This morning, while waiting on a call from the daytime radiologist, who would give me his take on the cat scan my wife got last night – the night shift radiologist must be second string – and tell us if it was a “spot on her lung,” or some kind of photographic anomaly – we tried to buy a heart attack.  They want to sell us cancer.  Several thoughts revolved through my head.

One thought was, “Great!  What a perfect excuse to go from occasional over-indulger to full time drunk.  What unbelievable quantities of slack I’d be cut.”

Another thought was, “Great!  What excellent dramatic fodder to wow them with tonight at the Jackson Arts Collective reading at the Commons.”

Then I started feeling sick blind panic.

Another thought was imagining her gone, lots of time passing, meeting someone else, having a life that would be easier, but somehow less than, somehow lacking.

And again the sick blind panic sped up my heartbeat, and I felt strongly the thing that I have unapologetically become, a sort of sociopath of love, or of something, who cares for nothing in the world but the continuing possibility of being naked in bed with my naked wife on a very regular basis.  What do I care what some stupid ass football team did.  What do I care for the latest injustice.  If I could get what I want by killing you I’d do it in a New York second.  Friends visit seldomly, sensing the single-mindedness in the blank look that settles on my face when they continue with a topic that falls in the quite large category of things that do not directly contribute to the cause of me continuing to be naked in bed with my naked wife on a very regular basis.

You in the audience tonight are probably beginning to feel my cold indifference to your personal well being and existence, rolling off me in waves.

It is not a choice I have made.

Involuntarily my aim is zeroed in.

My eggs are all the way in one basket.

And things are never, ever not precarious.

Tagged in:

,