[Verse]

In a void of my own making, I sink… suffocating, Drowning sorrows in a world That doesn’t exist.

The mind erodes, time wastes away, I can’t decide which is worse. Living is just another way to die, A slow-motion bullet to the head.

[Pre-Chorus]

I’m lost, I’m lost, in this space, A prisoner of my own mind’s maze.

[Chorus]

It’s killing me again, this déjà vu, Replaying in my head, a nightmare come true. It’s not me, it’s you, forever blind, Leaving me behind, lost in my mind.

It’s killing me again, this déjà vu, Replaying in my head, a nightmare come true. It’s not me, it’s you, forever blind, Leaving me behind, lost in my mind.

[Bridge]

My fault, once vivid, now fades, Anger dissipates, leaving only shades. I gave too much, poured out my soul, But it was never enough to make you whole.

[Chorus]

It’s killing me again, this déjà vu, Replaying in my head, a nightmare come true. It’s not me, it’s you, forever blind, Leaving me behind, lost in my mind.

It’s killing me again, this déjà vu, Replaying in my head, a nightmare come true. It’s not me, it’s you, forever blind, Leaving me behind, lost in my mind.

[Outro]

Lost in my mind, lost in my mind, Forever blind, leaving me behind. Lost in my mind, lost in my mind, Forever blind, leaving me behind.

(c) 2024 Obie Fernandez - All Rights Reserved

When you’re shining like the sun You make everything feel so right Lit by your fire Dancing in your light

Dancing in your light with you In your light with you Dancing in your light with you In your light with you

When you’re shining like the sun I’m dancing in your light In your light with you In your light with you

(C) 2022 Obie Fernandez - All Rights Reserved

Originally written in my personal journal Thursday, October 11, 2012

As I write this I’m having a conversation with Kitty, a neighborhood stray that has decided to come visit me every morning. The first time I paid her some attention a week or two ago, she eagerly followed me around as I took care of chores outside and in the garage, eventually darting into the house behind me. Amused, I decided to be a friendly host. She’s kind of skinny and pathetic so I rummaged through my kitchen looking for something suitable, eventually settling on some half-and-half and tuna fish. She devoured it. (Perhaps I made a new friend for life?)

Kitty has been showing up at my doorstep almost every morning since. This is the first time I’ve ever fed a stray, so I’m not sure what the deal is, whether she officially belongs to one of my neighbors or what. No collar on her and given the way my suburban property is laid out there’s no telling exactly where she’s going when she leaves here. Regardless of how long this relationship lasts, I’m enjoying it, to the extent that I bought some actual milk for her at Publix last night.

I don’t consider myself a “pet person” the way that some people get all excited about their dog or cat and always have one. My first experience with a dog happened in elementary school. One of my next-door neighbors had a small brown dog, which perhaps was still a puppy. I don’t remember what breed it was, but I think its name was Timmy. I seem to recall that Timmy’s owner would let me walk him around the block almost every day. I imagined having my own dog and how much fun it would be, but my dad put his foot down firmly against the idea. I was the oldest of five kids and he didn’t make too much money, so you could say there were too many mouths to feed already in our household. Luckily, we eventually figured out that really small mouths were okay.

My uncle Max, a bachelor living at home with my grandmother just upstairs from us in our shared duplex well into his 30s, provided interesting hobbies and pursuits on a regular basis throughout my childhood. Everything from listening to popular music (versus the classical and moldy oldies preferred by my parents, if they listened to anything at all), to setting up a photography darkroom in our basement, to car mechanic work in the garage, and most relevantly to this story, keeping pet fish in an aquarium. My own family unit could only manage a simple fishbowl in our flat, what with all those little kids running around, and I don’t remember us doing a very good job of keeping our fishbowls intact. But my uncle was enthusiastic about anything he tackled and occasionally had some disposable income to indulge his hobbies, so his freshwater tank upstairs was outfitted with the latest lamp and filter technology and regularly stocked with interesting goldfish and little luminescent critters that filled me and my siblings with wonder and amusement. Our trips to the store to pick out new inhabitants for the tank were always fairly fun, while helping Max with the complicated and fraught process of cleaning the tank a little less so, given his penchant for imbuing all activities with a great deal of pessimism and grumbling.

Somehow I was able to consider at least some of the fish in Max’s tank “mine,” whether they were bought by me or just claimed I don’t remember, but I was quite personally attached to some of them. My first suicide related heartbreak involved one of those goldfish. We came back from a multi-day religious convention (a yearly summer ritual for my JW family) and I bounded up the steps to my grandma’s flat eagerly. I was stunned to discover my favorite, a large, handsome black goldfish, laying motionless on the worn parquet floor in front of the tank. What the..?? To this day I don’t quite understand how that fish managed to get out through the flip-top door of the tank, unless it shot out of the water with a force that doesn’t make sense in my gut-level understanding of physics. The only other explanation would be that someone left the flip-top open and later closed it, leaving the fish on the floor. Either way, the fish was dead, and I was crestfallen. My brother and sisters and I gathered around the toilet with it, said a few words and flushed him away.

I haven’t had my own fish since, but my daughter Taylor keeps a few in a small tank in her room. She doesn’t take particular good care of them in my opinion, perhaps remembering to feed them everyday, I can’t be sure. Comically they are named after members of her favorite band, All-Time Low. Earlier this year I was doing something downstairs when I hear a piercing shriek and “NO, NO, NOooooooooo!!!!” coming from Taylor up in her bedroom. Puzzled about the commotion, I walk over to the stairs and ask her what is going on. She breathlessly explains that as she was in the process of starting to transfer her fish so that she could clean the tank and had her back turned, Zack jumped out. She turned, thought it was a big bug or something and came this close to stomping on it, before realizing at the last second that it was one of her beloved fish. Mind you, it was still wriggling on her carpet as she’s telling me this. “Well pick it up and put it back in the tank for goddsakes!”

