random thoughts, Kansas City, 12 years ago tomorrow

Twelve years ago I was on tour in Kansas City, at the halfway point of our journeys through the Midwest. I was in the middle of a catastrophic love affair, and the object of my desire lived in Westchester County, New York. She was a dancer, two years younger than I and a decade wiser. The ramifications of this obsession would not be made manifest for months to come, when i encountered the Dancer's reflection on a Saturday night in Gainesville.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that, in time, I would come to know that those rapturous months with the Dancer, and those torturous years with the Mirror, were in fact part of a single experience, what one might call sukha and dukkha.  To date I have never seen a better illustration of the dangers of conflating duality with the Divine, and looking back, I see it as a textbook case of projection and transference – the beatification of the Bronxville beauty on the one hand, and the malificent masochism of the Mirror on the other.

(Everything i saw in them was inside of me;
everything i saw in them was also in the other.

A man named Peter once told me: 'everything is in everything';
a woman named Lauren once sang: 'everything is everything':)

They're both right.

One year ago, I found myself curious about Halloweens past - where I was, what I was doing. I remembered, more or less, who I was for the past several years, but how about further back? I wondered who (I thought) I was a decade ago, but found the documents incoherent, lacking or absent. I stretched back one more year, to 1999, and this is what I discovered:

"SIN": 29 September - 7 November 1999

31 October 1999

Day thirteen is a day starts with a call from J______. It woke me up, and I was so happy to hear her voice and her choice. Sometimes I think there’s some psychic (but deeper, more emotional) bond...

I caught myself thinking this morning
and asked myself how the idea got inside:
I would be gone before you arrived. It was
the sound of a heart closing like a wound
– but I keep on picking at the scabs...

Gin at three, a tape, and a boredom thick enough
to grasp. I walk through the bookstore with my hands
clasped together to keep from shoving books off the display.
From where does this urge arise? It's not right to pawn
and merchant and whore these ideas and thoughts
and words under fluorescence and Muzak...

In Kansas City the nights are so quiet that
the table of three next to me becomes
deafening compared to the peaceful
lull of New York’s eight screaming
millions. I’ve read all my books;
and will have to read Kerouac
again, but then why did I buy it...

The penguin man cackles
at the table of three – not the
endearing cackle of Bobby, but
the sound of a small-eyed, hook-
nosed gentleman with glasses and
the manner of someone who is not
unhappy, but never laughs without
restraint. That deep hysterical laughter
of the mad, when your eyes water and you
gasp for breaths not for the oxygen, but only
to have another lungful of laughter, to spew into
the night until your sides ache and your bladder pains...

I finished The Bell Jar tonight, and
it’s fascinating that she turned her
depression, its simplicity, into a
novel. That’s how it is; that feeling
of watching life happen in front of
your eyes, the disbelief that what one
sees is invisible to everyone else. But
what frightened me was the calmness
with which she described it, and I
wonder if she was so removed when it
happened? I have always with me that
sadness, and a desperation to escape
its grasp, like clawing at some invisible
tie around the throat, like the lungs
were some never-stretched tendon,
feeling the pain of movement and
yearning for the freedom of mobility...

I
use
words
fast and
easy and
ambiguous
and so undefined
and unrefined and
unresolved and dissolved
and undeclared and uncleared
and I don’t explain and assume
you just know as I know and never
even have to ask if you know what I mean...

Watching
the Kansas
City streets
I miss New
York. I feel
tall enough
to see the
West Coast
burning two
thousand
miles away
and New York
engulfed in its
tungsten flame
one thousand
miles east, as
Hollywood and
Times Square
watch over me...

re(re)Listening to NPR in Atlanta

Part 1: for Plums and peaches

I listened to the voice of a woman
I knew nearly fifteen years ago, when
we teetered on the edge of adulthood.

I heard things that were, things that
were not, things that might have been.

I heard the girl next door
humming arias in the dark.

I heard Durham in August and
the diminishing of colloquialism
of South Carolina after the Return.

It was not like listening to the past.

Or living in Atlanta,
Manhattan and Denver.

