to try to make my blog breezier, more approachable. More hey there, come on up and set a spell.

dominant themes

What are the dominant themes of your life? We've learned that everyone has dominant themes. If you're told something enough times eventually you will work it into your mental categories, since the mind is weak. Plus we love narratives, apparently. I don't, but in some way I must, since I'm one of us. We love to say we're this or that sort of person. Otherwise intelligent people will suddenly start yammering about their Myers-Briggs category, as if it's any less ridiculous than sun signs. One of the worst things you can say to a person is, You're no different than the rest of us. My ex Derek, back in something like 1999, said to me, You know Ronnie, you're a pretty simple guy deep down. I replied, Even deeper down I'm nothing at all. If you go deep enough nothing makes any sense. I think about dominant themes, dominant themes. You must be wary of self-delusion. I am fairly sure, I mean with some degree of confidence I can assert, that is with only minor qualifications I'm comfortable saying that distraction is one of my dominant themes. More specifically, it's possible that I am the most distracted person in the world. If I begin doing something I begin to suspect almost immediately that I should be doing something else. Then I begin thinking about asteroids, or oil slicks, or brain chiggers. An inability to concentrate is one of my dominant themes, most likely. My mind is all over the place, but nowhere interesting.

That's why I've started meditating. Mindfulness meditation, or any of its one hundred other names. The one where you focus on your breath. Its adherents boast that it increases your powers of concentration. Its adherents say a lot of things. Everything's adherents make big claims, it's in the nature of advocacy to oversell, thus triggering skepticism and resistance in thoughtful people. Acai berries, democracy. But I am giving it a go. The hard part is finding the peace and quiet. Since I no longer stay up all night and sleep during the day, since I'm now up at 7 each morning, there is always something going on, there is no stillness. But I am trying, or should I not try, does it go against the principles of meditation to try, to strive. I forgot, I'll look it up. What leads to suffering again? Is it trying? If trying is bad then I won't try, instead I'll do the thing that isn't trying, but which is different than the not trying I've always done.

no kind of brittle

I still have my wisdom teeth, and at this point in my so-called journey through life it's unlikely I'll ever need them removed. I have a large mouth, there's room for everyone in there. I could probably handle someone's else's wisdom teeth in addition to my own. It doesn't look so big from the outside but once you're in you'll marvel at the spaciousness. I tend not to gape but if I did it'd be noteworthy. I'll probably never need my tonsils out, although they gave me a day of trouble recently. It felt like I'd swallowed a Yahtzee pencil. My appendix? Extant. It could still burst, however, perhaps causing a fatal sepsis. Did you know a woman recently had her appendix removed via her vagina?

As far as I know I've never broken a bone. I move along rather carefully. I'm aware at all times of the possibility of hidden trap doors, loose steps, debris in the path, sudden steep drop-offs, people angrily exploding out of restrooms with no regard for anyone who might be walking by at that moment. I never act out in frustration or anger, never kick a food processor or attempt to heave a computer, never punch a wall. I wield no weapons of any kind. I've never handled a firearm. I don't engage in sports or any athletic endeavor whatsoever. I avoid crowds in which jostling or being stepped on or pushed might occur. I do not drive a car or take the bus, train, tram, airplane, funicular, skateboard, helicopter, or bicycle. I eat no kind of brittle. I look forward to the gradual and undramatic senescence which my life of caution has earned me.