“I CAN’T!”

Oh my gods, the ridiculousness of teenage girls sometimes. I think I helped her use the net to get it back in the water and the fish was fine. Or I berated her until she did it herself, either way the fish was saved for the moment. One of them died a few weeks later, I think. I don’t know if it was Zack or not, perhaps the experience aged him prematurely. I think it’s good for children to have pets, if only for the lightweight exposure to life-and-death responsibilities and outcomes.

Throughout the remainder of my childhood, especially in my teen years, we were able to have some additional small pets in our house. We had a hamster named Pookie for awhile, and a gerbil. I recall learning the hard way that you shouldn’t put them both in the same cage, with a big bloody gash on the tip of my thumb serving as a cautionary reminder from the time that I gave it a try. At some point we also had a turtle, which is among the most boring of pets, except that we gave it plenty of exercise and play time. I’m sure from its cold-blooded perspective, that was extremely annoying. Turtles are among the class of pets that always seem very annoyed.

Besides Kitty and Fredericka, the praying mantis that is currently in a clear storage container on the table behind my sofa, my only real pet of significance in my adult years has been a cat named Zilla, that I got from my friend James back in the early 2000s. That’s a long story for a different time though, right now I have to go make sure Kitty is enjoying the milk and leftover chicken I set out for her.

Down at the dock, I dip my hand in your reflection. You smile on me, from another dimension. It’s beyond my reach, but still I shout your name. Just once, and then I pause, listening for echoes of your arrival.

It seems that tonight, the waves in the water are blocking my alphas and betas and thetas.

Time to double down. I commit to radiating passion, look upon the heavens and cry again. A halo of bugs buzzes and bounces around each tendril of hair that rises as if charged with static electricity.

Take me with you, I pray that you never leave me behind again.

I feel my feet begin to rise from the planks. In a way that nobody would even notice, not at first anyway.

Your hooks are inside and I groan as you pull on my organs and challenge the hold of gravity. Despite the agony, my arms cannot help but to rise to meet your embrace.

You kindly accept my worship. You fill me with love beyond earthly expression. and you lift me with greater urgency, as we observe the streams of blood now emptying from my veins, running down my legs and spraying across my toes.

Goodbye material coherence, you were overrated anyway.

Look at me everyone, I’m a shooting star in reverse. Particles racing to my core, coating my heart, in pulsing plasma glowing purple and green.

The sun takes a bow and moves out of the way, as I stretch from the waves on the edge of the oceans to the rim of the galaxy.

Gamma ray of excitement. Beam of bulging, eternal erotic ecstasy.

I grow and infect the spirit of the universe. I am a french tickler fomenting revolution, and I joyfully spread chaos in every cardinal direction while all blurs and unites

You and I together, the god that I always wanted to be.

The blanket crashes over my head like a wave at the beach, engulfing my world in darkness that matches my mood. It’s not that I mind being solitary, knowing as I do that the presence of loved ones and others dampens my productivity, but that rationalizing the advantages of being alone does nothing to improve my feelings about this empty house and the ringing in my ears that threatens to drown out the mating calls from hundreds of horny birds right outside my open window.

The forest breeze rustles the hairs on my head, stroking my melancholy. Soon I am supposed to depart the loving embrace of my cedar cabin, bound for distant lands of cosmopolitan hustle and bustle. A plateau teeming with energy and life, but also pollution and never-ending noise. To say that I am excited about the transition would be to claim that the tree is excited about its leaves changing colors in the fall. For there is beauty in change and for certain there will come a time that l delight in the novel sensations that are part and parcel of a new season, but there is also the certainty about deep and persistent sadness that comes from the departure of summer and all of its frolicking good times.

I wish I could reach my arms out far enough to give my old friends a big hug, and then not let go, but rather bring them in, shrinking them more and more until finally I’m able to compress them into my heart and take them with me wherever the winds of change take me. It would be a never ending mobile party in my chest, thumping along to the four on the floor rhythm that never ends, the rolling bass line of my emotions, the piano riff that can always be summoned when I need a lift to my spirits, the riotous laughter and silly dances, the hands coming together, and the searing cry of the diva when my achievements are most anthemic.

And still it wouldn’t be enough, would it? Change is painful because it represents growth, and growth implies aging, and aging implies death. Present is never present enough! Go away past! Ease my yearning for the distemper of my twenties and thirties. Stop me from fading back into the dark depths of back streets where writhing bodies moved as one. Is it still out there for real, not just in the rapidly deteriorating memories of those denizens of the night, but rather out there in the real world? It’s not like I don’t see the pictures streaming across the screen of my phone, instants documented for the benefit of those of us stuck with the drudgery of adult responsibility, weighing, sucking upon our desire for hedonistic abandon. I go out. I taste it. The taste is dull, not like before. I am compelled to put in the earplugs, a fitting metaphor. To save my ears, I tell myself, so that I can make music. Then I go back home and get to work making, not music, but money. Wealth, for what, since I hardly know what to do with it.