Part 2: one year later

I visited the voice seven months
later and found photographs of an
unremembered me: a birthday party
and broken asphalt. I wondered if the

woman who kept it on her bookshelf
owned the memory in the photograph.
In some ways that day will always belong
to her, and I left unable to distinguish

how much of my re-collection was nothing
more than a picture of a picture. I wondered
how many fragments of my being are left scattered
in Atlanta; how much of my Self is left unremembered.

author, voice, and bookshelf

Part 3: two years later

Two years later the
memory of Atlanta
is fading. This year's
sojourn was – like life –
layover rather than
destination. End points
are odious and elusive:
every time one appears,
a beginning takes its place.

I had a dream about
the woman in Atlanta
(the one in memory)
earlier this week. She
served tea to fifteen
Chinese children. I
woke from the dream
and sent word to Chicago.

I've never been there, and
so it lives not in memory
but in imagination. Identical
twins separated by time,
united by desire. Bough and aft,
forward and back, the face of Janus
haunting every moment called now.

the first version of this poem appeared here

redux: weddings, La Cienega and Agra

One year ago I went to a wedding:

The sun rose behind the clouds, moving from hidden to vermillion to amber curtains of light pouring down onto the ocean. The full moon hung in the western sky, almost as if it was waiting to hear the "I do," and it occurred to me that the same moon was just beginning to rise in Agra, where my yin was visiting the Red Fort:

how far apart are these places:
8000 miles? a 20 hour flight? 9½ hours worth of time zone?

These places are one moon away from each other, one moon that holds the day in perfect harmony with the night. I thought about these things as the preacher gave his sermon. I thought about four years earlier, when I stepped foot on this particular beach for the first time. So much has changed since then, and yet to the sand and the beach and the ocean and the moon it was nothing. It was less than nothing – a blink of the eye, slip of the tongue, a cliché waiting to happen:

Time is a scam; a beautiful, inexplicably lovely scam.

do these denizens of Agra ever worry about time?

I have heard people liken the mind to a monkey:

"There goes my monkey mind again."

But these types of statements are an affront to monkeys the world over.

The mind - at least the mind prevalent in this part of the world during this time in history - is better compared to the ruthless precision of Swiss watches. A Rolex-ed tyranny of minutes and minutia, seconds and second-guessing. To live and breathe and swing from trees is the privilege and birthright of humans and monkeys alike. Have you ever heard a child ask:

"Do i have enough time to climb this tree?"

How about La Cienega, do you think she wonders about time in Nepal?

No; we were in communication this very morning:

La Cienega wrote:

the author responded:

7:29am
in joying india ??

7:29am
that is fantastic!
[my yin] is in Agra right now.

7:30am
Life is!!!
You no

7:30am
alas, no. school. writing thesis.
saw picture of you and carrots. lovely.

7:30am
hmm...thought of you a bunch of times...in Kathmandu hehehe...from months ago! Lost my camera..boohoo

7:30am
we're already planning a future traipse.

cameras are overrated, a poor substitute for the creativity of memory.

7:32am
I agree! I actually havent taken many pictures...the crew i was travlling with did! So entering Nepal alone i took on the camera...crossed the border...no more camera!

7:32am
how long are you staying?

7:32am
???

7:32am
beautiful. have you been to Bhutan?

7:33am
In love! Yes! It is Beautiful! One of the 13 grandmothers lives there...a nepalese shaman! Hope to connect wioth her when she returns to nepal

7:33am
envy. someday someday someday...

7:34am
if you truly desire you WILL make it manifest!!

7:35am
agreed. envy, like all emotions, is beautiful in its impermanence.

7:35am
When do you and [your yin] enter into sacred union

7:35am
last Sunday in February.

7:38am
Beautiful!!! You are a most beautiful pair!!! May all the love that is, continue to radiate from each of you!!! and spread out over the whole world!!!! Radiant love!!! Yum! Thank you for the blessing of your presence in my life! Often you come into my heart and my mind and i am lost in love and gratitude!!! Please know this! So much love and gratitude!!!

7:39am
always and ever the same.
love, light, and safe travels.
every moment is a gift.

Conversations like these, scattered and infrequent though they be, is why i call her La Cienega:



And while La Cienega is never beside the point, I should nonetheless return to the wedding...

There were three flower girls, the youngest of whom had a shiner and trailed behind her sisters (or cousins) saying "you dropped some" and pointing to the petals in the sand. It was adorable, the magnificent fragility of life and the imponderable resiliency of children. How sad it is that, as we grow older, each of us has to learn that we can be hurt. Even sadder, however, is that we come to believe that we can be injured in a way that dampers our spirit and being.

