Circadian Rhythms

Since I've gotten back from Japan I haven't been able to sleep at night. It's been this way for days now. At around 10:30, after brushing my teeth and slipping into a comfy pair of pajamas, I get into bed. Sleep, however, never comes. Behind closed eyelids, my mind remains alert. Trouble sleeping isn't something I'm used to. In a comfortable bed I can typically fall asleep within minutes. Insomnia plagues some people, I'm sure. I've read as much. But reading about a thing and experiencing it are not the same. Tossing and turning fruitlessly becomes a frustrating exercise in tedium. Especially when it's proving to be a nightly occurrence. How long does jet-lag last? Deep breathing, a traditionally useful technique, offers no remedy. Nor does finding a comfortable position. I wind up hungry and thirsty by 1:00am. Sometimes I'll slip into sleep for an hour or two and wake up feeling fully rested. This happened to me two nights ago. It was midnight before sleep took me. It seemed as though hours and hours had passed. Intense, almost religiously powerful dreams danced in my head for what seemed the whole night through. But when I awoke in darkness and checked my phone to see what time it was, I was shocked to see that it was only 3:00. Until 5:00 I tried in vain to sleep, only slipping into sleep briefly before my alarm went off at 6:30. The snooze button quickly turned into the stop button, and birds woke me at 9:30 when I realized I'd be late to work.

To prevent this, the next night I took a Xanax. It helped in putting me to sleep, but I felt sluggish and drowsy upon waking. This sensation lasted most of the day until I got home and wanted to sleep. Then I had the energy of ten men. The only logical explanation is that I must have picked up a parasite in Japan. A parasite that feeds on sleeplessness. On the plane to Japan I'd read a short story by Murakami about a woman who one day stopped sleeping. At night she'd drink brandy and read classic works of literature by famous Russian authors. During the day she'd run all of her errands as usual, and resume her nighttime reading and drinking. Sometimes, for a change of pace, she'd go for a late night drive and read beneath a streetlight while sitting in her car. Things went on this way for two weeks or so, until the story ended tragically as two thugs attempted to force their way into her car at the exact moment that exhaustion had rendered her all but useless. Perhaps I'm to suffer the same fate.

It's 1:05am. I've been in bed for hours but haven't yet gotten close to sleep. I'm hungry and have a slight headache. Would it be so bad if I just turned on all the lights and made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and watched TV until the sun came up? Insomnia is a medical condition right? I could take a sick day tomorrow. Then, if I could keep myself awake for the rest of the day, I'd be tired by nighttime and might fall back into a regular rhythm. Unfortunately I have two friends from Australia on their way to me as I write this. Their plane is racing over the Pacific, halfway to San Francisco, and they're probably asleep. In fact, they'll likely be more well-rested than me. They're staying with me for the first few days of their journey. I guess if I can't sleep while they're here, I'll have something new to look at. Would they think that's creepy? It's definitely creepy. But what if they didn't know? The thought of someone watching me sleep is very disturbing. For a few reasons. First, I wouldn't know I was being watched. For all I know, this may have happened to me already. It could even be happening every night. Maybe that's why I can't sleep - because like a character in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, my body's finally realized it's being watched.

The second reason it's disturbing is because of how vulnerable a person is while they're sleeping. The epitome of complete and utter defenselessness. While unconscious the human body offers no resistance, to anything. It is maximally exploitable. A fact well known, and much abused by male members of college fraternities. And Bill Cosby.

A very close friend just messaged me from Ireland. He had to rush home from a long-awaited South American sojourn at the news that his father's health had taken a turn for the worse. It's a lengthy flight from South America to Ireland, with many stops and lingering layovers. His father passed while he was in transit. After a painfully long and lonesome flight home, he's been tasked with eulogizing his dad. The thought of it tears hard at the tearducts. It's a unenviable position that's easy to place oneself in, because most of us will be there some day. And what does one say? I guess you say the things that you remember. Those moments that defined and made human the person who raised you. Isn't it strange the things we might remember about them? Some memories come to be cherished and, others, forgotten. Usually without much rhyme or reason. Often it's the little things, the things they don't even remember saying or doing that stay with us the longest. Some memories, then, may be all but forgotten, yet still shape our lives and values in visible and invisible ways. We remember them through stories and photographs, videos, old birthday cards and letters, but also the little things; in the way we tie our shoes or brush our teeth; whether we fold our toilet paper or ball it up; how well we make our beds.