What is the point of this sacrifice? Who is the audience? Is this what they came to see? I suppose I could reject the intrinsic demand for normality, once again grow my hair out, ink my skin, stretch these holes in my ear lobes, throw caution to the wind. Get my freak on, if you will. After all, I have already established myself within the sphere of perpetuation, the intersection of intellect and commerce, the avenues of adulation. Abandoning the norms of the usual expectations put upon purveyors of my particular profession could only enhance my appeal to those that are coveting my rung on the social ranking. How can he get away with it, they ask, wondering about their own capacity for surprise and reinvention. Pondering their fates were they to build up the bravery to, as I have done so many times, tell their bosses to kiss their asses, fantasizing about rebelling against the demands for compliance and kissing of rings under penalty of injurious meetings with representatives from human resources. I could have that life, they fantasize, the excitement raising a coffee-tinged sweat on their brow, all the while not realizing that there is not a that to be had, that in fact all that that is is all fact-less, contemporary post-modernity, surfing on the desire for a return to a simpler time of reckless abandonment, damning the consequences, flooding the senses with serotonin overload, the overflow of empathic embarrassments forever wearing down their fractal path of destruction rolling over the hills of my ego, smoothing it down over the centuries, exposing striations of childhood bruises, chases, consequences and slapped faces, hanging upside down from the chain link fence, crying out for help, laughing and stumbling down the stairs running away from the pain of knowing that it is all going away too soon.

Death is comfortable. I didn’t say dying is comfortable. I imagine that actually perishing is the epitome of un-comfortable. But death, being dead, yeah, that’s the ultimate luxury. Not another care in the world to be had. No stress over money, or legacy, or whether you’re balancing priorities in your life the right way, and what your kids are up to and what their future will be. That’s all over and you can just relax. Comfortably.

Except of course that then it’s over. The sum of your life’s accomplishments are complete once you’re dead. Setting aside for a minute the possibility of being rich and having your money work for humanity after you’re gone, setting that aside, once you’re dead what you personally can do for anyone else is finished.

I don’t know about you, but the thought of never creating anything else for anyone makes me very un-comfortable. Pushing past 40 years old, knowing that half my life is probably gone already gives me a particular kind of anxiety, a sort of gnawing pain deep inside my chest. I’m grieving all the time that I’ve already wasted being comfortable. Too comfortable. Too dead.

Which brings me to my number one grievance today. Facebook is too fucking comfortable. And I fucking hate it, because it’s fucking killing me.

Don’t get me wrong, the book of faces is profoundly useful for keeping up with friends and family, and what parties I should be attending. No doubt about that. But nowadays every morning it seems like, I wake up in bed next to my beautiful wife and what do we do? Do we plan world domination? Or even what we have to look forward to today?

Do we fuck?

No.

Well, not most days, anyway.

What we fucking do is we fucking fire up our fucking iPhones and catch up on our fucking Facebook feeds. Sometimes for a good half hour to an hour. Cause it’s comfortable. Having the time to see what inane bullshit our friends and celebrity causes are serving up instead of rushing off to work or whatever else needs to be accomplished is a fucking luxury.

Picture a poor Syrian couple fleeing the mayhem and destruction of the ISIS scourge. He and she and the kids, camping out as refugees in god-forsaken desert along with a hundred thousand of their best friends and family, all shitting and pissing and begging for mercy.

I bet our lovely couple would love to have the luxury of checking Facebook feeds in the morning when they wake up, but no, they have to drag themselves awake to face inevitable suffering and chaos. On a certain level I envy them, not because I want to be them, but because I suspect they’re more alive than I am.

Our poor Syrian fuckers, they are present.

They’re up to their necks in shit. Everything that they knew and held dear has gone to complete fucking hell, but despite it all they keep going because it’s all they know how to do. To stay alive and to stay alive you have to be present.

I used to see all the crazy fucked up shit going on in the world, and all these poor people popping out babies they can’t feed, fodder for catastrophe, and I’d get all pissed off and righteous and be like Jesus-fucking-christ, why don’t those stupid cunts stops having sex??? Do they really have to rut and have babies in those conditions? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with those idiots!

I’m the idiot and I hope the universe forgives me for being such a judgmental clueless jackass. Of course they’re not going to stop fucking and popping out babies. Cause when you’re in the present that’s just what happens. You’re not comfortable, but so what. The sun’s going down, your eight kids finally passed out from heat exhaustion and hunger, your tent smells like shit and smoke, but hey now… there’s a blanket and you look into the eyes of your haggard wreck of a wife and goddammit you love her more than you ever did before because she’s your rock, and you give each other that come hither look and then she reaches down and grabs you in the way you like it, and there you go, a hit of the sweet sweet drug, the only one that can relieve their pain. And of course nine months later there’s even more mouths crying out for a too-dry tit. And now we have even more death and more of everything that is terrible and beautiful and disgusting about humanity, but man!

…at least that shit is living, am I right?

What we do over here. Correction, what most of us do over here, where it’s nice and we hire landscapers and maids and get that little ball of fat in our arm removed cause it’s ugly, all that stuff that comes with the luxury of being born in the right place and time… all that shit that we do, all that time we consume being consumers, capitalist egotists. All that time.

Time.

For what exactly? Why do we get so much time, and do so little with it?

You and I have so much potential. For whatever fucked up chance and circumstance, I’m over here in my beautiful house, with my expensive computers, fretting about my diet stripped of refined sugar, cause I want to live a few extra years and be able to look in the mirror and have my ego be happy with what it sees.

And I’m comfortable.

And I’m dying.

Sure, kind of like everyone else is dying, except maybe worse. Because maybe you don’t bear the same psychic burden, but let me tell you that somehow, the same fucked up chance and circumstance that got me here to where I am now? Not only am I failing to live up to my potential for greatness, but every fucking waking minute that I try to be present there is something that manages to remind me, to make me acutely aware of the fact that I’m failing to live up to my potential.

And face it, as much as I want to blame Mark Fucking Zuckerberg and the endless streaming carnival of human folly that is my Facebook feed, as much as you might want to say fuck those silicon valley fuckers and their disruptions! As much as you might want to shift the blame, nah man, you can’t honestly do that.