The preacher giving the service spoke to these things in his own obtuse way. It was a more traditional service than the one my yin and I would have six months later, but I was able to listen for the truths he spoke rather than becoming lost in the semantics. I was reminded once more that the largest difference between Christian theology and Eastern thought (at least as it's been taught to me) is a matter of which state one calls 'acquired' and which state one calls 'natural.'

In other words, how original is our sin?

a Rose by any other name...

Maybe I'll end up becoming a Christian mystic like Dostoevsky and see grand mal visions of the Divine and pen great sweeping novels with unpronounceable characters' names. Maybe I'll write heartfelt accounts of normal people, flawed and anonymous, that come to represent the shifting tides of history as an empire begins to collapse upon itself.

How far apart are 19th century St. Petersburg and 21st century Washington?

The wedding and sunrise were followed by breakfast, and I made small talk with friends and strangers while my mind pondered Dostoevsky. I questioned an acquaintance about her vipassana retreat and asked the server to prepare me a plate without any meat. In spite of this, the ocean breeze smelled like bacon.

After the cake was cut, I wished my friend congratulations. She is one of those special maniacs that does things like build surfboards in her free time and sews dresses for the bridesmaids. I still remember three years ago, when she attempted to set me up with her roommate and fed me a spinach-feta burger with sweet potato fries. The match-making didn't take, though, and that night I walked the beach with Mardou.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I spoke with my yin after the wedding and gave her a brief recap. She told me about Agra and sent a picture of the Taj Mahal, as seen from the Red Fort:

more of the Taj to follow...

My favorite, though, was this one of her with a half-Canadian:

"looks like you got laid," i observed.

Alas, getting laid is also beside the point... at least for the time being.

repost: Godard v. Dostoevsky

This time last year, I turned in the first chapter of my thesis, and to celebrate (and to nurse my ailing, pre-tendonitis wrists and forearms) I decided to take a couple of days of from typing. I wanted to relax and take it easy, to clear my mind of all the convoluted mental acrobatics required to make a the muddled mess of Lacanian thought into a (relatively) straight line of reasoning.

Q: How does a super-genius like myself choose to unwind?
A: French films and Russian novels, of course.

Jean-Luc Godard and Fyodor Dostoevsky, scaled to stature

First, le film du jour, Godard's Vivre sa vie, which stars the impossibly comely Anna Karina as the prostitute Nana:

dig the Voltaire in the background

Vivre sa vie has all the wonderful Godard tropes: crime, allusion, tabletop philosophy, episodic construction, and a great jukebox dance scene:

Unfortunately, it also has that other quintessential Godardian trait:

the vacant woman.

Her lines are delivered emptily (sans la motivation, sans l'effort), and with Karina this is especially disturbing because she and Godard were married during the early and mid-Sixties. One cannot help but feel a certain animosity leaking into the frame from the man directing the camera, an invisible contempt tinged with subtle personal acrimony and the not-so-subtle misogyny of the camera's gaze.

The clearest demonstration of this is the final scene, when Nana is gunned down not by one, but by two pimps who were in the process of trading her. The film ends abruptly, with a long shot of Nana on the ground as her former pimp makes his getaway.

C'est la vie?

Hoping to lighten my mood, I decided it was the perfect time to start Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Although I read Notes from the Underground a couple of years ago, which had great lines like:

"Vice begins with that in which true love finds its consummation."

It was Crime and Punishment, however, that instilled my awed, fearful reverence for The Dead Russian. I read it as an undergraduate (also for fun, also without adult supervision) sometime in the late Nineties, and a six-month period of mild insanity followed. In fact, I've never quite been the same since reading of poor Raskolnikov and the murdered pawn broker. Something broke inside of me while reading the novel (I mean this in the best possible way), and I wish I had taken better notes on the experience.

There was simply something different me after the book, something so fundamental as to elude my ability to say it, yet so profound as to inform every thought and action that came after it. The novel had lodged itself into my unconscious mind, and I've been unable (and unwanting) to shake it in the decade that followed.

The same thing happened the first time I heard Stravinsky's Rite of Spring; maybe it's something about dead Russians:

The dead Russians are beside the point.

