Jackie Delbecq is Dead

In the snow
I remember Jacqueline was with me the afternoon I decided I knew what love was. The ground is powdered and the mountains draped in white.
In my mind
the atmosphere is smeared with the haze of brilliant summer sun. Sweaty legs stick to the beige vinyl car seats. Windows open, I hide my words under the noise of the road and the cars we pass.

She hears me anyway.

"You're never supposed to say that to anyone. You promised you wouldn't."

I couldn't have been but nineteen. Yet, I knew everything I knew.

"But it's true," I said, for once not pleading.

She cried. She was not afraid to die of hurt beside me. I had to pull
over.
And then over
she said through her tears, "You said you would never say that to me."

Parts of my history make me want to remove my mark from the earth, George Bailey style,
unsaved by angels.
Not out of spite. Not for anything other than to erase the pain I've caused I would like to undo my birth,
to allow all the goodness and badness of things to have happened without me.
I could hide in anonymity behind the television screen,
switching channels when the suspense got too high -
like I was a spectator watching a home improvement show. Someone else's hammer hits someone else's thumb. Someone else measured incorrectly and so now the boards don't fit. Someone else carries the bricks from the front yard to the back.

There would be no note of me, no regret because I would never have been. And the house would have never been built.

I never told her I loved her, but she said she loved me. It wasn't supposed to matter.
I was free and clear.
I never told her.
That's the way it works.

Today the air is filled with snow.
Inside my boots my toes ache from the cold.
The bald eagles are all grounded and the frigid breeze carries no raven's call.

I sing along with the improbable song in my head, exhaling a warm cloud that is all that remains of a day in the summer when I told her I did not love her and would not stay with her.

In the snow
I wonder what I might have become had I not been so sure. Today I ask God to consider I was only a child making those decisions. I ask for a lighter sentence as I could hardly have been expected to act with any degree of the greater wisdom I have acquired with age.

Would that I had not spent the rest of my life escaping the summer for the cold.

---

I did not sleep with Jackie. It would not have worked out at all.

She assured me there would be no problem. Something in her childhood made it impossible for her to bear children. There was little that could happen beyond being caught by her parents.

The thought of it terrified me. You might think there was something wrong with me, a healthy nineteen year-old heterosexual boy turning down an invitation to a girl's bedroom in an empty house.

It was a summer day between high school and college. A warm humid morning. Everyone was at work, but we were pre-responsibility. All the time in the world and nothing to do. My car was at the curb. I'd answered her phone call, promised I'd stop over. I stood on her front lawn next to the Norwegian Elkhound, looking up at her at her bedroom window, reverse Romeo.

"I can't come up. I have to go."

"But where are you going?"

"To work."

"You're not dressed for work."

"Well, to Mike's then."

"Wait, I'll come with you."

I waited. Honestly. I want to be that person. I don't want to remember I left before she got to her front door.

---

She wrote me letters. She called. When I went away to college, she went to my house and hung out with my parents. My mom's tinny telephone-compressed voice told me through my Miami dorm room receiver: "Jackie stopped by."

"Uh huh."

"Why?"

"Stanford doesn't start for another week."

"But why is she coming here?"

"I don't know. I have homework."

But I did know. And knowledge is not truth. Truth is not certainty. I was not her true love. I would not be.

---

Now it turns out that the girl I was seeing, with whom I was convinced there was true love, broke up with her boyfriend and he began seeing Jackie. The two of them got married as did the girl and I some 23 years ago.

And is wont to happen with the massive available connectivity of the internet, I found my old high school on the net. They have a website now, and an alumni association which also has a website. Next year will be the 30th anniversary of my graduation from high school.

In that time, CD players were invented. Personal computers became a household appliance. Iran/Contra and Greneda gave way to two wars in Iraq. The Japanese took over the American television set industry and put out of business such staid names as RCA, Magnavox, and Zenith. Apartheid ended. The Berlin wall fell. Yugoslavia burst into tiny genocidal pieces. The human genome was sequenced. We got pictures from the surface of Titan. The face on Mars proved to be a hardly-face shaped mountain.

Why does the past weigh upon us so heavily, then? What are we looking for that makes us ask those questions we neither want answered nor will benefit through having answered?

The site put me in touch with some former classmates. We hadn't had the need to converse for 30 years and being cordial didn't give way to anything more than polite civility.