And there's beauty in that. Because then the end isn't the end. They are always a part of us, and not even death can take that away.

Japan, In Short

I have much to write about. Unfortunately, there's no time. It's been a day and a half since I returned from Japan, but I still haven't had a chance to write about the trip. So, here's a bulleted list, as a reminder of things to come:

• A front-row, in-your-face, sword-waving experience at a robot restaurant
• Alleys full of Japanese bars that felt like Burning Man camps
• Walking like Moses, parting Red seas of people at the most crowded crosswalk in the world
• Taking nearly eighty forms of public transit over the course of ten days
• Mastering said public transit within our first 24-hours
• A pilgrimage to Mt Koya, and the serendipitous witnessing of a Buddhist ceremony
• Staying at Benny Benesse's House in Naoshima
• A museum curated by the ghost of Stanley Kubrick
• The best ramen ever
• The best sushi ever
• The best bidet ever
• The best bakery ever
• The best soft-serve ice-cream ever
• A lone Geisha
• Weird, octopus-ball street food, and eating the bastard lovechild of a pancake and a quesadilla
• A broken toe in Tokyo
• The best whiskey jazz bar, with the best Moscow-mule ever
• A morning full of thousands of red gates
• A morning in a forest full of thousands of stalks of bamboo
• An untold number of NYT crosswords
• The best steak ever - made by Kobe Bryant!
• More whiskey, this time paired with 1920's silent movies
• Not enough sleep
• Shitting like a disgraced dog inside a subway station bathroom
• An unfulfilled blowjob

More on these tomorrow, I hope.

The Laundromat

The coins fell into the tray in loud clinks. Ten dollars worth. The prices had gone up recently. What used to cost five dollars for two loads of laundry now costs seven. It was relatively empty, save for a man reading a hardcover book and a short Asian lady folding her clothes in the rear. He is middle-aged, white, with short hair and a pale mustache. Covering his eyes are a pair of reflective aviator sunglasses, the kind a cop or a highway patrolman might wear. Who reads a book while wearing sunglasses indoors? It's true, he is sitting in front of a large set of windows, and it is sunny. Where I am standing, at the change machine, I can see down the length of the laundromat. To my back is the exit and, beside me, on the right, are a set of white plastic chairs. The kind that are one solid piece, like life-size versions of the little white tables that come in pizza delivery boxes. What do those little tables do, anyway? Prevent the center of the pizza from being crushed should a substantial weight fall upon the box? Maybe it's where the cheese hides for safety in case of an earthquake. Probably not.

Back to the chairs. There are four of them, and they're filthy. They look like they've been drawn on with number-two pencils but then couldn't be completely erased. The chairs are held together by a wooden 2x4 running along the backside, so they move as one unit. Presumably this is to prevent them from being stolen and repurposed as lawn chairs at the nearby trailer park. On the left side of me, there are a line of washing machines, probably twenty-five of them. Larger ones - there are three of them - are in the front, nearest the windows, and the standard-sized ones run the rest of the length of the wall. In between the door and the wall, on that side, directly in front of the windows, are another four chairs held together by a wooden plank. That's the side the man reading the book is sitting on. Maybe about three meters across from the standard-sized washers, are all the dryers. They stack one on top of the other, for a total height of two, and they run the length of the wall on the right side. In that three meter gap between the walls, lengthwise, are three tables to fold clothes on. Pretty bare bones.

The Asian lady is in the back, at the furthest table. She has a lot of laundry. There are two giant bags, one on each side of her, and one on the table in front of her. She's stuffing clothes into the sack. It's so full it looks about to burst. Imagery of swelling water-balloons and clown-cars dance in my head. When I say the bags are enormous, I mean they're gargantuan. Or is it that she's small? The bags easily eclipse her. It's going to be interesting to see how she gets all that laundry out of here. If she's smart, she's got a small, two-wheeled dolly with her to roll them out on. We'll see. I scoop the coins into my hand, trying carefully not to let any quarters escape and go rolling madly around onto the floor. Have you ever noticed how a dropped quarter always reaches the furthest corner of the room, if you can find it at all? As soon as a quarter hits the floor there's a 50/50 chance of it ricocheting off into another dimension.

"You missed one," the seated man says as I step away from the coin machine.

"What?"

"A quarter, you missed one," he continues.

My first thought is that he must be joking. How could he know that, sitting all the way over there? I'd been blocking his view the entire time. And even if I hadn't been, even with a direct line of sight there was no way he could see into the tray from that angle.

