“I don’t know.”

That’s what I tell people, these days, when they ask me anything. I say solemnly, “I don’t know.”

Except when they ask if I’ve got the time. Then I say, “I don’t have the time.” They wince, I wince, we wince, we walk away.

Sometimes, sometimes: People will ask me, “What’s that wound on your arm?”

“Oh, this one? This wound here? Man,” I say, “I just don’t know.”

It’s healing, in case you were curious.

There is a one hundred percent chance that you weren’t.

It’s all pink and stormy and it has given birth to beautiful new hair follicles. This new hair is the color of my birth-hair. It’s brand new, I tell you.

I’m not sure why, though.

I check on it every night, just before I slowly descend into a nighttime mood, just before I descend to a warm place below pounds of feathers and microfiber. I have been pleased with its progress, fascinated with the speed of its work, and of the elasticity of its nature.

That’s new skin for you.

And I think now that I have been beaten and broken and torn and ripped at every point on my dermis, that maybe all of it is newer than it was when I was first endowed with skin. The cat scratches and chest scars and mysterious non-healing arm wounds have appeared and healed and reappeared and healed so many God damned times that I am utterly convinced that the protector of my bones and organs has an on-going newness to it, that it is always rushing to fill in holes and scrapes and scratches attained from Being Alive.

Being Alive!

I’ve been doing a lot of that, lately. I have been alive so much in the past few weeks in precisely none of the ways that I want to be. My body has been labored in places that are not the only two places that I ever want to be: my winter palace, for one, and a place called Nokesville, say. I want to be in those places because they are the only tiny boxes of existence that I can navigate in the third dimension where I might find everything I want out of life.

(If you were curious, they are: alonehood, non-sounds, the ability to legally be naked, no one to tell me what to do, close proximity to the library of my sentimental junk, comfort.)

None of that, recently. None of that at all.

And really, it’s a shame, because I am actually a real-life person when I can have all that I want out of life. It is so very little, friends. For fact: I have everything that the world could offer me, right here in my little home, in my little head; the future need not apply. I guess that makes me dangerous. The only other things that I want and cannot have were in my possession once, but are no longer mine for various cosmic reasons, and you know how that goes. It’s heavy, heavy stuff, really. And you just can’t take that with you.

. . . hm. Cosmic.

This business of laboring in slimy, unfortunate hovels: it comes to a temporary close very soon. I anticipate the arrival of Nothing. I crave Nothing.

When that day comes to pass, I can look upon it with black, black eyes and say to myself and no one else (while naked (and comfortable)): “Finally, Nothing.”

I will, of course, whisper the last part to myself and no one else: “(Temporarily.)”

I will whisper this, because there is a big chance that I may not even hear myself say it.

Maybe then it won’t be true.

Then again, I don’t know.

After the celebrated arrival of Nothing, the blissful acceptance of Nothing, behold: there is Something.

Which is, yes, the transportation of my body in three dimensions by way of a flying aluminum tube capable of transpacific travel.

There will be trains and hot springs and the viewing of a snow-capped inactive volcano. I anticipate all three, and little else. It will be eight hundred U.S. dollars ($) well-spent, I am certain, if I endowed with the opportunity to (temporarily) “indulge” in such crude luxuries.

And then it’s back to Nothing for a little while longer.

The misery of “stuff I have to do” will resume later this winter.

Ah.

I anticipate wounds if only for the healing of skin. This is all I can look forward to, these days.

It’s an exciting way to Be Alive, gentle friends.