I found that my so-called best friend from high-school was working as a barista at a coffee house in Philadelphia. He shunned the internet and anything to do with his youth in New Jersey. He didn't sound pleased I'd contacted him, but he didn't try to end the conversation prematurily.

And he answered quickly when I asked him about Jackie.

"She died."

I think I said, "Wow," or something to hide the gut-punched grunt I couldn't hold in. "Of what?"

"She was sick. It was a long time ago, though."

"A long time."

"Jeeze. Like almost twenty years."

"My God. She was young."

"We were all young."

---

I loved to read stories by Ray Bradbury. And even though I couldn't understand some of them, the mood they engendered poured over me like warm syrup and enveloped me in the possibility that unseen things could be.

There was one story of which rereading could not improve my comprehension. The action is simply a child denying a grandparent her own childhood. It was important to the child that her grandmother say that she had never been young, and the way things were, were the way they had always been.

Now I scan the electronic web pages of my high school alumni newsletter and see faces attached to names. Graying men smile through bifocals. Lines crease faces that suggest resemblances to girls I once fought shyness to ask to the Homecoming dance. Their children are taller than they are and it seems they are imperfect copies of a truer group of people that I know existed, in a time that is real to me.

The adults in the pictures are not the teenagers I remember. These middle-aged men in golf shirts could never have been the ones who spray painted the red barn. These are not the shadows of the ones who drank vodka and orange juice before math class. These are not the ones with who made fires on the beach and at midnight streaked naked past the lovers writhing in blankets near the pier.

Now I know I will not find among them anyone who claims to be her.

At night I lie awake in awe of the sublime truth, that life treats us the way waves wash shells to and from the sand. Now I cannot sit with her anywhere but in my mind. And she never said she loved me. And I never had to reply.

I am absolved from wondering that had I possessed the courage, another life would have happened. It's the way life works. I'm in the clear.

Because the way it is now is the way it has always been. And I grieve for something that never was.

Weird Headless Death Cult of Writers

"Your problem is you just do it," Kat says. She puts her iced coffee on the sticky metal patio table. We're sitting in the outdoor area at the coffee house, on those metal chairs that are about as comfortable as an autopsy table. When you get up there's a grid on your ass.

It's spring and everyone is thinking about sex. I am, and Kat must be but I don't really wanna go there with her because I'm married and she's engaged and besides, that sort of thing is bad between friends who want to stay friends.

Middle-aged guys walk by, unconsciously sucking in their guts as they blare mental images, days they used to catch frisbees, shirtless on tan sand beaches.

A woman glides past on rollerblades, her long auburn hair trailing in the slipstream, bikini top over jeans shorts, the world whispering past in her black plastic sunglasses. She slides through the lacey shade cast by the eucalyptus trees and I follow her with my eyes, soaking up summer Ray Bradbury style, a kid with brand new sneakers that speak the freedom of running on marshmallows. Reminds me of a time on spring break. Fort Lauderdale. Must have been something like 1979. What the hell was her name?

Remember the song was, "Always and Forever." Sing the first few words.

Kat tells me to cut it out, that it's rude to be having coffee with one woman and stare at another, which makes me forget for a moment that she's criticising me.

"What are you singing?"

"Little things can make you drift in the springtime. I'm singing a memory. My whole life has this maniacal soundtrack. It's stupid sometimes. Stuff like disco got stuck in there back in the seventies. I still remember them playing 'She's a Brick House' at the Homecoming dance I went to stag. Bad time. But that girl on skates...damn...reminded me someone a long time ago made me feel like like I didn't care if the world detonated and left me floating in space surrounded by sand that used to be California. Give my fortune to feel that way again."

"Fortune? You?" she asks, looking over the top of her sunglasses in a way that makes me really want to kiss her bad--(ly). So so bad.

"When I get one," I say. Then, "Why are you sitting all the way over there?"

"In your dreams," she says, stays where she is, goes back to telling me why she's not reading my book.

She says, "Writing is art. You...you just do it because you can, not because you love the art of it."

Kat's a professional writer. Been published in lots of the big magazines. No books yet, but all over the newspapers and national weeklies. Journalist. Some short stories not sold. Once her novel sells, she'll be my hero. For now she's just a friend who's better than me at what I want to do more than breathe.

"But I love writing," I tell her. Stutter a little trying to figure the words. "I love to be with writers. It's why I love being with you, right?"

"That's the only reason? Because you think you can get writing advice from me?"