"You don't believe me?" he asks.

I don't say anything and I glance at the tray. I can't see it from where I'm standing and I'm almost directly in front of it.

"It's there, I promise," the man tells me, with smug self-assurance.

"Yeah," I say quizzically, "you can see that from there?"

"No, never said I saw it. I can't see. Just said that there's one there," he says.

What kind of game is this guy playing, I wonder. What if he's only saying that so he can see whether he can get me to go over and check?

"Thanks. I'll get it in a second," I tell him. Clever. This way, I'll get my laundry started and then check for the coin. It'll be more causal, and on my terms instead of his.

"Suit yourself."

The washer shuts with a clang! One by one I insert the change until I've paid the $3.50. I set it for cold wash, normal. The twenty-eight minute countdown begins.

"You gonna check for that quarter before someone else gets it first," the man asks without looking up.

I'll be damned. I was about to. But now he just changed the power dynamic on me. If I go look for it now, he's basically commanding me. If I wait, I might lose the chance to find out and prove him wrong. He can't know that there's a quarter there. He can't. How would I have missed it? It's possible, sure. The Asian lady is nearly done stuffing her bag in the back. I glance at her but she's absent-mindedly humming a song and isn't paying us any mind.

"Hey, lady," the man yells out suddenly. "Watch that bag on the floor, the machine is leaking."

The woman looks down to her side and lets out an exasperated little sound as she discovers what must be a slow moving body of water traveling toward her bag. She leans down and yanks the bag away from the newly forming lake and drags it over nearest the other one, on her right side.

"Oh, thanka you," she says, smiling. She goes on humming and folding her clothes.

Something strange was happening. What are the odds that he was able to spot a small pool of clear liquid all the way at the back of the room. Me, two tables, and the woman were all in the way. While it's no super-human feat, by any means, the guy never looked up. He was sitting there with his head buried in his book. Granted, he has sunglasses on, so it's possible his eyes weren't pointed where his head was, but it didn't seem that way. The spin cycle of the washer started with a kick and the force of it made the whole room feel as though it were wobbling. It was the only thing I could hear. The empty chairs near the change machine seemed to ever-so-slightly wiggle with the sound. Now I needed to check that change tray. If he was right about the spill maybe he was right about the change.

As if reading my mind: "You gonna let that old quarter get lonely in there, boy, aren't you," the man asked with a wry smile.

"No, I was about to go get it," I say.

"You don't believe me that it's in there, do you," he asked, closing his book. He sat there expressionless with his hands folded over the cover. I couldn't make out what it said.

"I mean, I don't know," I say to fill the silence. "You've got a good eye if it's there, I'll say that much."

"Two," he says.

"What?"

"I got two good eyes."

"Ah," I say and then laugh.

He doesn't.

I walk towards the change machine and then stop.

"What's a matter?" he asks.

I'm beginning to notice he has a bit of an accent. A kind of drawl. It was subtle at first, but it's become more pronounced the more I hear him speak.

"I don't know. I'm just really curious how you could know there's a coin in there without having seen it."

"So you think I'm telling lies?"

"No, not saying you're telling lies. I just think it's strange, that's all."

"We could place a wager."

"A wager?"

"A wager."

"I'll bet you a dollar you'll find a coin there," he declares.

"And if I don't?"

"You will."

"But if I don't, what do I get?"

"Listen doc, if I say it's there, it's there. There ain't gonna be no other option."

The way he said doc strikes me as peculiar. Maybe it's because of the text messages from earlier, but the phrase is odd and out of place. Unless you're Bugs Bunny. Yeah, something about this was definitely rubbing me the wrong way. Come to think of it, this whole conversation was highly unusual. Everything about it. The washer is really going at it now. It's thrashing in place. There's no doubt about it, the floor is shaking. Suddenly I get the sense someone is coming up behind me, and I turn to see the little Asian lady like a locomotive lugging her bags toward me. I step out of her way and she smiles a big smile as she passes.

"Well, what are you waiting for," the man says.

"Yeah, I was about to," I say.

"Well, git," he spits.

Who says git? What does he think, he's from the south?

"We're in Northern California, buddy. We don't say git around here," I tell him.

"Ha! That's what you'll git, then. If there's no quarter in there I'll never use the word git, again."

"Okay, why not. Deal."

