My mood swings do surprise me these days. But I think it’s like wandering down a darkened hallway, seeing something moving and realizing it’s your reflection in a wall mirror. This has always been happening. Now in my period of at-home constancy, it has become more apparent.

And what a ride it is. I woke up this morning feeling quite rested. Got up and began to feel a certain dread. Another day of queasiness. As though something bad was about to happen. Which it was. Something bad is always about to happen. It’s only a matter of time. It’s also a matter of what you mean by bad. 

I would describe having the ground fall out beneath me as being what medical professionals term ‘contraindicated’…but that is only because I am not the Grand Canyon. If you are one of the world’s major eroded chasms, why not go from being a star to being a superstar? As for time, competition apart, it is on your side. Well pretty much. If you are the Great Rift Valley, time will only make you greater…up to the point where it doesn’t. Who’s to know?

Where was I?

Actually I was thinking about Mount San Jacinto. It stared at me throughout my desert childhood. It had an attitude, that peak. Lofty, sneering, looking down on me in every sense of the word. And geologically smug. That’s what comes of having the San Andreas Fault entirely on your side. Because it is the major peak that I climbed as a kid, a decade before my injury, the mountain had quite an impact.

I remember being on the summit and staring down at a brass marker someone from the US Geological Survey had pounded into the granite. The markings provided a sort of permanent compass, just in case you are lost. They also provided the altitude. The mountain was then 10,831 feet tall. And I was 5’8″ tall when I was shot. Now I am 5’7″ tall and Mount San Jacinto is several inches taller. No wonder the peak has an attitude.

Yes, some of the increased height (in the mountain, not me) can be attributed to advances in surveying techniques. Lasers have made a huge difference. No more fucking around with line-of-sight optical measurements. So measuring has gotten more precise. But there’s this other thing, vis-à-vis slippage. The summit is rising at a breathtaking pace. Yes, it is measurable in one human lifetime. Just go up the mountain. I wrote about doing this via Swiss cable car in January. But there is a perfectly reliable county highway that will accomplish the same job. Either way, you can’t avoid the cliff-hanging reality of the mountain. It is steep beyond imagining.

Oh yes, I was talking about psychic ups and downs. And call it the oceanic feeling, as Freud did. Or call it a broader view, as I did. Either way, the world will continue without us. And frankly, it won’t miss us. This is hardly an original view. And is not at all helpful while sweating out a mass pandemic. Still there are moments when I find it calming.