FLOW RATE

i put this one in the proofing oven

i sometimes sit down to write something sincere and then think about how “being honest” is so boring i might puke. my boring life. it drills holes into me.

the honest truth being that very few people really are boring but that sincerity and clarity and linear narratives are a fucking drag. not to mention prose that’s made no attempt at rising. yeastless, saltless, sad.

i want to be caught off guard. barring that, at least try for a little opacity. my friends know this about me: i’m not above saying there is bad poetry. i’ve been on the internet a long time; still i scroll through substack for 20-30 seconds and am alarmed at how much this feels like the dregs. well, so that’s my excuses out of the way.

today my sister’s friend passed away from leukemia. a kid i knew. in his parents’ house, less than half a mile from my parents’. i didn’t know him well enough to feel much or sense much other than the kind of yellow bruise sadness that accompanies the thought of all death, of all the kids who die too soon. i think about his siblings, still here and awake and feeling, i assume, something like particles in a collider. the bruise purples. i blink and my eyes sting. but who can grow me a new brother.

accepting death is like being in freefall. thrilling and sick. once it’s past, you’ll forget the feeling but won’t forget that you felt it.

given the insistence of death, i’m trying to get better at this, but i worry about money. i don’t make a lot but more pressing than this is my own impulsiveness. you would think that after 4 years on my own dutifully marking down spreadsheets, dutifully investing in the kind of half-assed way that (usually) doesn’t make me feel like a pro-capitalist freak, dutifully ending every tax year with a little bit more in my pocket than the year before, i would be a little bit comfortable. but i have a lot of inherited paranoia that my entire savings account is one mental break away from draining out the columbia and into the sea.

portland is trying to make itself known as a “water city,” that is, though we are three hours from the coast, you can come here as a tourist if you want to splash around. we have two enormous rivers hence THE PORT. they are both cleared for swimming again as of this year hence AN IDEAL SUMMER DESTINATION. and then there are the tributaries, running clear and cool and sweet, surrounded on all sides by forest and yet so clearly bound for the sea that i feel almost as safe there as i do in the ocean. we aren’t there yet, but we’re reaching for it together. the water will carry all the slough and salt of me where it was meant to be.

so if all my money is one day snatched away from me and caught up in the rapids maybe it won’t be so bad. still i keep wondering but what if i want to have a baby or what if i want to travel more or what if i can never retire or and really, this is the crux of it, what if i am never experience true comfort and peace because i am always just a little bit worried about money. which i am trying to convince myself is a choice i can make right now, but like i said this is something of an inheritance, if not a fully genetic predisposition.

i had a dream i met my father’s grandfather. my father’s grandfather, who decided to send my father to boarding school when he was just seven, so that he could grow into a smart and disciplined patriarch and take over the family business, only for him to grow into a smart and disciplined patriarch with an anxiety disorder whose scorned dreams of taking over the family business have been displaced onto his children while he regrets much of the extent of his long and sleepless life.

last week my father was diagnosed with major obstructive sleep apnea which, when untreated as long as his has been, can shorten a lifespan a decade or more.

last week i went into urgent care for an arrhythmia that appeared after i went on a 5-minute jog for the first time in years. i was diagnosed with premature ventricular contractions, essentially an extra heartbeat. i still need to pick up a heart monitor to see how often they’re occurring, but at its worst i am feeling an extra beat for every 2 regular heartbeats. no known cause, no other symptoms, no treatment suggested at this time. i had a breakdown remembering my last untreatable diagnosis, five years ago, of sensorineural hearing loss.

my hearing loss is very minimal—i can’t process very high pitches in my left ear—and i joke about it often, but the longer i live with it the more it makes me just a little bit miserable. i can’t hear well in restaurants or bars (even less than the average hearing person can). i can’t hear words spoken to me when there’s water running. i get alarmed and confused speaking to waiters and cashiers. i can’t hear my wife whispering when i sleep on my side.

i’m worried my PVCs will be the same. already they exacerbate my anxiety, and i’m scared to get my heartrate up again. i’ve never been so aware of my heart—it feels like she’s shuddering.

disregarding her fears, we drove down to crater lake and saw this deep and strange and scared basin, two thousand feet of rain and snowmelt sitting almost untouched in the 5-mile wide caldera of mount mazama. it was blue as a glacier, bluer than the sea. empty, still, and shoreless. no channels in or out. no hint, until you reach the steep and vacuous cliffside, that the lake is even there.

when i first stood at the rim, out of shock and awe and love and wonder and a deathly fear of heights, my extra heartbeat stalled and skipped, resulting for one second in a steady pulse.

this life. if i am to be sincere: all i have to do is look and it pierces me clean through.