July 11–24, 2003 — Decay

I do not feel well, and I am wondering if the numbness and slowness in my head could become permanent; it’s the feeling I used to get when I didn’t have enough sugar inside me, but now I feel this way almost all the time. Something is deficient: iron or essential oils or a sense that things will be better one day.

And a lot of smaller things are falling apart; the play button on my CD player stopped working, which mostly means that my CD player stopped working. In fairness to its other components, though, only the play button is faulty. (I know the rest of the CD player still works because I tore it apart, removed the cover on the play button, put it back together, and then hit the trigger that was once hidden beneath the button with a screwdriver until it acknowledged it was being pressed. Because carrying around a screwdriver to force my CD player to work is not practical, I am no longer going to be able to listen to music outside the house.)

My bike is also causing problems. It makes a constant rattling noise that I’m trying not to notice, but pedestrians seem to notice, and it is embarrassing. Also, it seems more difficult to pedal now, and a few weeks ago my right knee started to throb a bit whenever I went up a steep hill. More recently, my knee has been throbbing when I’m not on my bike, and I catch myself limping sometimes. I am giving my bike and my knee a rest while I think about the permanent damage I might have caused.

Jeff watches me eating the same foods every morning, a fairly healthy breakfast by most standards, complete with vitamins and supplements. He says I’ll end up living to be 120 and that obsessing over vitamins and nutrients isn’t compatible with the pessimism I work so hard to maintain. I think he’s missing my sunnier, more optimistic side and overlooking my intense fear of death.

Another morning, Jeff asked me if I knew of the Exploding Hearts; while the name sounded familiar, I said I didn’t. He told me that three of the band’s four members were killed in an accident while driving home from a show the night before. I’ve never heard a song by the Exploding Hearts, and I didn’t know what their album was called or what record label they were on until that morning. But my heart sank.

I’ve always been terrified of car accidents. I’ve caused or otherwise been in enough of them that I consider sudden death a very real possibility of agreeing to sit in a moving vehicle. With Cuff The Duke, I sat in a van for the better part of 49 consecutive hours and barely slept because I thought that if I did, the van would go off the road and I would never wake up.

I have done a pretty thorough job of desensitizing myself to deaths of others. War casualties and starving children are so disconnected from my life that their suffering doesn’t begin to hit me as hard as the deaths of three people in their early twenties driving in a van during the early hours of morning. I feel very small realizing that thousands of people in other countries with lives nothing like mine can die without making a dent in me because they died in a way I don’t have to worry about dying. I live in a safe city in a safe country with enough money to buy food and with free health insurance; I can afford not to think all that much about death, and I can justify my blindness to the suffering of others by insisting that I would not be able to live my life if I allowed myself to be devastated by the uncountable deaths I choose to remain ignorant of.

I should go watch TV; I don’t want to think about this anymore.