should i take the owl

death blow

One of the benefits of having a blog is the ease with which you can look over past entries to find out precisely what sort of monster you are, or what breed of angel, rather than having to rely on imprecise measures such as the emotion-clouded reports of loved ones and the notoriously unreliable but numbingly frequent self-evaluations one is given to when one has as much free time as I have and little to no interest in the world at large to crowd one's unremittingly narcissistic thoughts. And yet, how tedious you become to yourself. And by you I mean me. I can't stand reading it for very long. What was I thinking when I wrote this or wrote that, what could have possibly led me to believe it was worth typing, much less posting. Just stop. Few people are interesting enough to withstand such intense scrutiny, and surprisingly I'm not one of them. How I'd love to find someone else tedious for once. I find many people interesting, actually, but they are not likely to find me interesting enough to talk to. Lately the people I find the most interesting have not been all that kind to me. No gestures, no thrown bones. It's my own fault for not being sufficiently compelling. And yet here I go, writing and posting, over and over, all about me, when nobody is reading. I must have a reason for doing it, but what? It's a mysterious compulsion. If it were just the act of jotting things down I could do the same thing without posting it publicly, after all. What did people do before blogs, what did I do? Apparently there are no unbroadcast thoughts now. In the past, you rarely heard from the most interesting people alive. Years would go by. The winter, the spring, the harvest. The only people whose thoughts you read frequently were newspaper columnists, and they weren't talking about themselves for the most part, they were expounding on things. You know, in the world. The trouble abroad, the extinction of the dodo, the terrible shipwreck. The diaries of interesting thinkers were published years after their deaths, if at all. Have you read James Schuyler's diaries? And their letters. I have a gorgeous first volume of Beckett's letters, which I've only dipped into a little. If I haven't read deeply in Beckett's letters, or James Schuyler's wonderful diaries, why should I read my own blog? It's ludicrous. And this, right here, the worst thing of all. Every blog succumbs to this at one time or another. Blogging about blogging. Embarrassing. This is always the nadir of a blog, and sometimes the death blow. Maybe it leads to something different, something better.

boy of him

Every Father's Day I consider making contact with my dad, who lives warmly abroad with his subsequent wife. We have not spoken or listened to each other in twenty years by reason of benign positional drift. At least I think it's benign. I remember softly exhaling gratitude for his shruggish indifference upon being informed of the general butt of my lust's humor. I don't even really have anything to express to him except for the usual decadal paroxysms one is subjected to by nature's penchant for mawkish periodicity. Families should have yearbooks except for the fact that one never graduates. Oh, dad. C'mere, son. My old man. My son, my son, my boy. I'm the only living boy of him, bracketed by two girls and two deaths, one of each. Not that that fact resonates much with him, he's not really the type to weed up sentiments now to be overcome by later, in a squelching banquette or on the gravelly asymptote of an evening's reservoir. No, what I actually want to say to him is, do you have or have you ever had prostate cancer or hypertension, what is your rate of urination, dad, please rate your satisfaction of said discharge according to this simple numeric scale. I need a family medical history. His brother, my uncle/stepdad, had a touch of fatal heart trouble, some years ago. But that was a case of defect and probably doesn't concern me. My dad lives, probably, and is about 74, I am convinced. He could very well be thriving, medically. Whether he is thriving otherwise is none of my business, as he would be the first to insist. But I still need some data about his urethra and so on, for the cold clipboard. Maybe they make a greeting card for this. Whenever I find a card with a picture of an exceptionally cute puppy on it I always buy two, one to give and one to intentionally misplace, so that I'll find it one day while frantically looking for some important document or other. In this way I will force my future anxious self to pause, to smile, to look at a puppy and feel the serenity of the Buddha. But I misplace them so well that I don't come across them again for many years, and then when I do stumble upon one my first thought is that the puppy must be dead by now.

last seen

The other day someone died flying a kite. Not much else to tell regarding that one, other than to say that I am vindicated in my avoidance of kites. It makes me queasy to be connected to something so high. My legs start to shiver. I've been following this other case, a missing uncle. There's been an emerging pattern of missing uncles throughout the Pacific Northwest, going back to the early 70s, but only now is the scope of the phenomenon becoming understood. Of course everyone else is focused on the missing Portland boy, the one who vanished from elementary school. He was last seen wearing a CSI t-shirt. When they send out the dive teams and repeatedly polygraph the stepmother you know good news isn't just around the corner. Many of the cases I follow are never resolved. I never did find out why that oncologist threw his kids and himself off the balcony a few years ago. This was Dr. Van Dyk in Florida. Apparently men rarely kill the kids and themselves without also killing the wife, whereas women are more likely to kill the children and themselves, leaving the husband alive, according to a study by the Violence Policy Center. People look for the hidden key behind such acts because they think life will be illuminated in some way, but it rarely is. Not that it's a bad strategy. Can a scrapbook of accumulated negations suggest the contours of its opposite? Life! I come at you with awkward, violent hugs and a sweat stain resembling the Sea of Marmara on the back of my shirt. I advance on life ambiguously, with who knows what intent. All I know is that when I am given the choice of any donut in the box I always choose a filled one, even though I don't know what it's filled with and might not like it--indeed might find it disgusting, as many or even most donut fillings are--because the filled ones by definition have more donut than the ones with holes. I have had heated arguments about the merit of this strategy, about what sort of person it makes me. As if anything makes me any sort of person. As if I am any sort of person to begin with! I am very much no sort of person. Not only that but it has nothing to do with what I was previously talking about. I love my little family, in our little bed in our little house, where I am safe except when I take a shower in the middle of the night, or if everyone else is asleep but me. I just realized that I have it backward, completely backward. In fact I always choose the one with the hole, but now I can't remember why. I don't remember arguing for the hole but I must have.