The point is that I started reading of Mitya, Vanya, and Alyosha last night, and I found myself captivated at the end of the first chapter: "In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we."

I know this is true in my own experience. The gremlins and ghouls and monsters that populate and terrorize this world are acting out of ignorance rather than malice, out of fear rather than evil, out of forgetting rather than remembering.

And so, I humbly submit myself once more to the divine will of the degenerate master, let come what insanity may...

[lapse]

One year later: the thesis was written; the book remains unfinished.

le départ, un an plus tard

L'année dernière à Marienbad

une sirène dehors

de la fenêtre

le mal de tête s'apaise

Un, trois, cinq, sept

Un jeu de cartes

un journal français

le départ de mon amour

Le poids de pensées vacants

je les sens 

tous les mêmes.

redux: Zazen v. Nancy

This time last year, I read Norweigan Wood and was immediately taken in by its sense of loss. Before even the first page was finished, I found my mind start drifting, and I could smell the cold German mist of the narrator's world colliding with the humidity of past life Floridian summers. I felt as if I knew Naoko, but was unable to place precisely how or whom.

Was it Nancy she reminds me of? Those broken cryptic warnings that masqueraded as invitation? Was it her deception or my projection? What difference does it make now, eleven years later? Karmas have been incurred, lives altered, and each of us stumbled into worlds safely removed from the other's.

Was it a trap door?

Ever watched a rabbit emerge from hat?

Those six years stand like a giant pillar in my life, blocking a clear view of what came before and bathing the years since in its shadow. Is it messianic time flowing in two directions? Everything before and after anchored to the memory of what came to pass, of what lay ahead. Sometimes I walk around that pillar and watch the shadows stretch across the ground, but the sun is never moving.

Back then I was also reading Bodhisattva Archetypes, and I thought about the Zen understanding of a sitting meditation. Iin the Zen tradition the point of sitting is not to attain altered or transcendent states of consciousness – it is merely to sit. (A useful understanding since my current schedule requires that most of my sitting practice has been relegated to parking lots in Broward County.)

Another point that stood out was the notion of 'no-self,' which has a certain linguistic resonance with my dormant nihilism. No-self is not a purely negative construction, however, but an understanding that there is no personal existence except as it relates to all other beings.

Coincidentally, perhaps, last year was also the time my own teacher began to describe a 'transcendent individuality' that exists as a way station (or stomping ground) between the identified, limited self and re-immersion into the Godhead. The Zen understanding of 'no-self' seems to overlap with my teacher's 'transcendent individuality,' though I'm not certain either the dead Dogen or the living half-Canadian would care to hear so.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that no-self holds resonance my deepest meditations, which seem less like an expansion of self than the dissolution of self. (Not that the expanded sensations don't exist, it's just that they seem somehow to be more 'me' and less free.) The no-self is also easier to reconcile with my concerns regarding the balance between the material and metaphysical realms. Unlike the yogic concept of the atman, which is ever unaffected, ever outside of relationship, the no-self lends itself more easily to seeing ourselves as constituted historically as well as atemporally, helping to understand one's place in the world for those 23 hours each day that we're not transcending our living rooms and parking lots.

The only problem is that, while my sitting practice resonates with the no-self, the experience that started me on this whole rigmarole four years ago is beyond my comprehension unless it is framed within the notion of some sort of unaffected, unchanging core of existence - the atman, in other words.

(C'est quoi disent les Francais? Mais oui, c'est la vie...)

[lapse]

A man walks into a store.
The clerk asks, "Atman or no-self?"
The man answers, "One of each please."

[return]

Either way, it doesn't really matter. The answer (which is the question) will reveal itself in its own due time. Until then, one continues to sit...

my yin: toughest woman on Earth

Last night my yin and I babysat the daughter of a friend of ours.  First, let me clarify, when I say "we," I really mean "she" because S____, like most of our friends' children above the age of 18 months seemed to be utterly mortified by my mere presence.  This is especially disturbing and unfortunate, especially when one is babysitting in his own home.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that, mortification notwithstanding, last night taught me a lot about kids in general, and 7 year-old girls specifically.  For example, seven is old enough to be largely self-sufficient, but still young enough to want constant attention.  As a result, we colored, beaded, and watched My Little Pony for most of last night.

(Again, by "we" I mean "she".)