I walk up to the machine, reach my hand in, and pull out a quarter. The man starts a hoarse fit of laughter that turns into coughing.

"Best damn dollar I ever made!" he says.

"How did you..."

He continues laughing. The floor is still vibrating, stronger now. The chairs beside me at the change machine have a Parkinson's shake. I feel sick. The man continues to laugh and cough sickeningly. My knees get rubbery and I'm starting to feel dizzy. He throws his head back and his Adam's apple bounces madly up and down as he howls. His laughter knocks the book off his lap and it hits the floor with a loud bang just as the washer stops. The silence fills the whole emptiness of the laundromat. I feel disoriented. The quarter is digging painfully into my clenched hand. After a moment, the uneasiness wears off and I step closer to pick up his book and hand it to him.

That's when I notice it's in braille.

The Radler

I didn't know what to do after I'd realized it. This was no ordinary message, not by a stretch. It said "help me." I was flummoxed. I walked out of my kitchen and back into my living room with the freshly made shake in hand. The glass was icy. When I sat on the couch I took a long drink as I let my mind wander. From the rim of the cup I saw a small puff of smoke escape when the cold air met my breath. The frothy, bubbly top tickled my lip as it began to harden there and I wondered if I had a green mustache. When I took another sip I noticed the teeth at the back of my mouth were cold. Half the shake was already gone. Slow down, tiger. You don't want brain freeze. Something about the text just didn't make sense. Whoever texted me had access to a phone. If they were in danger, why not call the police? Why text me? While it was possible the person didn't have a phone, that instead they only had access to an automated messaging service, it seemed unlikely. But it would explain the peculiar nature of these events. No, actually, it doesn't. Let's assume they only had access to a messaging service; why try to obfuscate the message and conceal the fact that it was a request for help? Maybe the message itself was being supervised and it needed to be disguised? Already a lot of assumptions need to be made for this to be true. And even if it were true, there was nothing actionable for me to do about it.

I stared down at the empty glass for a moment and noticed I was chewing the shake as I drink it. Why? There's no reason to. The chewing has already been done by the blender. A habit? Or for the satisfying sugary crunch? I don't know. I got up and walked back into the kitchen. There was a slight cramp in my hamstring. I began to think about the muscle fibers in my leg and wondered how a muscle comes to be cramped. Are they a series of tightly wound chords, like the strings on a guitar? If so, how can they ever become entwined? Perhaps they're more like a bunch of taut cables that can get snagged and tangled into a knot? It definitely felt more like a knot. It was still mid-afternoon and I had the remainder of Sunday in front of me. I guess I should do something productive. Laundry? If there's one thing I hate, it's doing laundry. Cleaning clothes isn't the problem. It's the waiting. I loathe sitting captive as my clothes are cleaned. An hour of my time, lost. Forever. Thirty minutes for the wash cycle and another thirty minutes to dry. That's not including the ten minutes or so that it takes to fold and bag the clothes. Sure, an hour doesn't seem like much time, but that's because you're not faced with the task of doing your laundry - I am.

Reluctantly I put on my shoes. I collect all of my dirty clothes and put them in the laundry bag. Socks and shirts and underwear and shorts. Towels. All of it. From the closet I grab detergent and fabric softener and throw them in my backpack. I'd just turned the key to lock my door when I remembered I'd left my headphones on the kitchen counter. The laundromat is bad enough, but a laundromat without headphones is cruel and unusual. I run back in, get the headphones, and run out. To get to the laundromat I have to walk down a steep hill, one that my mother complains about every time she comes to visit from New York.

"How do you walk up these hills all day," she asks in breathless indignation.

"I don't know. I don't really have much of a choice."

"That's why you're so thin. It's these hills!"

In her defense the street is easily cut at a seventy-degree angle. Each time I climb it my quads burn and I feel as though I'm inching along the hypotenuse of a right triangle. With two hands I hold the laundry bag and stomp in an awkward, mechanical motion down the hill. It's the way I'd imagine Frankenstein's monster to walk inside a child's bouncy house. By the time I'm nearing the bottom I've gained so much momentum that I'm afraid I'll topple over and go rolling down the rest of the way. But I don't. Of course I don't; this isn't a fucking cartoon. Speaking of cartoon characters, my sister dropped a piano on her foot the other day and shattered her big toe. Yes, it was an Acme brand piano.