Trying to pawn off that responsibility would be like a junky blaming his drug dealer cause the drugs are too good, too pure.

Being upset cause the drugs got us too high and now we don’t want to do something else.

Cause we’re too comfortable in this place.

In this bed. In this dirt.

Dying. Ultimately, dead and gone and forgotten.

So the questions remain: How do we change? How do we live more than we are living?

How do we shake out the comfort without destroying everything that gives our lives meaning? Without hurting the relationships that keep us going? The wife. The kids. The close friends. Seriously, despite it all, what about their comfort? Does it count for anything? Do I really want to impose my definition of what makes life worth living on them against their will? It would be fine if they figured it out themselves, but what if they don’t?

The cushion directly in front of my face has a bottom border that meets up with the plastic top part of the tray mechanism. Mostly because I’m searching for any excuse to ignore the wailing toddler about 5 feet behind my eardrums, I notice that strangely enough, in what is an otherwise well-put-together plane, the border of the top of the seat with the middle section of the seat is unfinished, by which I mean that there is no seam preventing the material from fraying and sprouting threads along where it was sheared into the correct shape. Most of the imperfections are rather small and innocuous, of little concern.

About 3/5ths of the distance from the left edge of the seam, a blueish-silver thread hangs down about an inch, overlapping the word WHILE in the the FASTEN SEAT BELT WHILE SEATED notice. The thread quivers in the airstream from the nozzle above my seat, tempting me. I pull on it, adding about a quarter inch to its length and moving it from the center of the WHILE to the W. I wonder how the thread got there. Was it an artifact of careless work by the laborers undertaking the recent interior renovation of this aging Airbus A320, when Delta added more comfortable ECONOMY COMFORT seating? Or did a bored passenger notice a small thread and pull on it? Did that passenger, in exercising his or her destructive indulgence, realize their contribution to the entropy of this plane?

I reach out and pull on one of the smaller threads along the right third of the border, the act a remorseless acceptance of nihilist urges that have been demonizing me lately. My activity catches the attention of the passenger to my right, who looks up absently from his perusal of the airline magazine. He’s an older black man who has been sleeping for most of the flight, except for those 15 minutes or so when he paced back and forth in the aisle, nursing what appeared to be a pain in his lower back, or perhaps his leg. He’s turning the pages of the magazine too fast to permit any actual reading or studying of the contents within. I notice that he is watching me pulling the thread, and turn my head to meet his look. But he quickly goes back to his magazine, aware that his mere observation of this subversive little activity could result in unwanted conversation or confrontation.

Meanwhile, the passenger to my left continues his inexplicable and incongruent obsession with solitaire on his phone. Seriously man, you’ve spent almost 2 hours playing solitaire. Is there not a better use of your time?

I pull some more on the new fraying until I am satisfied that the rough seam of the cushion in front of my face has achieved something of an aesthetic balance. There are now two long threads hanging below the beige plastic, one on either side. My contribution has resulted in the partial obscuring of the O in the word BOTTOM in the phrase USE BOTTOM CUSHION FOR FLOTATION.

How many times has this cushion been farted on? Is it wiped down by the cleaning crew on any sort of regular schedule, or does the airline rely on the automatic wiping inherent in regular contact of clothes with a shiny vinylesque surface?

I shudder at the thought of how many germs must breed on these seats, and the subsequent thought that tragic circumstances could plunge us all into the sea, turning that floating seat into my closest friend and savior.

Pffffffft.

I fart silently on my seat and adjust my noise-cancellation headphones. The damn toddler is now laughing. Spoiled brat.

We live in the most peaceful age in human history. One of the great ironies of this progress is that our deepest worry is no longer death of our body, but death of our soul. We don’t live in fear of bullets, starvation or disease. We do fear having lived an inconsequential life: dying without having ever really lived.

I preach the relentless pursuit of excellence and warn against traveling well-sterilized paths. I didn’t spend my childhood on a carefully monitored playground, and albeit for reasons out of my control, the Ivy League education, comfortable job, and sensible marriage were never an option. Still, in less than 40 years, I have managed to figure out enough to carve out my little mark in human history. Not only that, but I reproduced too. And despite the post-divorce challenges inherent in being a part-time parent, I have constantly tried to provide my offspring with experiences of true intensity and meaning.

Still, when I look into their eyes, content that they are healthy and relatively happy, I wonder: Will they fall victim to that particular kind of  depression and despair that persecutes those with peaceful, affluent lives? My own childhood was clouded by the specter of global nuclear annihilation. My impatience to get out there and see the world was existential. If I didn’t rush, there might not be anything left to see.

My kids don’t have the same urgency. Maybe things have been too peaceful for them.

THIS IS WHAT I WANT (AKA HAVING IT ALL)

✕ knowing my meaningful purpose in life
✕ working towards that purpose instead of ignoring it
✕ positive spiritual beliefs that are uplifting to myself and others
✕ opportunities to help others and make the world better
✕ a thriving career and solid professional reputation
✕ enough money to take care of basic needs and savings
✕ a partner who is stable and loves me unconditionally
✕ plenty of great sex and loving intimacy
✕ a happy, beautiful and peaceful home
✕ kids who are loving, kind and grateful
✕ a large circle of diverse friends that appreciate me for who I am
✕ neighbors that like talking to me and happy to do favors
✕ gratitude from those that I directly take care of on daily basis
✕ freedom to travel to exotic locations
✕ delicious food and lots of good music and dancing
✕ stimulating intellectual conversations and debates
✕ a dog that doesn’t roll around in shit
✕ a little bit of spare time to indulge my hobbies
✕ occasional quiet time to enjoy a good book or two

and I guess…

✕ sympathy from my best friends when I don’t in fact have it all

I actually have almost all of these things, most of the time. But sometimes the most important ones seem very out of reach. And there’s nothing I can do about it except thank the universe for blessing me with the others. Still hurts…

Finding the grey darkness of the restroom comforting, I neglected to latch the door. The need to pee had overcome my desire to stay and comfort Tamara. Now I had an unexpected moment of solitude. A moment during which my mind went blank. My face stared back at me in the mirror, without really looking. Behind it my mind reeled, a status check winding away, a mental inventory. Was I prepared for what might come next?

