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"25 things that have to do with me, #4"
  1. the number 23 holds a deep, mysterious gravity that i can feel when i see it.  when it pops up in especially deep, mysterious ways, it’s like a red dwarf has passed me and pulled at me.
  2. this is probably all in my head.
  3. sometimes people need something to believe in.
  4. on my road trip from new york to memphis, somewhere around mile 700 and hour 10, i tried to imagine that god, or some version of god left over from my childhood, was in my passenger’s seat.
  5. when i was a child, god was my imaginary friend.
  6. but in the car god kept changing into various men that left me, or were never around much in the first.
  7. one reason i like solo road trips: by the end you’re too tired for social correctness, and given no alternative but good-natured lunacy.
  8. on my road trip from new york to memphis, i sang nearly the entire time.
  9. on my road trip from new york to memphis, when i was worried that i was getting tired and losing focus, i put in neutral milk hotel’s in the aeroplane over the sea, which is one of my least favorite albums ever.  my annoyance at the album shook me out of my haze.
  10. last night, back in memphis, i was in the middle of a seething crowd, pogoing to korn.  mosh pits kept forming around me and i kept having to push myself away from them.  i’m still too small and bony for mosh pits.
  11. when my best friend and i were teenagers, we went to see stabbing westward at the new daisy.  she was picked up and surfed over the audience.  then someone dropped her and someone else stepped on her face.
  12. my best friend wasn’t in the crowd.  she’s become too old for mosh pits.
  13. my age has never had much to do with the number of years i’ve been on this earth.  when i was a child i was very grown up for my age.  starting when i was eight, seemingly everyone around me started getting cancer.  by the time i was twenty, i’d nearly lost my mother, and had lost my father and my grandparents.
  14. my grandparents had taken care of me when my mother was next to death, so losing them was like losing two more parents.
  15. in july, it will have been ten years since dad died and i ran away from home.  although i know i’ve grown up in some ways, in many other ways i don’t feel older.  in many ways i think i feel younger.
  16. few things are more ironic than an eight year old with the weight of mortality pressing on her.  the inarguable fact that death is in the room.
  17. when i was eighteen, holding vigil over my father, i stared at death every night.
  18. ten years later, i still see it hanging around.
  19. i’m not in the habit of seeing dad’s grave when i’m in town.  it might be the last bit of leftover protestant guilt.
  20. i refer to dad’s grave as The Filing Cabinet.  he’s in a mausoleum.
  21. when you see a dead person, drained and refilled and made-up to look not as much like a corpse, they don’t look like they’re sleeping.  they look dead.  you know that this body is like the skin of a snake.  it vaguely resembles what it used to hold, but the life inside it is obviously gone.
  22. dad’s body looked like this months before he actually died.  his body killed him; i have no doubt of it.
  23. it’s been ten years and.
  24. i am back in memphis and.
  25. i tell people i am pagan, but in reality there are so many religions rich with tradition and story, and i know each of them has depth and significance, so i can’t possibly imagine that the god i happened to be raised to love and speak to and cower from is the one and only god.  so when i say pagan, i mean that your god is just as likely to be around as my imaginary childhood friend is.