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My Trip To Ecuador
Mar. 10th, 2006 08:56 amDoctor confirms: viral pneumonia. Also known as "walking pneumonia." What's the treatment?
Don't walk.
So, a guy on the Well died yesterday, not someone I knew anything about beyond the fact that he took his television-watching very seriously. Still, it was sad. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer maybe three months ago and began blogging about it. I pictured him, if I thought of him at all, as one of those jolly, balding, bearded, vastly overweight guys who hook up with online bulletin boards the way their compadres outside the Bay Area join the Rotary Club.
But when he died, there was this brief spillage on to my monitor of – I don't even know how to describe it. "My blue-eyed boy," wrote his widow, another Well regular, and I didn't as much as see those words on the screen so much as hear them wailed.
To feel you have a life in someone else's imagination is to feel a kind of intimacy with them, writes Sue Miller.
Afterwards, I had to go to Costco where I had this strange vision of the Big Box Store of the Walking Dead. I don't mean the other shoppers were extras in some kind of interior Wes Craven movie, no; I mean I kept watching them – the Hispanic mothers tag-teaming the week's grocery purchases, picking up boxes of Tide and Cheer, frowning over the small print on the cartons; the longhair deadbeats with their cases of Coors and frozen jalapeno poppers; the Yuppie aesthetic, his cart empty except for a gallon of overpriced organic orange juice and a bouquet of roses – wanting in the worst possible way to slap them across the face. What does it matter what you buy? I wanted to scream at them. You're all going to die. Every blue-eyed boy you ever loved will soon be dust.
Of course my subjective impression of myself when I get into psychic spaces like this is that I radiate a kind of Primal Repulsive Vibe. Thus I was shocked, shocked, shocked by the number of people who smiled at me for no particular reason except that our glances happened to cross, who sought me out for conversation. "What do you think?" says a little Hispanic man. "Are these bananas too green?"
"No," I say, shaping the human words in my monster mouth with great difficulty. "I think bananas should be green when you buy them. Otherwise they turn to mush in a day."
"You're right, you're right," nods the little man. And begins to spin a story about the time he bought bananas in Ecuador and what the banana seller told him that goes on for five minutes. "But why am I telling you this?" he said finally. "You've been to Ecuador!"
I have? How did he know? And which of my blue-eyed boys did I bring along with me?
"My wife's birthday," confides the Yuppie with the roses. "I almost forgot. Figure if I don't do something, it'll be the couch for the next six months." He has blue eyes too.
Stocked up on $300 worth of groceries. Raced home. Went straight to bed with an Elizabeth George serial killer novel (With No One As Witness – not so great), a jar of Nutella and orders to the Boy Squad that I was not to be disturbed.
Still, all evening long, the after-aura to the disturbing vision manifested itself as a kind of sensitivity to events that had not quite happened yet – I would hear the telephone ring three beats before it actually did ring; I would respond to comments Robin and Ben made three seconds before they actually made them.
"What's up with you?" Ben asked finally. "Are you channeling that guy from the Dead Zone?"
This morning I feel better.
Don't walk.
So, a guy on the Well died yesterday, not someone I knew anything about beyond the fact that he took his television-watching very seriously. Still, it was sad. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer maybe three months ago and began blogging about it. I pictured him, if I thought of him at all, as one of those jolly, balding, bearded, vastly overweight guys who hook up with online bulletin boards the way their compadres outside the Bay Area join the Rotary Club.
But when he died, there was this brief spillage on to my monitor of – I don't even know how to describe it. "My blue-eyed boy," wrote his widow, another Well regular, and I didn't as much as see those words on the screen so much as hear them wailed.
To feel you have a life in someone else's imagination is to feel a kind of intimacy with them, writes Sue Miller.
Afterwards, I had to go to Costco where I had this strange vision of the Big Box Store of the Walking Dead. I don't mean the other shoppers were extras in some kind of interior Wes Craven movie, no; I mean I kept watching them – the Hispanic mothers tag-teaming the week's grocery purchases, picking up boxes of Tide and Cheer, frowning over the small print on the cartons; the longhair deadbeats with their cases of Coors and frozen jalapeno poppers; the Yuppie aesthetic, his cart empty except for a gallon of overpriced organic orange juice and a bouquet of roses – wanting in the worst possible way to slap them across the face. What does it matter what you buy? I wanted to scream at them. You're all going to die. Every blue-eyed boy you ever loved will soon be dust.
Of course my subjective impression of myself when I get into psychic spaces like this is that I radiate a kind of Primal Repulsive Vibe. Thus I was shocked, shocked, shocked by the number of people who smiled at me for no particular reason except that our glances happened to cross, who sought me out for conversation. "What do you think?" says a little Hispanic man. "Are these bananas too green?"
"No," I say, shaping the human words in my monster mouth with great difficulty. "I think bananas should be green when you buy them. Otherwise they turn to mush in a day."
"You're right, you're right," nods the little man. And begins to spin a story about the time he bought bananas in Ecuador and what the banana seller told him that goes on for five minutes. "But why am I telling you this?" he said finally. "You've been to Ecuador!"
I have? How did he know? And which of my blue-eyed boys did I bring along with me?
"My wife's birthday," confides the Yuppie with the roses. "I almost forgot. Figure if I don't do something, it'll be the couch for the next six months." He has blue eyes too.
Stocked up on $300 worth of groceries. Raced home. Went straight to bed with an Elizabeth George serial killer novel (With No One As Witness – not so great), a jar of Nutella and orders to the Boy Squad that I was not to be disturbed.
Still, all evening long, the after-aura to the disturbing vision manifested itself as a kind of sensitivity to events that had not quite happened yet – I would hear the telephone ring three beats before it actually did ring; I would respond to comments Robin and Ben made three seconds before they actually made them.
"What's up with you?" Ben asked finally. "Are you channeling that guy from the Dead Zone?"
This morning I feel better.