My pockets bulged with supplies culled moments ago from my daypack: a purple anodized aluminum LED flashlight, a red bandanna, a packet of almond butter, a pill bottle with many types of medicine, my wallet, our passports, iPhone, earbuds.

What about my feelings? What was I feeling? Regret? No, no regret. Don’t do that to me brain. Must not feel regret right now. But I thought of the kids and winced. Sadness filled me up as I realized I would not see the kids graduate and get older and do the stuff that kids do when they grow up. Their own sadness to lose me. Look at the bright side. They would be provided for (materially) in abundance and that thought caused a wave of gratitude washed over my nerves. Life insurance, yes. I hoped that Taylor would be smart enough to use our resources wisely and felt confident that she would. Shades of her developing maturity already show through where teenage angst and humor are flaking off the surface. She’d be fine without me, wouldn’t she?

What about Liam? Round and round we go, every other weekend, mostly, where I pick him up and we get to exist in each other’s presence for a while during which he doesn’t seem to care that much about me, or anything really, and I can’t seem to do anything about him not caring. Is it just because he’s 14 and caught in the middle of a difficult custody battle? Would it hurt him less if I was gone forever? Or would he carry regrets about our relationship for the rest of his life? With a measure of shame I admitted to myself that even though those difficult issues might be over soon, new ones would take their place.

Out the door and back up the aisle. My fellow passengers are in their own worlds, many in varying states of distress and low-grade panic. An attendant pushed past, clutching her prayer beads. Only a few people in their seats going about their normal flight routine. The man across the aisle from me continued to read his book. Could he be that calm? Or resigned. There was no sense in standing in the aisle, so I sat down and put my arms around Tamara, one of the great, if not greatest loves of my life. She trembled a little bit, I assume holding on to hope things would be okay, but having trouble with the thought of not seeing her five year-old son Tenzin again. I would be her rock right now.

The rest of the time until we landed was filled with repetitive speculations about what would happen and admonitions from the flight crew to leave our belongings behind when evacuating and how to assume the crash landing position, arms above head, holding on to the seat in front of you, awaiting impact.

I turned to Tamara and told her that if a fireball was coming, she should face down and not inhale. I said this in all seriousness because I read it once, or maybe I imagined it, but it seemed wise and good advice. She nodded her agreement. If we survived the impact, neither of us would let the fireball take us.

I looked out the window and a plume of liquid was streaming out of one of those little cones that protrude from the rear of the wing. We were dumping a lot of jet fuel. To minimize the fire I suppose? Perhaps they were lightening the load to make the emergency landing easier.

As the wheels touched down my eyes welled up with gratitude for a lifetime of good fortune. Luck had not abandoned me after all. I will die someday, but not today! Elation gave way to feelings of pragmatic opportunism. What a great story to share! People will love it. I’m a survivor! Wait a minute, have I really accomplished so much in my life already that contemplating an early demise provoked only shrugs of resignation? Was it a defense mechanism?

I guess the only thing you can control in that situation is how you react, and for me it meant forcing myself to stay composed and calm. To help Tamara and others to cope. To make assurances. To look at the bright side.

Hey, think about it, at least the engine didn’t explode, right? At least we weren’t in the ocean, right? That’s a good thing, isn’t it?

And hoping that a smile hides your worry.

How unique could my little rituals be? They can’t be that unique, after all, they feel instinctual, like they have been handed down to me across countless generations.

The thought popped into my head as I was finishing up my morning shower. Standing there, by myself, naked, the warm water soothing my nerves, I ran my hands up and down my torso and around my neck. I tilted and stretched my tendons and muscles, grimacing as I massaged the little aches and pains that plague my shoulders. The discomfort that tells me that I’m out of shape and getting older is somehow never enough to merit any serious attention or change in lifestyle. My morning shower stretch is a little ritual, in that I do it every day in a similar fashion, but never significant enough that I give it any conscious thought nor do I bother to call it a habit. It just is.

What else do we do in such a way? What little rituals fill in the hours and minutes of our day? If our life is like a glass jar, and big momentous events and occurrences are like rocks that we purposely or accidentally place into that jar, and furthermore, if the smaller events that we take for granted, such as commuting to work or conversations with friends are the pebbles that drop into that jar on a daily basis, then surely the little thoughtless routines, those little rituals of our existence are like the sand and dust that completely fill the jar.

What are your little rituals?

Will humans of the future worship Google and Facebook as God? Those companies take intense interest in all of our activities online. Increasingly they are expanding their reach towards detecting all manner of offline activities as well, not to mention what can be reasoned based on our online profiles. It is natural to feel good about someone or something out there caring about our interests, which brings to mind the conversation with the AI Morpheus in Deus Ex:

Morpheus: Human beings feel pleasure when they are watched. I have recorded their smiles as I tell them who they are.

JC Denton: Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance.

Morpheus: The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.

JC Denton: Electronic surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence.

Morpheus: God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary.

JC Denton: No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera.

Morpheus: The human organism always worships. First, it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.

JC Denton: You underestimate humankind's love of freedom.