till

I recently had a birthday, and along with the gifts of finest silk and international cheeses, I was visited by the ghouls of time. You know that thing older people say, that as you get older the years simply fly by? Surprisingly, it's true. Just a short (or long) time ago, it slipped my mind that the 2000s occurred. The decade, not the century. Whatever we decided to call that decade, that one. I forgot it was there. Someone made a reference to 1997 and I did that mental thing, that thing where you reflexively figure out when that was, who you were, what you were doing, etc. And I thought it was strange that I had to really think about it, considering it was just three years ago. And I thought, wait, that's not right, what am I doing wrong. Oh yes, there's a decade in there, the sly little motherfucker.

So I've embarked on a new project, temporarily setting aside work on my autobiography. It needed to simmer for a while anyway, till something new happened. I'd already gotten up to age 28 and it was looking pretty thin, and my 30s are when things really slowed to a crawl for me. By the way, I hope you know that till is correct, not 'til or, even worse, 'till. This confuses a lot of people. The British have this down, it's Americans who are in love with 'til. There is no 'til, OK? People think 'til is some kind of contraction of until, but they're wrong. Till is correct. Look it up. And not "on the internet," look it up in a proper and authoritative book on English usage, like Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. In fact, don't bother, I'll quote from Garner myself:

Till is, like until, a bona fide preposition and conjunction. Though less formal than until, till is neither colloquial nor substandard (emphasis added). If a form deserves a sic, it's the incorrect 'til. Worse yet is 'till, which is abominable.

Got it? So you'll quit doing that, right?

Back to my new project, which is to slow the passage of time. I believe I can succeed, and hence live a longer life. The problem has been that I live a pretty much eventless existence. I am a person to whom nothing ever happens, and I seal my fate by never attempting to force the issue. I let nothing happen, I do not allow vulgar event to sully the smudgeless void that is my being. So my project is to record every micro-phenomenon, every subevent, every near-incident that happens to me or almost happens to me. In this way I will pull occurrences out of my ass and make them real, and when your life is filled with events, Event Gravity slows down time. Events, after all, are what make time. There is no time without events to mark it, and the more events there are the more substantial time feels. Right now time is at Mach 2 for me because nothing ever happens, every day is like every other day, then suddenly there I am picking out Arbor Day presents again. One must throw obstacles in front of time to slow it down, like throwing barrels of medical waste out the back of an Econoline van to slow down the pursuing squad cars.

I will dutifully record in a journal (a Mead composition book, 100 sheets, wide ruled) every external and internal event, every whim, every mood swing (a volume in itself), every itch, every throb, every notion, every resentment, every good and bad idea, every symptom, every dream, every baffling caprice, every hope, every fear, every strangulating terror, every meal, every TV show, every book, every movie, every fortune cookie, every orgasm, every corn muffin, etc. And of course, the rare but actual events that occasionally insert themselves into the otherwise blank duration of me. In this way the featureless landscape of my being will seem (and more importantly, feel) rich with happening, positively chock-a-block with vibrant and colorful detail.

If I do a good job the next few months will seem interminable, and that will really be living.

Diane Selwyn's SOS

what was that for?