The laundromat is on the next block. It's a small, dirtbag kind of laundromat. The glass windows look more like plexiglass, and they've been etched with graffiti by keys, pieces of metal or sharp rocks. On the inside, the floor, which is missing several patches of tiles, is covered in a thin layer of hair and grime. About a third of the machines are either broken or eat your money. The sign affixed high up on the wall, near the ceiling, says: you're under video surveillance. The adjacent video-camera, which, presumedly is doing the surveilling, seems to be inoperable. I know this because sometimes I'll flash my dick at it to see if anything bad comes of it. Nothing ever does. Homeless kids from the Haight sometimes hang out inside to get warm. But more often it's frequented by older vagrants, and those of the violently deranged, mentally ill kind.

Once, a while back, I was doing laundry on a weeknight, some time in the evening. There wasn't anyone else in the laundromat, which I was thankful for, and I was exactly halfway done. My headphones were in, so I didn't hear the man come in. I only saw him when I turned to transfer my clothes from the washer to the dryer. He was big and black, and he'd ridden in on a Magna mountain bike, but what struck me as odd was that he had no clothes to wash. His phone was in his hand, close to his ear, and I could tell by the way he was bobbing his head that he was listening to music. He was in his mid-thirties, early-forties, but he seemed wired. Soon I was able to hear him rapping. This over the volume of my music, which was already fairly high. Using the controls on the headphones, I turned it down a bit so I could be more aware of my surroundings. This allowed me to hear the terrible, static quality of his phone's speakers. His phone rang and he stepped outside to take the call. I could see him looking back over his shoulder at me as he spoke. This made me uneasy. I paused my music. The two dryers I was using were on so I couldn't hear what he was saying, even with my music off. Since there was still over 25 minutes left I sat down and waited. I didn't want to, because I didn't like the look of things, but I didn't feel like going home and coming back to discover all of my clothes had been stolen. When he came back in he sat down across from me and waited. I looked up and saw he was staring at me. But when my eyes met his he looked away. Then he began freestyling a particularly violent verse. The invectives he'd speak louder and more aggressively than the other words, to the point where I felt he may be trying to intimidate me or muster the courage to commit a violent act. Either way, I was becoming uncomfortable. He started talking to himself.

"Y'all think this is a game?!"

"Y'all don't know! Y'all don't know nuthin!" he yelled as he aggressively jabbed himself in the temple several times with his pointer finger.

He menaced about this way for a few minutes. The sketchy fluorescent lighting and otherwise desolated laundromat didn't seem like a good place to die. Why did you have to do me like this, god? Why was I talking to god? I'm not even religious. Maybe that's the reason god had forsaken me to die in a scumbag laundromat. It made sense. I had been judged and condemned to death by aggravated assault with a bicycle. How would they explain this to my mother?

"Well, you see, they, uh, were able to identify your son by his tattoos, not his face, unfortunately," the first cop says.

"Yeah, there weren't any teeth left to get an ID off of," the second one adds.

"Well Jim, technically there wasn't much of anything left...I mean, of the head at least. I'd never seen anything like it. Mashed his head into paste with a bicycle tire. Just kept beating him over the skull with it until..."

"Yeah. It looked like chewed up meatloaf and ketchup."

Whatever had gotten into my newly acquainted cycling enthusiast had temporarily abated. For the moment he was quiet as a lamb. He still had that glazed-over, "my eyes are open but I'm dreaming" look on his face. I got up to check my laundry and saw it had ten minutes left. Over the course of those next ten minutes I worried for my life as the cyclist continued to yell out obscenities and threats at the air. The good thing was, when he looked at me, he seemed to be looking through me, so I felt less concerned that I might be an unwilling outlet for his anger. I wasn't convinced he even knew I was there. My laundry beeped and I got up to remove it from the dryer. I opened the door, reached in to grab my warm clothes, and when I turned to place them on the table behind me I noticed he was gone. I'd never been so gracious for an anticlimax in my life.

So, here I was, back at the laundromat. But this time, on a sunny Sunday. What could go wrong?

Angxious

It was Sunday afternoon, just after noon. The first week of March in San Francisco. Grey, cold. I'd just gotten off the bus and I was walking home. For the past several months I've been on a health kick, eating right and not drinking, exercising, even on weekends. After the gym I took a walk to Hayes Valley where I stopped at a Greek restaurant for a salad with chicken on top. So far this year my diet has consisted largely of salads. And chicken. Sure there's been the occasional burger, or fish, but for the most part it's leafy green vegetables and poultry. Once I was done eating I remembered I needed to finish editing a series of photos I'd taken during a last-minute trip to Yosemite two weeks ago. The weather reports indicated there was to be a storm, and a chance of snow. Having never seen winter at Yosemite, or a storm, or snow, I decided it would make sense to check it out. The gamble paid off. It rained and stormed incessantly and the mountains were draped in curtains of fog and mist, lending the landscape a soft, dreamy feel that you had to see to believe.

