A Letter To My Body

Dear Body,

I've been terrible to you. You've been nothing but upbeat and optimistic, carrying me through unbelievable highs and lows, pure love, and I take you for granted and make things very difficult for you, and then berate you for being weak when my neglect makes you sick. I think I do this so that I can always hide behind the excuse that if only my body weren't weak I'd be superman, to dominate over you and just generally avoid responsibility for my life, like an abusive parent. But you're not weak at all. Even when I make you sick, you just go into overdrive and fight the infection. You're really quite extraordinary. You never give up. You're never resigned and cynical. You're beautiful.

So I'm going to stop being an abusive brain. I'm going to start taking responsibility for your health. I'm going to stop complaining. I'm going to get sleep, by whatever means possible, every night. I'm going to listen to when you're tired, and not start spinning my mental wheels at that moment to resist sleep till 3 or 4 AM. This may require Ambien, perhaps just melatonin, perhaps meditation, but we'll get there. Because you need sleep. I'm also going to start giving you better food to eat. Vegetables. Fruit - I know you loved the pear we ate today. It was delicious. I wish we had another right now. I'll make all my meals a combination of protein, veggies and starch - not terribly difficult to accomplish, and I'm told a simple but powerful approach to food. I'll also take vitamins that I think you and I need a little more of, like vitamins C, A, E and Zinc. Because we're sick this weekend I've been drinking a ton of water, but I think it might be a good idea all the time. So I'll do that - I'll drink more water.

Mostly I'll try to listen better, because you're much more intelligent than me - you know everything. I'm sorry I've been so abusive. I did it to think I was somehow better than you. But I'm not. We're in this together.

Love,
Jake

956,000 Nonflammable Matchsticks And A Dream

A man spent 6 years and 6000 euros building a full-scale Mercedes F1 stock car out of 956,000 matchsticks, first cutting off each one's inflammable tip individually with what seems to be a special matchstick-tip-cutting device. As the article puts it,

We are at a loss for words as to why a female appears in one of the pictures...

It's an insane project, but so are many things I've obsessed over for six years without anything so tangible to show for it.

It's important to note that by cutting off their tips this man rendered the matchsticks nonflammable, and that they were originally inflammable, which is synonymous with the 20th-century invention "flammable":

Flammable. An oddity, chiefly useful in saving lives. The common word meaning "combustible" is inflammable. but some people are thrown off by the in- and think inflammable means "not combustible." For this reason, trucks carrying gasoline or explosives are now marked FLAMMABLE. Unless you are operating such a truck and hence are concerned with the safety of children and illiterates, use inflammable.

Strunk and White, The Elements Of Style, 3rd Edition

I love William Strunk.

I Need Full-Time Slave Girls

I just ordered an alarm clock that wakes you up by slowly brightening a light bulb, that slowly heats a reservoir of scented oil to stimulate your olfactory sense, and then after 15 minutes starts playing "soft, yet lively nature sounds". After that it releases a flock of doves into the room. They hold hot towels in their beaks that they dab lovingly at your face. If you're not out of bed by then it blasts you with a fire hose.

My hope is that I'll just float out of bed. As opposed to what I do now, which is clomp into the bathroom to slap the alarm clock, and then back into bed for an indefinite snooze until my cat Teddy starts pawing at my face. Thank you Teddy.

What I really need is my bevy of naked women to gently climb under the covers with me while I slumber, and coax me awake with kisses and feathers. But they don't get in till noon. I need full-time slave girls.

The Fish Who Found Out What Water Was

This is a great story I either read somewhere or someone told me once. So I acknowledge that it's someone else's work, but I don't know who to acknowledge. I just like the story and remembered it while talking with my tennis partner.

A school of young fish were hanging out underneath the dock one day, and they overheard the humans sitting on the dock talking, and the humans kept referring to "the water" - how they were thinking of going into "the water", how "the water" looked cold - on and on about "the water". And the fish turned to each other and said what's "water"? What is this "water" they keep talking about? So one of them decided he would find out what "water" is, and he set off across the sea to find out.

But he was gone for years. No one heard anything from him, so they had to assume he was dead or had started a new life somewhere else, or maybe actually discovered what water was and liked it so much he stayed there. So they went on with their lives without him, and in the back of their minds always wondered what "water" might be.

Then one day, when the fish were old, they were hanging around under the dock again, listening to the humans talk about "the water", and as usual the fish were all talking about what "water" might be - not as urgently as when they were young, but still curious - when another old fish swam up to them, and after a minute they recognized their friend that had left so long ago to find out what water is. So they crowded around him and said, "Did you find out what water is?"

"Yes I did, I know what water is.", he said.

"Really?!" This was amazing news. "What is it?" they said, and leaned in, fins a-flutter.

And the old fish looked at all of their excited faces around him, and he tried to think of what to say.

"You'd never believe me," he finally said.

And swam away.

Not Camel, Rope!

According to the Lamsa Bible, translated from the Aramaic (Jesus' native language), Jesus is misquoted in the famous line

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.

[Matthew 19:24, King James Version]

This sentence makes some sense, because a camel is an enormous animal and the eye of a needle is a tiny hole, and it's probably impossible to get the one through the other. But the Aramaic for "camel" and "rope" are nearly identical:

excerpt from the Lamsa Bible

which would instead make the sentence

It is easier for a rope to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.

A rope, not a camel. He didn't mean it was impossible for someone to get into the kingdom of heaven. He meant it was difficult. Unpleasant, scary, and requires that the man completely unravel from a thick tight rope to a pile of meaningless thread, let go of all his cleverness and control and wealth and vanity, hit bottom, and once again be the "all-singing all-dancing crap of the world" [Fight Club]. When he does he will pass through the eye of the needle and see himself through it for the first time.

So the kingdom of heaven is on Earth. In life, not afterward. The kingdom of heaven is right now while you're sitting at your cubicle reading this blog, or in the bathroom inspecting a pimple, or smiling at a stranger in an elevator, or talking to your coworker. It is the right brain able to see the left. It is letting go of the Broca's area of the brain, full of wit and politics and todo lists - finally giving up that control and slipping for a moment into the everything. It is dropping the big lie that we matter at all - the human voice that drowned J. Alfred Prufrock - that claims we are anything more than speaking dust. It's what great writers and artists and athletes know. It's what Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare knew. It's seeing yourself through the looking glass. It's seeing that your sound and fury signify nothing.

I've seen the possibility of this. When you pass through the eye of the needle, even for a moment, interesting things occur. Your headache and stomach ache disappear. You notice shapes. You notice people. They notice you.

But getting there requires walking through a big wall of emotion for most of us, and dropping the fictions that run our lives, and facing our fears, and being honest, and risking looking unattractive. Not impossible, just difficult and scary. The kingdom of heaven, for me, is ease.

It's also not never, or later, or after death. It's now. And mankind has caused so much physical pain and heartache trying to prove himself right and get into heaven someday, and trying to bring about an apocalypse so that everything finally falls apart and we all go to heaven someday. There's no need for all that. We're already home, we just think there's something wrong with it. That's the sickness of humanity - thinking that at all. For example, my cat doesn't seem to dwell on the negative.

So it's not a camel, it's a rope. It's not out there someday in neverland, it's right here; you just can't see it when you're tying yourself in knots. So many people have been tortured, ripped to shreds, dismembered, raped, waterboarded and widowed. Over a typo.