"Shit. Damn. NO. I that's not what I mean. Okay--can we just rewind? Put one on the scoreboard for woman-kind. I fucked up. Fine. It's not what I meant and you know it. Don't jerk me around that way; you're not my wife. Why the hell are all my friends women now? What happened to all my guy friends?"

She says she's sorry and that I drove my guy friend away. Just teasing. Goes back to telling me why she doesn't like the short story I sent her, and the book I have a contract to produce even less.

"Your stuff is like a movie. I see everything that's happening, but I don't know what anybody's thinking."

"Uh huh," I say, remembering the cardinal rule of constructive criticism is you shut up and listen. But I'm thinking really hard I always put a lot of thinking in my stories.

"They're just not...I dunno. They're not enough... Maybe because it's like, I KNOW you. So I know how you think and when I read your stuff it's like...personal. Why are you doing this to me? This is hard."

"I'm doing this because you said you wanted to read my book and the short story for Bill's Antarctica anthology and then three weeks went by and you said nothing. I mean, I can take, 'Billy-bob, this shit sucks really bad.' Of course I want to hear, 'Billy-bob, you're a fucking genius.' But nothing is death. Stab me through the heart sort of death. Do you realize of the eight people I gave the book to, Laurie said she cried her eyes out, Paolo loved it, and the other six of you writer-types just went into your shells. So if you hate it, just say so. You're killing me with this bizzare non-functional kindness. Say something or let me go back to mentally masturbating about beautiful semi-clad women, thank you very much."

Kat rubs her head like something uncomfortably hot is going on inside. I take a swig of my iced latte wishing I could get on with the rest of my life, but I'm stuck. I have no job for the first time in 20 years. My writing seems to be selling, but then my best friend critics are saying zero about it, which makes me think it sucks. And even then I couldn't support my family on those earnings. Still need some kind of other job.

Two girls walk by in tight hip-hugger jeans and tube tops, wide white belts around their waists, hair flowing down their backs like Julie from "Mod Squad". It's like the 70's all over again, only now we have killer viruses you can't cure with a penicillin shot. I was too young for free sex in the 70's, too married in the new millennium.

Grew a beard in Antarctica and it's showing a little gray. Sheep dog kind of thing. Kat likes it.

I would much rather be having sex right now than thinking about being a failure at everything I do.

So I tell Kat she's not being helpful and I suggest something else not helpful that's coming from the sun and the hormones I still have even though I'm a lot older than spring break girl, Fort Lauderdale, Always and Forever.

"We could go somewhere and fuck. Ever wonder why the characters on 'Friends' don't just have one big pile-on orgy? How the hell can you have that many attractive people in one place and they all act like they're oblivious to the fact they're in their prime breeding years?"

She says, "Because the show would be over in two episodes. Joey would cut Chandler's throat and the women would throw each other off the balcony. The survivors would commit suicide. You don't fuck your friends, Billy-bob. Not ever."

I say, "Wait. Okay. Strike, 'Fuck.' Make that--make love. Look, I'm thinking we head over to the Marriott across the street, check in, get naked and play with each other's soft parts all night. Then tomorrow we catch the next flight to Toledo. Tire capital of the world. You must have always wanted to see it, right? Or Borneo. Auckland, New Zealand and we can raise sheep and I promise not to fuck them. Whatever. I got a fricking Amex Platinum I can probably run up about quarter a mil on before the love of my life cuts it off. Then your fiancee would dump you and kick you out of the house, my honey would divorce me and take every cent I had, my kids would disown me, my mother would pretend I was never born, and I'd be totally unemployable because I'd have a mental breakdown. Doesn't that sound like a great idea? I'm thinking, hmmm, yes. Yes. Great idea. Whadda ya say? We go wreck our entire lives on one hormone-enraged act of supreme stupidity and then you don't have to explain what the fuck you mean that my book seems to be good but written by a guy who doesn't want to be an artist. It makes about the same amount of sense."

"You're nuts," she says.

"Yes, I am nuts," I assure her. "I went to Ant-fucking-arctica. I got a fucking book contract. I'm a fucking silicon valley electronics company executive, not a novelist explorer. Or maybe I'm an adventurer. Maybe I'm a latent adulterer. Kat, goddamn it. I don't know what the fuck I am anymore. What I am is defined by what I'm not, rather than what I can do and it's killing me. Is this a midlife crisis? I'm not anything. Not working. Writing crap people don't want to read. Not in Antarctica dying of exposure. Not fucking blonde bimbos when my wife isn't looking. Maybe I should start robbing banks. Why the fuck can't you tell me why my stuff is not good? What's wrong with me that I can't write bad enough to be bad and not good enough to be good? What's with all this fucking 'not'?"