But now, as I headed up towards my apartment, the sky looked heavy. It seemed to have darkened noticeably since I'd gotten on the bus. The wind, which had been shaking the trees, stopped. A brief silence in nature's song is usually telling of a coming storm. On the sidewalk small dots began appearing all around me. When I looked up I couldn't believe what I saw. It was snowing. Not full-blown snowing, but snowing, by San Francisco's standards. The rain was falling too slowly and it was too bright. Two girls rushed out of their doorway to capture the moment, recording a video with their phones. I tried to do the same but my iPhone froze and crashed when I launched the camera app. The snow had quickly turned into hail. Small, pea-sized balls were bouncing off houses and cars. Little granules of ice stuck to my black fleece and started to slowly melt. There was the sound of hissing as the hail fell. I smiled and laughed at the unexpected weather and how I seemed to intuit it the moment just before it happened. As fast as it started, it was over. The only trace of it happening was an unmelted piece of ice perched on my sleeve like a diamond in a jewelry store case.

I trudged up the stairs and put the key in my door. My feet squeaked against the wood floors as I walked in. Usually I take my shoes off before entering my apartment, but today, for some reason, I didn't. I put my bag down in the kitchen and bent down to unlace my shoes. My phone, seemingly recovered from its previous failure, chirped and vibrated from inside my pocket. I pulled it out as I sat down onto the couch. Reminder: Doctor's Appointment @ 7:34PM. Huh? What an unusual time for a doctor's appointment. I must have typed it in wrong when I created the event. When I checked my calendar, though, there weren't any doctor's appointments listed for today. That's odd. Maybe it was for next Sunday morning? Nope. There weren't any doctor's appointments in the coming week. In fact, I'd be leaving for Japan next week, so I wouldn't have scheduled something for a time when I wouldn't be here. My email didn't reveal any possible appointments, either. What the fuck. Maybe I'd just set a random reminder for myself to do something at 7:34 tonight? But it's such a specific time to do something. And it doesn't quite line up with any of my typical Sunday activities; laundry, cooking dinner, watching TV, reading. I felt myself getting frustrated at the fact that I couldn't remember what this was about.

As a distraction, I started working on the photos. Editing photos is perhaps one of my favorite ways to spend time. Hours can slip by as micro-adjustments are made to saturation and contrast, color balance, sharpness, exposure, and clarity, just to get the right combination. It's easy to obsessively hunt the frame for dust particles that may have come in between the lens and the camera sensor, or to lighten the glow of sunlight as it bleeds into and across the scene. Small changes in one value can dramatically change the entire photograph from warm and inviting to cold and lonely. Those aren't the only two possibilities, of course. A photograph can easily evoke any set of sentiments, which is why photographs are so moving. All that is required is to look. It speaks for itself. After finishing dozens of photos it was time for a break. My phone rang out again. A text message. I unlocked the phone and saw it was from a number I didn't recognize. It said:

Hello! You have an upcoming consult @ 7:34PM with Dr. Doctor. Reply 1 to confirm. To cancel/reschedule, do NOT call/text this number! This is just an automated message. If you need to cancel please contact us at our main number. Thanks for respecting our 48hr cancellation policy!

Hmm. I could feel my pulse rising slightly. My chest felt tight. Was I angry or anxious? I'm not sure. Definitely confused. Maybe angry and anxious. Angxious. I grabbed my computer and did a quick search for Dr. Doctor. Unsurprisingly, it didn't yield any helpful results. I tried to narrow it down to San Francisco, but it just provided me with all sorts of doctors in the San Francisco bay area. I picked up my phone and read the text again. Why isn't there a callback number? And why would they text me hours before the appointment if they have a 48hr cancellation policy? In frustration I texted the number back, asking what their main number was. Almost immediately I received a message back:

HeLlo! you have resPonded to an automated MEssage with an invalid entry. please reply 1 to confirm your appointment. 934740#7309:110-1

Instead of getting clearer, things were getting more bizarre. What kind of message is this? Why is it capitalized like that? And what do the numbers at the end mean? This must be a scam. Somehow I was added to a mailing list. Or might it be a prank? One of my friends could have created an event on my phone while I was in the bathroom. No, this would be a bit elaborate for most of my friends. I noticed it was suddenly sunny outside. The weather was incredibly sporadic today. Early this morning it was cloudy, then raining, then sunny, then it snows for 15 seconds, hails for 45 and then abruptly stops. Resolved to get to the bottom of this, I called the number instead of texting it. It rang five times and then I was greeted by three ascending tones and an operator who told me my call couldn't be completed as dialed. There goes that idea.

