So I’m sitting here at the end of a long summer day, looking at all the cute and subtly intuitive buttons on the Word toolbars, and wondering what I should write about. My mind is a small orchestra, tuning up as a troop of clowns on bicycles crashes through a crowded Chinatown restaurant. So many recent immigrants are being scalded by flying pots of steaming egg drop soup. And as the last team of paramedics clears the scene, a soggy, scrotish fortune cookie ponders the folly of too much concern for fleeting love.

It can’t be helped. Call it the pratfalls of unremitting sobriety.

It was a quiet day. J detailed his car, as the dogs moved from place to place throughout the house, looking for a cool, soft place to doze. I worried about my nerves, which have been on high voltage lately.

Sometimes, when it’s like that, I get alone and make a stupid face. It’s a relaxation technique, taught to me by a psychotherapist a few years back. You breathe slowly in and out, and with each exhale, allow the face to fall more slack, like the uncomprehending features of an idiot. Let the jaw hang loose like laundry on the line. When the face is totally limp – which takes me 20 or 30 slow, deep breaths – work on down the body from the ears to the toes.

It just doesn’t matter. Whatever’s making you crazy, spend your day dreaming about getting drunk into a warm darkness, or eating to the point of paralysis, it doesn’t matter. Not in 40 years or 50, not to the lawnmower, weed whacker, reaper … sssshh. Shantih.

I was neither