I'm easy on the eyes except when I'm sitting on your face. Well, I'm easy on the eyes in the sense that I don't emit blinding radiation that might damage your retinas. I am not an attractive person, in the usual sense. I am not an attractive person in any unusual senses either. I am offbeat looking, there is a puffy aspect, a suggestion of just having awoken from a lengthy coma during which the possibility of humane termination had been discussed amongst my loved ones, an impression of stacked oblate spheres wobbling together clumsily, like a drunken snowman. A dirty drunken snowman rolling down a hill, having been pushed by some neighborhood boys. Those mean sexy boys with their Starburst Fruit Chews and their adorable haircuts and their pretty smokin' hot dads. I am vaguely ethnic in appearance but not in an intriguing way. Yet there is a quality about me, you must admit. You sort of can't take your eyes off me, can you. An intangible quality. What is it? It's sort of like when you're watching TV late at night and a commercial comes on, one of those ones you never see during prime viewing hours, and you don't ever really pay attention to commercials but this one is odd because it's been on for 15 seconds and you still can't figure out what it's advertising, an eternity in the world of television, you're sort of reluctantly riveted, is it intentionally ambiguous like some of those pharmaceutical ones where there's a woman looking out a window very early in the morning but you don't know why, or is it just inept, or maybe a put-on of some sort, will the payoff reveal that it's a teaser for some kind of comedy program, something satirical, a deft sendup of contemporary marketing cliches? So you keep watching, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, but then it ends and you're just as confused as ever. What was that for? That's the question people will ask about me someday, after I'm gone. You'll see. Everyone has a calling in life, and mine is to leave people just as confused as ever.

no bridge but bloat

I learned that it's medically inadvisable to take Benadryl every night for the duration of one's life. This is a problem because I need it to sleep. I used to take it for hay fever, but there are more powerful and non-sedating drugs for that. So I take other drugs for my allergies and good old Benadryl to make me fall asleep. But it turns out there are warnings, there have been studies, etc. The usual. So I haven't slept well in a week as I search for a non-prescription sedative that is safe to take every night for however long I stubbornly persist in living. I'm looking into the world of herbals, a very annoying world full of gentle people with vague degrees from little colleges in the verdant foothills of a western state. Herbs come in plastic bags and look like weed or in large capsules that smell like a corpse rolled in horse manure. I have a tea ball and bags marked "skullcap" and "passionflower," capsules labeled "valerian." None of these will help me, most likely, but I am trying everything, systematically, because I don't want to resort to prescription sedatives which are probably more harmful over the long term than my beloved Benadryl. I'm taking melatonin, I'm trying to relax, when I look at myself while brushing my teeth I try not to let myself get drawn into a stressful and fruitless dialogue, as is my habit. Calmness and a relaxed mind are crucial in the hours before sleep is attempted. Attempted. Even the language doesn't come naturally to me. You shouldn't attempt sleep, you should fall into its loving arms or float away on it, or something. But I do attempt it, I attempt it like jumping double dutch, or I take a running start and close my eyes and leap, like someone working up the nerve to commit suicide from the old iron bridge (1935), one of the most magnificent legacies of the Public Works Administration. The literature says to draw yourself a hot bath, but I hate baths, I have never been a bath person, to me there are few things in life less relaxing than a nice warm bath, it's been years since I've taken a bath and if I started now in some misguided attempt to relax I would only succeed in working myself up into a wet blob of anxiety, anxiety tinged with anger. My anxiety is almost always tinged with anger over being anxious. I deeply resent my anxiety and it doesn't take much for my resentment to become anger and then rage. Probably if I learned to take a bath, if I worked on the bath problem and whatever is my hangup about baths, my problem with sleeping might begin to clarify itself, it's possible my bath problem and my sleeping problem are related, or are manifestations of a more general problem. Of course there is a limit to such thinking, of course ultimately every problem becomes a symptom of the living problem and what good does it do to realize that? Yet it's true that I have always loathed taking a bath and I have always had insomnia, for as long as I can remember. Perhaps someday I will be a devotee of the relaxing, soothing bath, the bath ritual, the scented candle, perhaps vanilla, the fluffy, almost sumptuous towel and robe, why not treat myself to a little luxury I'll tell myself, one must be good to oneself after all, the nightly bath in which I let the worries of the day float away with wisps of steam, and then I will be able to sleep too, having learned the art of true relaxation, and of course I will fall asleep in the bath and drown, leaving a bloated, revolting corpse for my loved ones to discover. I will die of relaxation and calmness, centeredness and spiritual serenity, and my story will become a cautionary tale for others about the hidden dangers of tranquility, my legacy will be only a legacy of irony, not iron but irony, no bridge but bloat, and not even interesting irony, only cheap irony, the cheapest kind of har-har zinger irony that stupid people feel proud of themselves for recognizing, that will be my only legacy to the world of the living. Harold Ickes can go fuck himself, and Roosevelt too.

the human condition