During all this, I was stowed safely in the kitchen cooking up a plain pan of vegetables that would ultimately see itself doused in butter.  Apparently seven year-olds love butter, and I myself have a strong memory of eating giant pads of butter (I called them "mounds") plopped atop prepackaged rolls in my grandmother's kitchen.

This is also beside the point.

The point is that sometime during all this cooking, S____ alerted my yin that one of her baby teeth was loose. My yin, ever fearless, led her to the bathroom while I, like a true coward, shouted behind them, "I'll make some salt water to rinse afterward."

My yin was unplussed by this turn of events and emerged mere minutes later with a tiny baby tooth, which looked much smaller than those I remember them from childhood. I suppose that's what growing older is in many ways – learning that these small losses, these pieces of our being that get lost along the way, are always larger in our memories than in the moments when we truly see them again.

[lapse]

And yes, the tooth fairy still makes her rounds during the night...

last year's Pyrexed dream of bodhisattvas

One year ago I dreamed of a giant rectangle, subdivided into twenty smaller rectangles. The rectangles were equidistant: four columns across and five rows deep. The proportions of height to width of the smaller rectangles matched the proportion of height to width of the larger rectangle holding them all.

This isn't entirely accurate.

I didn't dream of these rectangles. I dreamed them. In other words, these rectangles were not the content of my dream, but rather its form. Inside the dreaming, each small rectangle would fill with the substance of the dreamscape, and once that individual rectangular cell was full, I would wake from the dream.

This did not make for a restful night's sleep.

The rectangles were made of Pyrex, but I'm uncertain about the substance of the dreamscape. The nature of the dream's movement implies a certain viscosity, but beyond this I know nothing. Likewise I do not know how many cells filled during the night, nor how it is I know there were twenty of them.

One does not count inside the dreaming.

I wonder about the arrangement of cells, and if the gaps between them would have eventually filled if only I had stayed asleep a little longer. I wonder if this dream was a measure of portent or promise.

Upon each waking I considered time and speculated if perhaps it had stopped altogether. It was before sunrise, but it seemed the same distance from sunrise upon each waking. Perhaps the dreams  were separated by mere seconds, but it seemed longer. Maybe the gaps between the rectangles corresponded to the time I spent waking. If this wass the case, then what is the larger rectangle – a diagram of my consciousness itself?

If the large rectangle comprises the extent of my being, then I have come face to face with some clue regarding how much I am sleeping and how much I wake. There was nothing outside the large rectangle, only voidness..,

But what about the border regions? 

It was the waking regions that touched the edges of the large rectangle, not the dream.

Before bed, one year ago, I read a book about various bodhisattva. (How does one pluralize bodhisattva? Bodhisattvas? Bodhisattvi?) Perhaps that had something to do with my dream. Perhaps Avalokiteshvara was trying to tell me something, maybe Shakyamuni is fluent in Pyrex. Perhaps it was a stranger knocking at my door... maybe the stranger is me.

clay statue of Bhairava, seen last summer in New York

redux: on (someday) turning 90

Last year my yin and I went to her mother's cousin's boyfriend's birthday party at his country club, and although this sounds like the start of some impossibly long and complicated joke, it is actually the simple truth.

(Note: no truth
- even if true -
is ever simple.)

But this is beside the point.

The point is that it was this mother's cousin's boyfriend's ninetieth birthday. To put this fact in perspective, one has to remember that when this mother's cousin's boyfriend was born, alcohol was illegal and the 19th Amendment was only six weeks old.

But this is also beside the point (as well as overly didactic) and fails to adequately set the mood.  The point is:

We walk into the clubhouse to find a room full of gray hair, red wine and mimosas. We say hello to the mother's cousin's boyfriend and then locate a corner table where the mother's other cousin (the one with the boat, not the boyfriend) sits with his wife. We sit with them, answering questions about my yin-in-law and her beau until they arrive. At which point, we continue answering questions, albeit more quietly.

After drinks we move one room west and take our place at table #4. There are perhaps 45 people scattered about, fewer than ten are under 40, and disinterested servers move from table to table asking, "Chicken, salmon, or prime rib?"