Morpheus: The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization."

Deus Ex came out in 2000.

At precisely 7:30 am, the alarm on my iPhone fires. Lately I’ve been waking to the start of Still D.R.E. by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, picked for the great background riff more than for any particular appeal of rap music. I reach over and turn off the alarm and also switch off the white-noise generator that helps me sleep. Too many years of loud music has stricken me with moderate to severe tinnitus. It doesn’t bother me too much during the day, since ambient noise masks the high-pitched tone in my ears, but in the silence of the night it can be deafening.

I have a habit of checking email and twitter for anything interesting, while still blinking the sleep out of my eyes. I’ve read Jason Fried and others advise against starting off your day that way. Whatever. If there’s not much mail or twitter activity to hold my attention, I’ll see if there’s anything interesting on Salon.com or Andrew Sullivan’s blog.

Eventually, I get up and stretch and walk out of my bedroom to take in the view out the windows of the living room. Fall weather in Jacksonville Beach is unpredictable, but unless it’s very foggy I’m guaranteed an impressive vista over the ocean. Inspiring, the charmed life I lead. Whenever I need a reminder I just look out the window.

I’m one of those people who rarely deviates from my morning ritual. I try to get the grooming over by 8:30 so I have time to have my usual oatmeal and latte at Coffee Bistro, a quick 2 blocks away.

I stopped drinking caffeine at least six months ago, because I felt like it was giving me mood swings and keeping me from sleeping well. I had gotten into the habit of waking up and cracking open a large Rockstar energy drink and sipping on it for the next hour or two, but when I drank it too quickly it’d make me feel like I had done a few lines of speed. My eyes would jitter and my skin would feel clammy. Not good, so I stopped the caffeine altogether.

Hashrocket’s company-wide standup meeting is at 9 am sharp. Unless I’m on the road, I never miss a standup meeting and I never, ever arrive late. It’s a “lead by example” thing. Standup doesn’t last more than 5 minutes or so, really it’s more of a ritual than anything else, and then Sal and I usually discuss resource allocation for the day. In other words, we talk about who is going to be pairing with who that day. I’ve known Sal for almost 10 years, since working for him as a professional services guy at SilverStream Software. I love that he was my boss then, but I’m his boss now. We’ve worked together at another company since and become close personal friends, so I know he’s got my back. It’s great to know that the people that are running your company love you and have your best interests at heart.

So Sal is primarily responsible for assignments, but I like to have a say when I’m in the office. Juggling project assignments, particularly when you pair “promiscuously” like Hashrocket, can be challenging. If an odd number of people are in the office, it gives me a good excuse to spend the day programming instead of doing the semi-structured management activities that usually comprise my day.

Those activities primarily have to do with another member of my management team, Ben McDonald, who was our fifth hire at Hashrocket and very quickly turned into my executive assistant. His official title nowadays is “Director of Business Development,” which takes way too many letters to type out, but seems to have a positive impression on clients. By business development I mean following up with the sales leads that pop up during the week. Ben is not as ADD as I am, so he’s well suited to make sure we don’t drop the ball on any potential new business. I still rely on him to keep me abreast of appointments and phone calls, plus he manages our finances and has the pulse on our money situation.

Consultancies are a “feast or famine” business, or so I’ve been told. We’ve suffered exactly one prolonged period of famine, during which our utilization, the measure of how many hours we billed clients vs. hours in the week, dropped to around 40%. At the rates we charge, we need more than 50% to break even, and around 70% to generate a satisfactory profit. For the last few months we’ve been enjoying a big feast period, with close to 95% utilization. Being so busy brings its own challenges, such as problems starting new clients and projects because there is nobody available to work on them. You also need the discipline to sock away part of the profits for the next time we have a famine period. The more famous we get and the more positive word-of-mouth we generate, the less famine we’ll have to deal with in the future, but some macroeconomic events, such as the recession of 2008/9 affect everyone.

My knife bleeds pomegranate across the pristine surface of the large bamboo cutting board. And I curse my favorite fruit in silence while admiring its bloody, gory, glory.

Red-blooded royalty amongst produce, pomegranate does not simply submit to be eaten; it cries out in agony when you cut it. Not one to slip silently into the forgotten memories of calories consumed. You don’t just casually pick up a pomegranate on the checkout line the way like you would a pack of gum or a banana. No, buying a pomegranate takes planning and conviction, or a laissez-faire attitude envied by lesser mortals. Eating a pomegranate is a commitment. You don’t simply snack on a pomegranate while writing a term paper or riding the bus. You cannot steal a pomegranate from your roommate. Not unless you want to get caught redhanded.

There is no appropriate attire for eating pomegranates, nor appropriate room of the house. A pomegranate’s thousand ruby red hearts explode over skin, metal and stone with carefree abandon, leaving a thousands more little stain-resistant blotches and trails. Ever given your four year-old a pomegranate to eat by himself? Neither have I. Those juicy nuggets bouncing up and out of the bowl, escaping and then hiding in plain sight, that is, until you step on them. On the carpet. Defiant little fuckers.

Truth is, you’re never really the same after eating a pomegranate. And neither is your house.

Makes me think the only ideal way to consume a pomegranate is to rip it in half triumphantly over the heaving bosom of your glistening, naked lover as you climax together and the cool foam of ocean waves rush over your bodies in the setting sun. Shove one half in your mouth, and the other half in theirs. Let the ruby red rivers of ecstasy trace souvenirs down your neck as they drip into the surf. Anything less seems so ordinary.

My bedroom, between my parent’s room and the bathroom. Their blue shag carpet and dark brown fake wood plastic bedroom furniture. The bassinet in their room. The baby. There was always a baby.