She says, "Are you done?" Folds her arms and stares at me.

"No. I wanna fuck or I wanna do something that can get me killed. Maybe drag racing. Winter mountain climbing in Alaska."

"Go home and fuck your wife," she says. "You're a good writer. Stop acting like a baby."

I pull down my sunglasses and flutter my eyelashes. "You sure you can resist me?" And truth is, I wouldn't know what to do if she said she'd go with me, but everything inside is hurting way too much for me to act like I don't care anymore. In my brain I've got a picture of her naked with a chapter of my book in her hand, glasses on, reading aloud while I'm over her making babies that will never come because I've been neutered by some Air Force surgeon with a sharp knife.

"What's wrong with me?" I say.

"You're freaking yourself out. Look, work harder at your writing. Read something once in a while. Try to tell stories instead of flipping metaphors around like you don't have to do anything but give people analogies. People want to know what's happening, not how you feel about the landscape."

"My book is already sold. It's going to be printed," I say, knowing she doesn't have a book contract and wants one bad--(ly).

"It will have to be fixed. You have a lot more work to do," she says, and my heart sinks like a rock through hydrogen. Alcohol. I need to be getting drunk now. Really bad--(ly).

"I found this place on the web," I say. "It's full of writers. Good ones. They're all over the place like some kind of weird headless death cult of writer apostles. I've written some things for them and they're NICE to me. They tell me if they love stuff or hate it. They threaten to castrate me when I insult the bands they like. I feel like I'm home. These people, they think like me. It's called Everything2. They have these rules. Dole out points. It makes them write better, they think. They really try to make each other happy with their writing. They can't stop. They write and write because their genes make them do it. Are you sure we can't go somewhere and fuck? How about just oral sex? No penetration. A hand job. I'm cool with that if you are."

Kat whacks me with her empty coffee cup and makes me love her by reminding me you don't go fucking your friends, figuratively or literally. It just doesn't work. There's no such thing as casual sex. She's been there, done that, and there are bodies in shallow graves all along highway 80 to prove it.

She says, "That thing you wrote about Blink 182. That's the funniest thing I've ever read from you. Why don't you write more like that?"

I say, "That was funny? You laughed at that? What's wrong with you? That was a sensitive piece about making my children happy. You tempt me with your feminine wiles and then mock me with your insolence. Harlot!"

Kat knows nothing serious is going to happen anymore. She gets up and fishes the car keys from her purse, says, "I'm going now. I'm going to call 911 when I get to my car. I'm going to tell them to look for a crazed 40-ish guy molesting rollerbladers by the coffee roasting house. If you're not gone in fifteen minutes they're going to feed you Thorazine and take you away in a hamster cage. I promise."

I pull out my Amex card. Wave it around. "In half an hour we can be at the airport checking in. Toledo is waiting, darlin'. All that rubber. More steel belted radials than could fit in Madison Square Garden. All you have to do is say, 'Yes,' and your retread days are over."

She says, "You can't tempt me with Toledo. It's Akron where the tires are, honey. Go back to your Anything-2, or whatever that writer death cult is. Maybe they can help you." She turns to walk away and stops, says, "Tomorrow? Same time?"

I say, "Sure," and wait for the men in white coats.

August 1st 2009

So life is a juxtaposition of people and places
And things that happen
And everyone we meet for some reason
Things we see and do
And can never take or give back
Everything true and none of it false
When you really get to the heart of it
Everything is always true

For other people it's different but for me it starts and ends at the office:

---- Them -- you have to go to Germany and Armenia and probably Italy, before November
---- Me -- great, wonderful. You know why people have heart attacks? To get out of shit like this.
---- Them -- please don't have a heart attack.
---- Me -- Sometimes I'm really tempted, you know?

Radio loud on the way home from work - Dave Matthews, sotto voce, at the start of "Time Bomb", I think of sometimes

"Relax." Then he sings a song.

Relax. In my book
If Lyle Lovett had become a plumber there would be no reason for country music.
Though some would argue he's not exactly "country". More "Texas".
Amazon lists him as "alternative country".
He's got this cello player that comes out in the middle of a song and does a classical solo.
And a black gospel backing group
And a modified mullet.
And Tonto saying, "Kiss my ass," to the Lone Ranger.