(the room is too hot)

I ask for a vegetarian plate, and after a house salad and rolls, a bowl full of over-cooked veggies doused in butter arrives. I try not to think about it, thinking (wishfully?) 'at least it's not margarine' as I attempt to eat around the spinach, which has been cooked so thoroughly that its characteristically vibrant green has been transformed into a hue resembling nothing so closely as pine needles at the height of wreath season. At this point my yin and I exchange a grateful look, wordlessly acknowledging the wisdom of our decision to forgo a traditional caterer for our upcoming matrimony.

After the main course there are speeches, and ultimately a ten minute DVD montage of the mother's cousin's boyfriend's life. I find it fascinating, especially how the change from black and white to color film stock in the Sixties marked both a metaphoric and historical break in the story being told. I saw not only the Polaroid emergence of a post-War consumer society, but also the tipping point in the mother's cousin's boyfriend's life as he crossed over the threshold from youth to middle-age. The pictures of the soldier and young husband and father were suddenly gone, replaced by a man whose children were nearly grown, whose remaining years seemed less certain.

this is the deceitful nature of images.

In the mother's cousin's boyfriend's life I saw the history of America in the 20th century, from Depression

to War

to the Boom

 that followed the Bomb

I watched the mother's cousin's boyfriend move from the Bronx to Harlem to Paramus, New Jersey - the decline and white flight from the burroughs across the Hudson, Jews and Gentiles alike.

I watched children appear and grow into parents.

I watched parents, and then siblings, fade from the picture.

(do photographs,
as Benjamin argues,
truly destroy the aura?)

The mother's cousin's boyfriend told the story of a boat ride in 1936. it began at the Bowery, Hudson-bound, and stopped at 125th Street, where the mother's cousin's boyfriend's childhood friend had arranged to meet two girls. One of them, named R______, became his wife.

They were together 70 years before she passed.

How much death does the most fortunate among us witness? Is watching our loved ones die the price we pay to ascend to the title of patriarch? Of matriarch? Is this why our elders see so much so clearly?

(a final question)

Placed next to

the unintelligibility of death|the problems of life

How can

compare?

[lapse]

After this video came the group photo, which may someday resurface at his 95th or 100th birthday. It was another tiny fragment of life enshrined and embalmed - the present moment ferried by the camera into the past...

my immune system, epic fail

Somehow I've managed to get sick again, the second time in two months, and I haven't left the condo since I got home from work on Thursday. There's a very Howard Hughesian feel to the whole affair, with my yin boiling up pots of ginger, cayenne pepper, and lemon juice to take the edge off the razor blades lodged in my throat.

 Sounds like something Hughes himself would try...

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I'm very, very disappointed in my immune system. I've been eating well, going to bed at a reasonable hour, and even visiting a personal trainer for my weekly torture session.  And yet, in spite of all this, somehow I've been coughing and snorting and headaching all over the apartment for going on 72 hours.

What is the cause of this malady?

I don't know, and as a result of this not-knowing I find myself searching both absurd answers (that my illness is a manifestation of some underlying metaphysical shortcoming) and logical explanations (that one of my 20+ consultations at the writing center this week happened to be with Typhoid Mary).

Neither of these scenarios, however, adequately assuage my sense of dis-ease. Not the physical sensations of having a cold or flu or strep or whatever it is, but rather the mental agitation of wanting to understand the underlying cause of these symptoms. The logic (so seductive) is that if I knew what caused this illness, I could somehow take action to remedy it.  This problem-solution model is attractive because it allows to hold on to the illusion: I am in control.

The reality, of course, is that the control have over our own lives is far less than we like to imagine.  To draw an automotive analogy, the influence we exert is not comparable to that of a hand on a steering wheel, but rather to the foot on the pedals. In other words, we have less control over our destination than how quickly or slowly we get there.

This is not to say we are helpless, in fact, far from it.  Our choices slowly pile one on top of the other, subtly shifting our destination from where we were to where we are going.  But the large changes in direction, the sudden jerks of the wheel, are exceptions rather than the rule.  And, if my own experiences have taught me anything (which is itself a topic open to debate), it's that yanking the wheel is far more likely to cause disasters than miracles.

(I think the Buddha called this concept the Middle Path...)

So for the time being, I'm doing my best just to feel the weight of the accelerator pushing back against my foot: plenty of water, hot veggie soup, copious vitamin C, and lots of rest. I know my ultimate destination is a return to full health, and the sooner I get there, the sooner I will be ready to return to the impossibly busy week filling up the small squares of my calendar...