The Lowedown

Here is your throat back,
Thanks for the loan
from Mr. Jones by Bob Dylan, from the album Hwy. 61 Revisited

They have taken me out of the electronic bombardment tunnel, off the poison drip and graduated me from Swallowing School. The examinations with the White Coats are further and further between. They have taken to just reading my blood. The blood is a map to the heart of my disease or, now we hope, to the place it was before they brought in the heavy artillery and the chemical weaponry for the shock and awe chapter that strangers wrote throughout my body. Instead of dust, twisted re-bar or clouds of cordite there is a Tom Waits voice, a bony old man pausing at the foot of the stairs. There are pill canisters arrayed like a cityscape beneath the bureau window. It’s almost always cold.

In the February 28 edition of the New Yorker, in an essay called Who Am I, in a section known as Shouts and Murmurs, a writer named Demetri Martin tries to answer, quite eloquently, the question posed by his title. It is a testament to the rigor and fascination and sanity of Socrates’ “examined life” and Mr. Martin has come up with a number of reasons why such a life” is worth living.” The first of his statements resonates and informs–the writer’s job–while it reminds us to take inventory of our own existence every once in a while so that we can understand the chapters we have read and those that are yet to be written.

I am a man.

And I am a former baby and a future skeleton, and I am a distant future pile of dust.

It’s raining and, at the Radiation Clinic, it’s bread and fresh popcorn day. It all seems to appear when I’m in my morning session being bombarded by lights and rads and curies and all the other stuff that makes the aides and nurses leave the room to their hi-tech redoubt behind lead walls. They let me wear a mouth guard and cover me with a thin blanket. I feel like Marie Antoinette at a nudist colony.

When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer

Stevie Wonder, Superstition

I am an orphan now. My mother seems barely gone. In fact, too close to make the first line of this thing really stick. But my father died years ago in Orange County, California, while I was under a bed in Beirut in a cellar or wrapped up like a hot dog in the bun of a mattress, as the shells came in from the USS New Jersey in the Mediterranean or Druze positions, in the Bekaa or south from the festering horror of the Shatilla camps or Israel or maybe, the random red-eyed stoners with RPGs and AK 47s for whom the whole world was a day off school with spectacular toys. We didn’t go outside in those days. The forecast was likely for light to scattered lead in the morning and great clouds of it just before midnight.