We were in the third row and when they played "Penguins" The blonde haired girl broke out in uncontrollable laughter over the lines

"I don't go for fancy clothes
Diamond rings.
I go for penguins
Oh lord, I go for penguins.
Penguins are so sensitive.
Penguins are so sensitive
To my needs..."

so much so that the rhythm guitar player kept looking over and grinning.
Maybe he hadn't been around people who had paid $120 a seat to see Lyle Lovett and his Large Band
And didn't really know the music at all
During the economic downturn when people are being bankrupted by medical bills
We are laughing at Lyle Lovett
In the cold Saratoga night

We will always have the penguins, the blonde haired girl and me

**And I will rise up.
Though I be a dead man...**
Etc.

"Tomorrow we will play in Monterey, in an air conditioned theatre. Inside the way you're supposed to be in the summer," says Lyle about the fact it's 58 degrees F and dropping fast in the damp ocean breeze.

This is really country music, apparently,
To play jazz with a Gospel group and sing

"If I had a boat
I'd sail out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I'd ride him on my boat...
me upon my pony on my boat."

Which made me think of kids. It's a kid thing, to wish to ride your pony onto a boat.
So then me sentimental--a stressed out old sap--nerves frayed from weddings three days prior.
Shell shocked by the impact of the visiting ex's, and their accusing glares and my-life-was-ruined-head turns
then having to dance with your married daughter thinking -

I already did this once
She was just a little kid
Very small smiley criey blue eyed person thing
Head in the palm of my hand
Legs splayed on either side of my forearm
In one hand I held her dancing in the living room
To the vinyl music on the stereo
Stop crying till mommy comes home
No need to cry for I will slay lions
Bare handed and sharp toothed
Work to the bones for you

One day you will be married and I will be old
One day you will leave the same way I did
And everybody everywhere
else

**And I will rise up. Though I be a dead man.** Lyle's choir sang and me thinking - dear lord, when I was stoned last Thursday I thought it was the same as Alzheimer's. Just more of the distance that's already forming.

"You know, when I was a kid I thought you wrote this song for me," my wedding-dressed daughter says in my arms about Paul McCartney singing her name.

**And I will stand tall, until I meet my end.** I could knock on the door of many Gods. I could demand audience and they would speak to me.

"I did," I told her before I couldn't talk anymore.
"We'd like to invite the father of the bride to dance with his daughter."
"The Beatles stole it from me."

"Gina's worried you're going to try to ground her."

The younger sister's got her own car. She's got her own job. She lives in Santa Barbara. I could ground her about as easily as I could become Governor of California.

"Are you okay, now?" the bride says to me while we do that movement in embrace that seems like dancing to the people doing it and some kind of circular rhythmic walking to people watching. There is a story here about my eating some confection, fresh out of my freezer, that tasted of chemicals, and I found myself tripping through the rest of the day when I should have been doing errands. Everybody laughed. I sat around wondering about things most of the time. Like is this going to go away before I have to drive to the wedding tomorrow.

I ran errands anyway. Just like the 93-year old guy who drives into the farmer's market in Santa Monica killing 7 and maiming 12.

"Something wrong?" said the car wash lady who took my money when the stuff kicked in and I could barely count. I shook my head, wondering how I was going to drive off the lot, trying to remember which pedal was the clutch. What do the kids see in this? Is their reality so vivid they need to beat it into this real-time imagination? Oh, yeah. My friend Mark was there. He drove me home.

"Got your back, buddy," I remembered 200 times per second.

"She said she told you not to drive," my daughter says in my arms.

"She shouldn't poison her father," I say, forgetting the waltz.

"You shouldn't just eat random things," the bride says, sticking up for her miscreant college age sister.

"But it's my house."

"Well, okay." She says.

"You never did things like that. You were always a good kid."

"Daddy, I love you," she forgets she shouldn't say things like that when the camera guy is around. Too late.

**Though I be a dead man I will stand tall till I meet my end **

"He just spent the whole meeting yelling at us," says my chief technologist about the meeting I missed while dancing with my daughter. Because life gets in the way of work.

"I spent my whole night staring at the ceiling, imagining how I was going to confront him and probably lose my job," I say, because it's true

If I had a pony on a boat I'd sail into the ocean.

"Don't do that," says my technology guy.

"Don't eat stuff people put in your freezer," says my daughter.

"Weddings make me very sad, " says the blonde haired girl, nearly in a catatonic stupor.

