Big Questions Circulate

As I write this, it's Sunday afternoon, my favorite time to sit at home and watch stupid movies. Instead, I'm sitting in Panera eating a chicken salad sandwich with a knife and fork. Every now and then I move my right arm and wince.

I know how I got here, but the utter discomfort with which I inhabit my body is still way beyond the norm.

1. The fake acrylic teeth covering my own make it risky and extremely unpleasant to bite into anything. Everything gets cut into small pieces and shoveled into the way-back of my mouth. I've been eating a lot of soup and I think I'm becoming anemic.

2. I got my Tom Servo tattoo finished on Friday. The anesthetic goo I used beforehand didn't really work, and it felt like my skin was being flayed off by the end. I think I actually have bruising. This is not the fault of my artist, whom I love and who just wants to put beautiful work on me, but the pain has stayed fresh a bit longer than usual.

3. Our air conditioner broke on Saturday afternoon. It's been in the mid-nineties (Fahrenheit) for the last few days, and it easily gets that hot in our apartment even on less-hot days because of the way the sun falls on our roof. On Sunday I tried as hard as I could to cope with the climbing temperature, the increasing sensation of being in an oven, but when no one had come to fix it by 2 PM and it was actually ninety actual degrees in my apartment, I gave it up and fled to Panera. I was sleepy and hot and immobile at home (anemia? carbon monoxide? hysteria of the skin?), and I felt better once I'd been sitting in a civil temperature and had some smoothie and a sandwich in me. Even if I did have to eat the latter with a knife and fork.

4. The L.A. neighborhood where I live is the closest one in the city limits to Santa Clarita, where a massive brush fire has been raging uncontrollably for the past few days. The sky looked like this on Saturday:

(See the harsh bright-sun shadows on the building across from me? And the scary wrath-of-God sky at the same time? That's Los Angeles. It is the strangest place. I don't want to live anywhere else, though. That very night, Matt and I went to the Hollywood Bowl to see Weird Al as a birthday gift to him. It was very, very hot, but I always have so much fun at the Bowl, even in crappy seats. Outdoors is the best place to hear music.)

The point is, the proximity of this brush fire makes me more uncomfortable than the usual fire-season hubbub. It troubles me. I have friends who are displaced and worried about their cats.

I just cut my pickle in four pieces before I could eat it.

It is a weird time.

Maybe all this weirdness in my body explains why I have, more often than usual, been having The Snap-Back Sensation here and there throughout my days. Do you have this? A moment of consciousness where you suddenly feel all the intensity of being alive in the world, the tug of gravity on your bones, the friction of clothing and air molecules on your skin, the genuine oddness of inhabiting a vessel made of meat? It's like someone has metaphysically slapped you upside the head to get you to stop your hysterics, and whammo, you are ALIVE. All these big questions circulate in your head, which can be disorienting if you're in the middle of doing something else. What even is consciousness? Is consciousness distinct from the soul? Who decided that sentience should live in this strange decaying thing enveloped by a flexible, delicate substance that no one can properly replicate as yet?

Why did our air conditioning break on one of the hottest weekends of the summer? Why does it take three weeks for a laboratory to fabricate my new veneers? Why was I blessed with a whole booth at Panera to myself when usually Matt and I are shoved into a table in the corner?

There's big weird stuff going on in the wider world, too, in case you haven't noticed. It's not my responsibility to think or write about those things too critically, but sheesh. Tragedy or farce or both, depending on your perspective and what lines on the map you live inside. I do not know what is up. I just want things to be normal again. Chicken Littledom is not my favorite place to live.

Some small news about writing: I got an acceptance, which per my usual policy I won't say much about yet, except yay. I'm trying to put together a collection based on a weird idea that continues to be fruitful despite itself, and if I had the wherewithal to sit down and be physically comfortable long enough to put words on the page, I think I could do it. I revised the secret project a little and sent it to another round of readers.

That's all for now. The fall semester approacheth. Maybe by then my body will feel a little more like my own.