Dr. Doctor. Wasn't that the name of a song from the 80's? Turns out it was a song from 1978, by Robert Palmer.

A pretty face don't make no pretty heart
I learned that, buddy, from the start
You think I'm cute, a little bit shy
Momma, I ain't that kind of guy
Doctor, doctor, give me the news
I got a bad case of lovin' you
No pill's gonna cure my illI got a bad case of lovin' you, whoa

What makes this all stranger, now that I think about it, is that I recently broke up with my girlfriend. A week ago, actually. We'd been together for almost a year and a half. It wasn't working...even though we'd wanted it to. We were hurting more than we were happy. And, when you're hurting, the hardest thing to find for each other is empathy. A friend told me that the other day, completely unrelated to my current situation. He said empathy is one of humanity's highest spiritual aspirations. Fittingly, it is scarcest in our greatest times of need. Despair and fear always scream loud enough to reduce empathy to a whisper. It's true - pain blinds us, just like love does. Where they differ, though, is that love is the absence of pain; it is feeling warm, not cold; safe, not threatened; full, not empty; protected, not imperiled. But love is fragile. Lately I've been fascinated with the question: why do humans seem so intent on seeking happiness in another? Why do we pair up and pick one person to spend the rest of our lives with? The answer, I suspect, is perhaps because we can seldom find happiness in ourselves. When we are born, we are born incomplete, in a state of unrelenting and insatiable need; to be delivered, fed, washed, clothed, cared for. We bond out of necessity. It is all we know.

Now my mind wanders to her. We were supposed to go to Japan together. The trip was arranged months ago. The decision to go despite our breakup was made last night.

"I'm worried," she said, "that we'll go there and we'll fight. I don't want to fight."

"Neither do I," I told her.

"Good. So the way I'm thinking about this is, I'm going to Japan. If you want to come, great. Then we're each going to Japan."

"Okay, I do want to come," I said. "My feeling has been that we should go, and still is."

"Okay, fine. I'm going and you're going."

"Yeah, okay, cool. We're going."

"Yeah, but. The way I'm thinking about it is I'm going and you're going. We're not together."

"I didn't say we were together."

"Okay, good."

"But, we are each going. So we're also going together, technically."

"Right."

Maybe she's the one behind this? No, it doesn't make sense. What would be her motive? Across the street from me a large group of college kids are having a party. The sun is shining and the music is playing loud. James Brown now. Before that it was Black Sabbath, and before that it was a rap artist I'm unfamiliar with. Their occasional cheering and screaming signifies they're playing a game. Alcohol is probably involved. Sunday doesn't matter when you're young. I remember when I used to party on Sundays, taking mushrooms and drinking on Ocean Beach, dancing in silent discos. How I was able to get up and go to work the next morning, I'm not sure. There's an enviable, unyielding quality about youth. It is both patient and irreverent and trifling, yet there is nothing more important than the lessons learned by the experiencing of it. It is what gives way to wisdom. Creedence Clearwater Revival is blasting. These kids have an eclectic taste.

It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no millionaire's son. I ain't no fortunate one.

I can't focus on editing photos so I get up to make a shake. I've been enjoying homemade, organic smoothies like a good San Franciscan should. I fill the blender with a bit of water. I add a scoop of chia seeds and a scoop of protein powder before I peel the banana and break it into three pieces. Then I throw in a few fistfuls of vegetables and a pinch of ginger, and turn the blender on. It whirs loudly as it grinds the ingredients into a green liquid. Small flakes of kale or spinach can be seen getting sucked down the side of the container, towards the blades that will cut them into still smaller pieces. Staring absent-mindedly at the kale, I think: it can't be helped. Then, observing: that's a weird, sort of misplaced thought. What can't be helped? The kale? Love? Loss? And then it hits me: the capitalization.

The text message. It said, HLP ME.