"You have to tell them on Tuesday what we're doing - " says the sales guy. "Oh by the way, congrats on your daughter."

"Thanks."

"You can make it at 7AM, right?"

"No problem, I'll just hit the road by 5."

"He tossed out the preso we worked on."

"The one we spent the week on?"

"Yeah, he wants another one, by Monday so he can see it before the Tuesday meeting."

"You know why people have heart attacks?" You know why I'm dizzy all the time and can't remember where my glasses are?

"I love you, Daddy," says my daughter "Relax," says Dave Matthews. "If I had a boat and a pony," says Lyle Lovett. "I will stand tall."

Though I be a dead man. After the drugs and the emotion wears off, it feels like waking up. All the time.

While waking up for hours I scribbled this to me - please don't forget
And write it the way it's supposed to be written

The Undeniability of Fish

"This is ridiculous," I said, "look at this." The book was on a cart at the front of the store. One-dollar bargains.

The blonde-haired girl zoomed in, looked at the cover, then at me. "So?"

"I always thought the worst fate an author could face was to find his own work in the one-dollar bargain bin. And this guy deserves it."

"I don't get it," she said.

"Doesn't the title sound revoltingly stupid to you?"

"'Learn Electricity and Electronics...'" She shrugged.

"Learn electricity. Repeat that to yourself a couple times. Learn electricity. How the hell do you learn electricity?"

"So, it's missing a word. Learn about electricity. So they left out the, 'about.' So what?"

"It's madness. Simply madness." I put the book back onto the bargain bin cart. "No one is paying a dollar for this. Nobody. We come back in fifty years, that thing will still be there and electricity will still be unlearned, as it should be."

"Let's get some ice cream."

"But it won't restore my confidence in reality."

"The rest of us are really not worried about that."

"My point, exactly."

"I mean - the rest of us are not worried that you don't have confidence in reality. Reality is just fine for us."

I picked up the book again and held it to her. "Well, then why not learn electricity for a dollar?"

"Because I already know a dollar's worth."

I put back the book. We got ice cream.

Everything stayed the same.

---

I have decided that the fatal dose of Zolpidem is six. I have gathered accidental data.

The blonde-haired girl and I were on a plane home from Paris and I had been poisoned by French food. My temperature was elevated and my entire alimentary canal, though previously emptied of all contents, ached and complained it wished no further participation in sustenance of my corporeal self.

I tried to sleep on the 12-hour flight from Paris to San Francisco, but the pain was constant. Lucky for me I had my bottle of prescription sleeping drugs, and so I took one Zolpidem.

The effects come on quickly and in fact I did fall asleep rather rapidly. Though my sleep was to be interrupted repeatedly by severe stomach pain that penetrated the drug-induced sleeping haze.

After half an hour the pain subsided but I could not get back to sleep and I decided to do something I had never done before, which was to eat another Zolpidem. Fifteen minutes after the second pill, I was asleep again.

Over Greenland there was some severe turbulence - enough to rouse me from my two-Zolpidem sleep.

Now, one who believes he is conscious after two Zolpidem only realizes there is no such thing until after the effects are worn off and one remembers the stupidity in which one had been engaged under the influence. As for fully-drugged me, the terms reasonable and unreasonable were fluid and interchangeable - so it seemed a great idea to remain unconscious through g-force turbulence by eating yet another pill.

That made three, for those keeping count.

My next memory is of trying to exit the plane in a mental fog in which I was quite unbound by the requirement to control the physical self. I got through border control and customs, reclaimed my luggage, wound up in the airport limo and then later, home in my own bed all due to the watchful guidance of the blonde-haired girl.

When I next awoke in full possession of my mental facilities I was overcome with the horror of how totally I had poisoned myself, and how close I had come to being comatose, and how it felt to be barely connected to the Earth at large. I reasoned then, and still do, that a fourth Zolpidem would have rendered me completely inert, and a stretcher would have been required to get me off the plane.

Scientifically, then, I conclude that five Zolpidem probably would have killed me, but who knows - maybe net body mass it would be fatal for some people and not others.

Six is a death sentence. I am sure.

I remind myself of this every time I take one to get myself into a blissful sleep which nature has long since ceased to provide.

Each night I am 1/6th the way to death.

---

My ex-wife once asked me, "You mean, if I had asked you to stay, you would have?" about my leaving after we decided to get a divorce.

"Yes," I said. "But you didn't."

This is another form of death.

You can put that on my tombstone.

