I have a cold.  Which is to say, a cold has me.  It has crept among my cells with little cats feet, infiltrated me with viral toxins.  I am sobered, more convinced than ever of my own mortality, not to mention age.  What else can one say about the strange and sudden draining of the human body's essential forces?  This is the second cold I have had in short order.  I don't get colds.  My Tuesday volunteer Paul has arrived on a Thursday.  It is the sort of change Read more [...]

I estimate that the small arrow on the side of the rail car parked across the platform from mine is about two inches long.  With Caltrain about to slide out of its berth in the San Francisco station I am in an excellent position to bear witness to the gradual.  An opportunity to catch the very first, barely discernible moment when inertia turns into movement.  I watch and watch.  The car jerks into action, the two inches on the car opposite yanked north while I leap south.  Read more [...]

I am uneasy about my wanderings, uncertain as to their purpose, queasy about their evasiveness.  Not that it matters, once I and my motor neurons are up and at it for another day.  They are anxious moments, those first ones.  The human is, after all, vulnerable on so many fronts.  Just kicking my one working leg out from the bed, in concert with an abdominal heave ho, to get me sitting upright...well, that is an existential shock in itself.  I don't sit up in the middle of Read more [...]

On the way out of Café Borrone, at the very spot where the concrete allotted to metal tables and chairs gives way to that provided for parking signs and bus stop benches, it hits me.  The oddity of bouncing around town seated in this vehicle.  That some of my mind still has me walking, like patrons heading to and from the café.  The wheelchair, or my low position in it, seems new.  It creaks slightly moving on the sidewalk, a platform pitching on a concrete sea.  Ahead, Read more [...]

Step #1Fall in love with Jane.  This is simultaneously easy and difficult.  Jane being easy to love, but love itself being difficult.  Note the instruction to 'fall' in love.  This implies descent, and equally stumbling, perhaps tripping.  For the course of true love never did run vertical.  And after the fall comes the winter...remember that too.  Remember the Maine.  The latter is important in doing battle with the forces arrayed against one in any love struggle.  Read more [...]

Jane is tied up with other things these days, and my emotional maturity being whatever it is, I get tied up in feeling deprived of attention, and so a certain tenseness pervaded our northbound journey.  What to do about such things?  Let time pass.  Time, and that other thing that comes with travel, distance.  North to Harbin Hot Springs.  That is to say, north into the past, this destination being what it is.  My own personal past pushing me down into the seat of Marlou's Read more [...]