It’s a solid piece, one that had everyone buzzing at the start of the week. It’s taken me all week to get to it. By the end, I was skimming, trying to keep from nodding.

Here’s my deal these days: I’m lucky. Every time I go to the doctor, she tells me this. More than once. And it’s not in a ‘count your blessings’ kind of way. It’s not said as a warning or even some underhanded threat. She means it. All the little things that could go wrong with having a j-pouch aren’t things I deal with.

But those are all physical. And I can trace a clear and obvious path in my head since being sick. We all know we will die one day. Poof. But the realizations that came with watching my own body betray me, with realizing I am powerless when it comes to staying alive, were more than powerful.

I could write a book on my feelings and thoughts about the feelings; my frustration at life, opportunities, health, experience. But I wanted to say I related. It’s different, obviously. It always is. But it’s a tough and terrifying road.

At the end, whenever it comes, it’s not the road you’ve planned. It’s the road you’ve left behind. Spend every single day doing the things you want to be remembered for. It’s the only thing any of us have in the end.

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Unlike most of the country, I work today. It’s President’s Day but my company doesn’t treat it as a holiday. I rode the train into work today, surrounded by air and empty seats. This never happens. The train parking lot was empty; that was my first indicator. And when I got off the train, the normally busy corner was a ghost town.

I loved it. The nearest person to me was 10 or 15 feet away. There were large expanses of concrete and blacktop with no one on them.

I thought to myself, “This is what the world would be like if 60% of the population disappeared. Or died.”
I went to Starbucks and my barista was talking to me about her other job.

She works at funeral home.

She talked to me for a few minutes about making late night calls to hospitals to pick up bodies. I was utterly fascinated; it was absolute naiveté that this would be her only job. I told her learning this about her would be the most fascinating thing I learned all day.

And it’s true.

There’s something morbid in the air today.

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I had a bunch of drinks on Tuesday night. 2 mixed drinks, 3 beers. Over 4 hours. This is not insane; it’s not some wild bender. More than I’ve had in a long time, but not some college binge. I had a dinner of sushi, an apple and some crap rice cakes. I watched Lost with friends.

I was never drunk. But when I woke up Wednesday morning, I had a hangover from the gods. It was because I didn’t drink any water. Doh. As I’ve gotten older, my body has changed and things like hydration matter. I’m just sometimes slow to realize that I’ve aged and changed.

And so began my morning. This was followed by a sausage and egg sandwich at Starbucks. Then I made my own egg sandwich at work.

At this point, I’m expecting the egg and sausage to work the miracle hangover cure business. No such luck. And I’m craving a hotdog. I walk to the grocery store, a few blocks away. And buy hotdogs and buns.

And I eat — ready? — 5 hotdogs by 1030 am.

5.

To be fair, I skipped lunch. And yes, that cured the headache. But what kind of monster am I?

Seriously, I’m fairly mortified at the entire episode. Note to self: drink buckets of water. All the time.

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I had a whole list of items to run through, but Ray’s post took it all out of me. That’s not bad, but you’ll have to imagine all the witty, insightful things I might have written about Lost, work, life and getting old. And drinking.

Instead, I’m thinking about losing family. And grandparents. I lost my mother’s parents before I could sit up. (And it’s awfully presumptuous to say ‘I lost.’ You can’t lose what you never had; she lost her parents. I simply never had the opportunity to know them.) I was down to 3 by 5th grade. My dad’s mom hung on, a trooper if there ever was one — over ten years of dialysis — before I lost her in college.

It was a blur. But I remember Linda and I had just started dating and I was driving back and forth to Richmond constantly in my grandmother’s old Mercury Cougar. Chain smoking crappy cigarettes that Linda had given me, visiting the hospital over and over for a week or 10 days, believing I might be saying good-bye every time I left.

Good times.

In some ways, I feel lucky. That’s the thinking part of my brain; I’ve gone through the grief for losing grandparents. Done. It’s like getting chicken pox or mono.

The emotional part of me is different; I could have continued to learn from all of these people. What would my grandparents have taught me at age 20? 25? 30? I won’t know. I only know my mom’s parents through the hundreds of photographs I’ve scanned over the last 3 years. They tell me nothing about mannerisms or catch-phrases or movement or anecdotes.

And I’m sitting in Starbucks at 8:15 in the morning, on a morning where I’m too hungover, wishing for a 7-11 Big Bite for breakfast and I’m getting sad. And, in a lot of ways, it’s stupid and pointless.

It’s all OK because it’s life. It’s not worth wishing for a different timeline or things to be different. (And how did I manage to tie this back into Lost? I’m a genius.) It is what it is. And it’s not about wishing for different; it’s about dealing with the present.

Ray, my heart goes out to you. Because that might be the definition of a crappy day. Because loss of someone you care for is devastating. But you had time on your side and I hope you can hold on those memories tightly. It’s all any of us get. I hope you are holding up.

But what happened with the toilet?

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Some days you simply don

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One of the bigger timesinks the last month was so nerdy that I can barely bring myself to type it out:

I organized digital files.

Which I didn’t find insane until I spoke to some friends. And realized that discluding my music and personal photos and video, I have about 100 gigs of data. Papers from high school, backups of various projects, art, pdf-ed articles. It’s an embarrassing amount of data. And it took me weeks to move it into a file structure that remotely resembled something logical.

The worst part is that I actually believed all of this was somewhat normal. I struggled with the file structure for a long time, knowing this was a project I needed to do. I searched online, read everything I could about how to organize trees, about how other people saved their data. And I was confused why I couldn’t find more information, more details.

Turns out that most people don’t save copies of their life like I have.

It took the better part of the month to shift things around, delete duplicates and generally clean house. This project has loomed over my head for over a year and now that it’s complete and I theoretically can find anything I’ve ever had, I can’t believe how much more relaxed I am.

I also can’t believe I typed that sentence.

But when you want to know about the paper I wrote on the Renaissance some 18 years ago (or the raw jpg from the 224 frame of my Howl animation or the letter I wrote you in college and sent you [printed on some sweet dot matrix printer] or the first digital picture I ever took*), let me know. I ought to be able to find it more easily now.

* Even better, here it is.

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I just took a month off from writing. It was a conscious decision, though not one I can explain easily. Some sort of reset for myself. I wanted to use it as a re-centering for myself, for the site, all around. But R was visiting and life was too hectic.

Needless to say, it didn

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