The toy box made out of thin wood, perhaps plywood or strong cardboard, with a patterned underside. The bookshelf full of colorful books and a clown. The raggedy ann and andy dolls with thick woven fabric skin and eyes that had fallen off so my mom sewed little pieces of patterned fabric on instead.

My bunk bed. Jumping off the top bunk. Falling off the top bunk. My little brother falling off the top bunk and landing on a beach ball and bouncing. Laughing.

Being picked up and carried. What it felt like to shift up and down with the gait of my mother or father. The acceleration when being picked up. Being put in the stroller. My dad having a mustache and it tickled when he kissed me.

Spinning and getting dizzy. Falling down but it wasn’t that far so it didn’t hurt.

Learning to ride my bicycle without training wheels. The parking lot was full of gravel and dusty. My grandpa held the seat so I wouldn’t fall over. He always brought milk. Sometimes he brought cookies in a round blue metal tin. I liked the ones with the red candy in the center.

The plastic covers on the living room furniture. How your skin stuck to that plastic when you sat on it too long and got sweaty. How we weren’t really supposed to be in that room anyway, because that is where the stereo and the breakables were on the shelf. Being stung by a bee as I looked out the window behind the sofa in the thick red velvet drapery. Crying.

The 8-track player in the stereo that went clunk-clunk when you pressed the track change button. Pressing the track change button over and over and over, just for the mechanical satisfaction of that clunk-clunk. Clunk-clunk. Clunk-clunk. Getting yelled at to stop doing that. The 8 track tape of Julio Iglesias playing over and over.

The big, old-fashioned baby stroller for my brother. It was navy blue on the outside and white satin on the inside. It had big wired spoked wheels with white tires and big springs that creaked.

Using cushions from the sofa to build a fort. Taking linens from the closet to drape over the fort and give it a roof. Reading a book inside of the fort with my dad’s yellow flashlight. My dad was a meter reader and he always had books where he wrote the numbers, until he got a big portable computer with membrane buttons that I wasn’t allowed to push.

The pictures and the albums. Looking at pictures of myself as a baby. The portrait studio at Sears on the third floor near the bathrooms. Hide and seek in the clothes racks. The Packards store across the parking lot of Sears where you bought food and stuff with stamps in the basement down the big stairs. It was fun to fill the little books with little green stamps but my mommy never did that only my grandmother. Waiting for the clerk to get what you bought with the stamps.

My grandfather’s camera. It was thin and metallic and flat. It had a built-in flash. My mom’s camera that used flashbulbs. The bulbs were cube shaped and had four sides and when you advanced the film, the bulb rotated to the next unused side. After four flashes, the bulb was pulled off the top of the camera and discarded. Inspecting the used one and noticing how they were broken and exploded within their little plastic compartments.

Tang. Chocolate milk. Strawberry milk. Jello. Yoghurt with the fruit in the bottom. Swedish fish.

Plywood paneling on the walls of the kitchen. The round kitchen table in the corner under the clock. My mom sweeping in the corner behind the table. Playing with toys under the table.

The phone with a rotary dial in the television room. The phone wire went straight into the wall on one and end straight into the phone on the other. The phone was heavy. It was next to the big chair that reclined if you leaned on the back of it. Duct tape.

Turning off the lights and hiding when trick or treaters visited during Halloween, so that they would think nobody was home. Slowly. Moving. A. Chair. To. The. Door. To. Look. Out. The. Peephole. To. See if the trick or treaters were still there. Giggling cause it was so funny.

Singing. Learning to whistle.

The toy that had a long handle connected to a clear plastic bubble on wheels containing little balls. When you pushed it around it went pop-pop-pop and the balls bounced around inside the clear plastic bubble.

The plastic phone with a face, also on wheels. When you pulled it the eyes moved around and it made noises.

The jack in the box with its thin wire crank and metal housing. It’s clown face with red cheeks and droopy outfit connected to the box. Du-dun, du-dun, du-du-du-du-dun, du-dun, du-dun, du-dun-dun it went and then pop went the weasel, or rather, the clown.

The books, although I can’t remember which ones. I do remember the Encyclopedia Brittanica. The National Geographic magazines. The Jehovah’s Witnesses literature, especially the heavy brown bound volumes of magazines that were released every year for archival. They were like big brown building blocks. We had so many of them that you could easily build a big structure to drive your toy cars in. In fact, when you piled up blankets and stuck volumes into them, you could turn them into bunkers in a mountain.

Wooden blocks with colorful letters on them. You could pile them up to spell different words. Sometimes my dad stepped on them. Sometimes he whipped me with his belt, but he almost always apologized later and I always forgave him.

Hot wheels and matchbox cars. The badger truck with a little radar on top that spun as its wheels turned. A red formula one racer with a wobbly wheel.

The television had an antenna on it. You had to move the antenna to get a good signal. Our television that worked sat on top of a larger television that didn’t work. The television got really hot when it was on. The channel dial was a little hard to turn and it went clunk-clunk when you turned it. There was also another channel dial that went click-click-click, but almost all of the channels on that dial were snow, except for the spanish ones.

My mom sewing. My grandmother sewing. The wedding store they owned that smelled like old building, wood floors, chalk and dried flowers. The time they got a sign and it had the name of my sister Sarai on it because that was the name of the store. Sarai Bridal Fashions. The second floor of the commercial building that sat right next to the railroad tracks on Main Street in Hackensack. The turntable thing that you stood on and spun around until you were dizzy and it had a thing with chalk powder in it that got really messy so I wasn’t allowed to play with it.