---

And this is another form of death:

The day before my daughter's wedding I ate what I thought was a peanut butter / chocolate candy and wound up under the influence of powerful drugs. The substances were placed in my refrigerator for safe keeping by the college students who frequent my home. The error in their thinking was that somehow I, the owner and primary inhabitant of this house, would never appropriate food placed haphazardly in my refrigerator freezer.

The packaging of the dosed confection did not provide any clue of its true content. I simply figured one of my family had tossed the candy into my freezer and had long forgotten it there.

Their loss, my gain, as is frequently used against me to stake claims to tasty foods in my home.

Things wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't eaten so much.

But I did. And they were.

The effects of the substance were slow in coming, distressing at their peak, and long lasting. For me, an individual with high blood pressure that is hardly contained by handfuls of prescription medications - the accelerated heart rate alone was tantamount to a near death experience. And indeed, in the state of altered imagination and heightened sensory input I was certain that I would not survive the drug trip, not because of the alteration of reality with which I was already marginally familiar from my youth, but rather, due to the maintenance of presence of mind with which I perceived my BP had reached levels that would cause permanent damage to my already fragile cardiovascular system.

In retrospect, though, I am disappointed at my behavior. I now realize that when threatened with imminent death I am not the brave soldier I frequently imagine I might be - because I was not able to focus on my surroundings and how my condition was affecting others. Instead, I fixated on the foreboding visceral pain in my chest, the chemically induced fear which I could not distinguish from actual fear, and during the worst of it, the fight for consciousness rather than calculation of a rational solution.

In this state I counseled myself, my subconscious speaking to me like a doting parent. The voice was my own, calm and collected, and it wanted information. While I suffered a sentient piece of me wanted to gather as much information about this event as possible for future use.

"It makes no difference what has happened before or what will happen later. Now is. Be, now," I repeated to myself over and over, wondering why I was thinking that. My memory was hopelessly distorted by the drug and I could not track from one moment to the next. The linearity of time was disrupted, which another piece of me found unlivable. My mind fractured and I recognized that the ego is the piece of the self that wishes ultimate control of reality. But like the verses in "A Course of Miracles" it was horribly evident that the ego itself was an artifice which was neither immortal nor ultimately moral. I realized that the ego is a device for functioning in the "real" world and it can be pushed aside.When that happens the real "you", whatever is buried under egos and ids and subconscious musings, finds itself in a battle for supremacy with those other fractious mental shards for the role of coordinating input from the outside to the self and constructing a model of the world at large.

My ego is a fierce fighter. It worked hard to reassemble a time line from the distortion it was receiving from my senses, and when it began to fail, it became fearful and angry. It threatened death to the rest of me.

"Now you feel what it is like to die. Total loss of self. Complete obliteration."

I did not like these thoughts in my head. They became concrete reality. Every thought amassed substance and I could not hide from the onslaught. It was like trying to dodge a rain of hammers by hiding under a cardboard box. I realized I was on the floor, shirtless, trying to merge with the Earth, some part of me talking to the blond-haired girl but most of me unable to comprehend what was being said by the piece of my mind in control of my mouth.

The calm me tried to get the rest of me to look aside from that.

"Cease to be concerned for the time line. Time is a perception construct, rather than a physical reality. True time is mutable, as any physicist can tell you."

But as imperfect as it is I - the ego "I" - did not want to lose my grip on my life because I knew that track of "me" through "time" is what I called "myself". Therefore, when it left I would die irrespective of whether or not by body survived.

And it occurred to me this state was indistinguishable from insanity. The failing structure of the rules of my mental processes was completely observable and I could "see", as if from a distance, exactly how and why some people exhibit mental dysfunction and some don't. I imagined my existing state of ultra-heightened sensory input and failing time line to be similar to that described by Oliver Sacks in those who have autism. A fire hose spewed sensory input brutally combined with internally manufactured ideas and I could not escape from the torrent.

The mechanism for hallucination became obvious. Normally, all senses and thought are filtered through this ego that separates its notion of fact from fiction and through the course of life we become comfortable with this discrimination as definitive God-determined truth. When the ego fails, the thought and sensory input become inextricably intertwined. The soul, then, cannot differentiate what is "real" and what has been manufactured by the imagination. Remembrance becomes concurrent with touch/smell/taste/sight/sound. In this state the time line provides no reference, and what you think may have happened is synonymous with the physical consensus reality others can verify.

