Day 629 March 23, 2022

Still Recovering

Sometimes it feels like I am still recovering from a particularly strenuous first career, the loss of the family dog, the loss of a favorite uncle, the end of an engrossing book, a Leonard Cohen song, a distant love affair, a particularly vicious football tackle my freshman year of college, that time I was thrown into the sand head first by an ocean wave, the last time I got sick and had to stay all day in bed, when I had bad alfalfa sprouts from the salad bar, the car accident I don’t remember, the times I have been called to a hospital bedside, my last colonoscopy, a bowl of curry with too much sriracha, the sweaty feeling of eating a piece of fried chicken that is not quite cooked all the way through, sitting next to a very large woman on a Greyhound bus from Massachusetts to Washington D.C. while starting to get sick, that time with the stomach flu when I could not even eat a popsicle, releasing a mouse from a mouse trap, the childhood friend who moved away, that time I got kicked out of a band, the time I did my taxes wrong and had to pay the government five thousand dollars, having to iron all my dress shirts in one night because I kept postponing the ironing for several loads of laundry over multiple weeks, carrying a 4x12 speaker cabinet up two flights of stairs for a rock show, when I used to smoke cigarettes, a deep affinity for cheese, the first time I heard Louis Armstrong in Ms. Busse’s English class, a bad night of sleep caused by a hyperactive cat and cat vomit and cat defecation, the last time I was called a chink.