The wedding store didn’t have its own bathroom. You had to go down the hallway to the small bathroom with a small window. It was cold there except in the summer. If you looked out the window, you could see the train passing by. I would hear the train and run to the bathroom and I would count the number of train cars on the train as they passed by. Sometimes there were a hundred train cars and that was really cool because I could count that high and not forget.

As I write this I’m having a conversation with Kitty, a neighborhood stray that has decided to come visit me every morning. The first time I paid her some attention a week or two ago, she eagerly followed me around as I took care of chores outside and in the garage, eventually darting into the house behind me. Amused, I decided to be a friendly host. She’s kind of skinny and pathetic so I rummaged through my kitchen looking for something suitable, eventually settling on some half-and-half and tuna fish. She devoured it. (Perhaps I made a new friend for life?)

Kitty has been showing up at my doorstep almost every morning since. This is the first time I’ve ever fed a stray, so I’m not sure what the deal is, whether she officially belongs to one of my neighbors or what. No collar on her and given the way my suburban property is laid out there’s no telling exactly where she’s going when she leaves here. Regardless of how long this relationship lasts, I’m enjoying it, to the extent that I bought some actual milk for her at Publix last night.

I don’t consider myself a “pet person” the way that some people get all excited about their dog or cat and always have one. My first experience with a dog happened in elementary school. One of my next-door neighbors had a small brown dog, which perhaps was still a puppy. I don’t remember what breed it was, but I think its name was Timmy. I seem to recall that Timmy’s owner would let me walk him around the block almost every day. I imagined having my own dog and how much fun it would be, but my dad put his foot down firmly against the idea. I was the oldest of five kids and he didn’t make too much money, so you could say there were too many mouths to feed already in our household. Luckily, we eventually figured out that really small mouths were okay.

My uncle Max, a bachelor living at home with my grandmother just upstairs from us in our shared duplex well into his 30s, provided interesting hobbies and pursuits on a regular basis throughout my childhood. Everything from listening to popular music (versus the classical and moldy oldies preferred by my parents, if they listened to anything at all), to setting up a photography darkroom in our basement, to car mechanic work in the garage, and most relevantly to this story, keeping pet fish in an aquarium. My own family unit could only manage a simple fishbowl in our flat, what with all those little kids running around, and I don’t remember us doing a very good job of keeping our fishbowls intact. But my uncle was enthusiastic about anything he tackled and occasionally had some disposable income to indulge his hobbies, so his freshwater tank upstairs was outfitted with the latest lamp and filter technology and regularly stocked with interesting goldfish and little luminescent critters that filled me and my siblings with wonder and amusement. Our trips to the store to pick out new inhabitants for the tank were always fairly fun, while helping Max with the complicated and fraught process of cleaning the tank a little less so, given his penchant for imbuing all activities with a great deal of pessimism and grumbling.

Somehow I was able to consider at least some of the fish in Max’s tank “mine,” whether they were bought by me or just claimed I don’t remember, but I was quite personally attached to some of them. My first suicide related heartbreak involved one of those goldfish. We came back from a multi-day religious convention (a yearly summer ritual for my JW family) and I bounded up the steps to my grandma’s flat eagerly. I was stunned to discover my favorite, a large, handsome black goldfish, laying motionless on the worn parquet floor in front of the tank. What the..?? To this day I don’t quite understand how that fish managed to get out through the flip-top door of the tank, unless it shot out of the water with a force that doesn’t make sense in my gut-level understanding of physics. The only other explanation would be that someone left the flip-top open and later closed it, leaving the fish on the floor. Either way, the fish was dead, and I was crestfallen. My brother and sisters and I gathered around the toilet with it, said a few words and flushed him away.

I haven’t had my own fish since, but my daughter Taylor keeps a few in a small tank in her room. She doesn’t take particular good care of them in my opinion, perhaps remembering to feed them everyday, I can’t be sure. Comically they are named after members of her favorite band, All-Time Low. Earlier this year I was doing something downstairs when I hear a piercing shriek and “NO, NO, NOooooooooo!!!!” coming from Taylor up in her bedroom. Puzzled about the commotion, I walk over to the stairs and ask her what is going on. She breathlessly explains that as she was in the process of starting to transfer her fish so that she could clean the tank and had her back turned, Zack Merrick jumped out. She turned, thought it was a big bug or something and came this close to stomping on it, before realizing at the last second that it was one of her beloved. Mind you, it was still wriggling on her carpet as she’s telling me this. “Well pick it up and put it back in the tank for goddsakes!”

“I CAN’T!”

Oh my gods, the ridiculousness of teenage girls sometimes. I think I helped her use the net to get it back in the water and the fish was fine. Or I berated her until she did it herself, either way the fish was saved for the moment. One of them died a few weeks later, I think. I don’t know if it was Zack or not, perhaps the experience aged him prematurely. I think it’s good for children to have pets, if only for the lightweight exposure to life-and-death responsibilities and outcomes.

Throughout the remainder of my childhood, especially in my teen years, we were able to have some additional small pets in our house. We had a hamster named Pookie for awhile, and a gerbil. I recall learning the hard way that you shouldn’t put them both in the same cage, with a big bloody gash on the tip of my thumb serving as a cautionary reminder from the time that I gave it a try. At some point we also had a turtle, which is among the most boring of pets, except that we gave it plenty of exercise and play time. I’m sure from its cold-blooded perspective, that was extremely annoying. Turtles are among the class of pets that always seem very annoyed.

Besides Kitty and Fredericka, the praying mantis that is currently in a clear storage container on the table behind my sofa, my only real pet of significance in my adult years has been a cat named Zilla, that I got from my friend James back in the early 2000s. That’s a long story for a different time though, right now I have to go make sure Kitty is enjoying the milk and leftover chicken I set out for her.