So you find yourself asking others - "Did you see that? Did you hear that? Tell me I didn't imagine that."

I paced in circles. I was only comfortable focusing on material processes that had neither beginning nor end. I had to turn off the television. I could not track music. Another's touch set off alarms in my mind as if I was being shocked. The setting sun disturbed me so I closed the windows and focused on the floor as I walked without counting my steps. So I struggled with myself for hours that felt like days, reminding myself that my body would remain on the earthly time plane no matter where my mind went. So what seemed like hours to my mind was only truly minutes to my body, and the reason my body was not tiring as quickly as I expected was that it was firmly of the earth and would remain attached to it.

My cardiologist had warned me any pain in my chest warranted attention and could be the portent of my untimely end and I felt as if a panel truck had been parked on top of me. But was this physical death to be the end of it all, or was I merely experiencing my ego's struggle to retain control of that which was impossible for it to manage?

I paced in circles which had no beginning nor end, struggling to understand the value in this form of existence, understanding perfectly that the condition could, and would, last forever in one universe or another. The infinite was perfectly clear.

"Concentrate on being now," a part of me reminded the rest of me. "I will get through this, and then I will go back to work and living, and I will get through that, as with the rest of life."

I don't remember how it ended. When my heart rate reduced I wound up in bed and was able to sleep. When I woke I wished I could buy back the time I had wasted in that purgatory. For if there is a meaning to this life it is to live within it.

There is infinite time for the other.

---

I have written of that which I remember, but I am sure there was more. The blonde-haired girl tells me I spoke of energy fields and a struggle between opposing forces inside me.

I spoke of dying. Of knowing that if I lost consciousness I would not return.

What disappoints me most about the experience is that I could not find the strength to focus my attention on how my words would affect her, or frighten her for my safety.

Then I fully realized the strength of the zen masters, who upon escaping the bounds of the ego's time line, find themselves literally groundless and practically insane, and yet in this state master all their fear, surrender to the nothingness, and help others in the process.
I am a very long way from that.

---

I imagined I should find a way to significantly punish my offspring for poisoning me. But my creativity is lacking in the parental correction/retribution department. Perhaps I can take solace that the quantity of what I consumed might have cost a significant sum, though it doesn't seem adequate given the severity of the experience.

Perhaps I can send her my next EKG trace.

Most likely, I will continue to do my best to see she has better opportunity going through life than I did.

This is what fathers want for their children. It is an unalterable trait baked into DNA at birth. I can only love her and want her to live well.

Talks can be had and were. All of which is another way to say I am helpless in this regard.

---

During the experience, filled with dread and conflicting thought, the idea of learning electricity made perfect sense. Thus I determined there was a context and subtext to every human endeavor. While that author might have consciously produced a training manual for people interested in the fundamentals of home electronics, he had subconsciously produced a philosophical tome outlining the wisdom in the physical processes.

The meaning of life, as it were, is to be in this reality and gain from it. In that context learning electricity, gravity, motion, light, heat, exothermic reactions, and rolling friction, are all paths to God.

---

"I will never do that again," I said to the blonde haired girl, holding the dog leash. The dog snuffled and rooted around a patch of ivy, looking for a place to pee.

"Me neither," she said.

Until she said that, I had forgotten what we had both done. I had forgotten checking on her inert form over and over to make sure she was still breathing. But it was like something I had seen on television, rather than something lived my me. A chunk of time was missing as if it had been stolen and lived by someone else who got away laughing and sent me a scratchy video to gloat.

I said, "I kept checking to see if you were alive," trying to remember the mental movie plot. It was fuzzy.

One, ten, a hundred times I went to see if she was still warm.

"Maybe I imagined it," I said.

A week later: "Did that really happen? Did we lose a whole night? What day was that?"

"It must have been Friday because the garbage cans were still on the driveway Saturday morning when we got up."

We walked the dog to the park at the end of the block.

"Maybe we died," I said.

She said, "I have some salmon steaks for dinner. I could broil them with lemon and rosemary."

"We could get the ice cream for dessert and get those kids to smoosh the heath bars into it."

"Let's concentrate on the fish. It's good for you. You need your omega-3."

"Sure. More omega. Omega is full of reality."

Meanwhile the dog sniffed a gopher hole.

"What is life if we can change it so easily?" I said. "We can get right to the edge. Look right over like the grand canyon only scarier. Maybe none of this is what we think it is."

"Rosemary and lemon and butter. And I have that broccoli rabe you like from the farmer's market."