I cut off all my hair on Wednesday. Well, not all of it. But a lot of it.

 

And in five minutes, I'm driving to Baltimore. Whee.

I am überconscious of recent events as the white elephant that I refuse to acknowledge. So, instead of writing over and around the things I'm thinking, I will once again abandon prose in favor of listing nice things:

Advil

Overdressed children in restaurants who hold hands

Heads

black beans, red tomatoes, and brown rice

great new albums by Jude, Sam Phillips, and Cake

"banal"

the movie Spy Kids

Greg's mom and step-dad

amazing new album by Ben Folds

EDDIE IZZARD AND EVERY WORD HE'S EVER SPOKEN

big huge dinners with lots of friends

an extra 64 MB for a previously painfully slow home computer

FruitWater, by Glaceau

people who call me just to tell me they think I'm "grand"

marsupials

6,333 missing and presumed dead at the World Trade Center alone. Inconceivable expenses. Layoffs in the thousands at airline companies. And yet, those of us not directly affected start to return to normal, because we have to.

It doesn't change the fact that I'm a little afraid to turn away from the TV or the Internet, for fear that smallpox has broken out or my office park has been bombed and I'm caught uninformed. It doesn't change the fact that sometimes I see movement out of the corner of my eye and get caught momentarily in a daymare wherein that peripheral blur turns out to be a man with a gun who shoots up my entire office.

But I can't be afriad of my shadow forever, and it's getting easier to ignore the feeling of the Grim Reaper's arm slung casually across my shoulders. We all know it's always there. But to pay attention to it is to miss everything else.

Rosh Hashanah was this week, and it felt good to put the weight of the world on hold for a while and celebrate the new year. Everything was a little louder, a little warmer, a little funnier than it should be, and I've never been so glad to see my friends.

And Danny called me at work yesterday just to tell me that he was finally pissed at the bad drivers again. It was the best news I'd heard all day -- god bless that banal and meaningless agression. How holy to have the energy to flip off the asshole Chevy. Maybe we are no longer consumed by the kind of anger that is so pure and so potent that it would poison our own hearts. Of course, it's still there, but we push it off the way we dance around the embrace of Death itself; to accept it completely is to reject life. So I will continue to feel the pain in small doses, and I will laugh with my friends, and I will blare my ever-loving horn to anyone who cuts me off in traffic.

I look for someone to pray to, some way to believe there will never be blackness so dark again in my lifetime. I walk around through a preternatural quiet, with a feeling like being out of the house at 4 AM -- existing outside of time, the earth on pause and me still moving. I can't think of anything but the last moments and the last phone calls, and how no one feels safe, and how we avenge this pain to the innocent people with the wrong skin color at the wrong time.

I am stretched full with love and sadness. I am so sorry. And I am so grateful for everything I have.