Eat or Die

Confessions of an overstimulated optimist.

I’ve had Covid now for more than ten days, and I’m beyond irritability. Add to this that I spent far too much precious time this weekend exposing myself to the toxic news cycle, something I never do. During college, I actually read the New York Times most days, largely because it felt smart and daring and I needed to be primed in the event of an encounter with pensive literati chicks who gave me the stank eye, but frankly it was poison to my soul, filling me as it did with useless non-specific anger toward everything. These days our brains are delicate flowers radiated with overexposure to information, most of which terrifies us, retards us, and makes us sick.

Unfortunately, without tangible projects to keep me busy, I default to my own lowest common denominator, a consumer of the wreckage. Too, it feels like wasps built a nest in my sinuses, making it hard to run the miles I typically run to take the edge off my mania. To remain alive, I’ve resorted to mouth breathing, which as James Nestor points out in his fascinating book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, is a recipe for disaster. Mouth breathing also makes me look like Mitch McConnell, the upshot being that I am a natural born tick and mosquito repellent.

Before bed on Saturday, I read that we bombed Iran, not a good move on my part. According to neuroscience, our brains are two-and-a-half times more densely wired to notice negative patterns in life, so of course when I lied down next to my sweet lass I was preoccupied with the fear of a nasty war burgeoning over the face of the planet. They are unlikely to tell you, but most good men fantasize a lot about their enemies, and by enemies I mean the psychopaths out there who by merely existing are a threat to loved ones.

Personally, I have lost whole days to revenge fantasies. They aren’t really fantasies so much as retributions. This is less uncommon than you may believe because men were built for war. People will disagree over this while driving by their local fire departments. I have a niece who is about two feet tall. When I worry about someone harming her when I’m not around, my inner gorilla wakens from dormancy and I have visions of whole nations afire. At the gym, it is always obvious the men who you want on your side. They are kind, and they are also extremely dangerous.

If it’s not already apparent, my imagination runs a tad feral, and it is darker in there than I care to admit, so I’ll spare you the details that troubled my sleep after reading about the bombing of Iran, but let us pray they don’t become reality. As dangerous as good men may be, they prefer peace. So do wise men.

There is a lot of flying spittle and gnashing of teeth online. I’m not built for it. Gawd made me an optimist, but he also gave me a hypersensitive nervous system, which is not an honor or an embellishment. Everywhere I go other than the woods, I wear noise cancelling headphones or earplugs. A fork dropped carelessly into the sink rings like a crack of thunder in my head. Televisions sound like four hundred people talking to me at once. If I’m one room removed from someone who is angry or anxious or stressed I can feel it the same way cold is felt against the skin. Fifteen to twenty percent of the population experiences sensory overload this way. It’s taxing.

I wish it was a superpower, and in the old world, when danger was approaching or there was nearby prey, this heightened awareness proved useful. Now more often then not it feels like a curse. The world we occupy is loud, literally and figuratively. So many of us are trying to be correct rather than connected, braying like horny mules to a few handfuls of people who mostly don't care or care too much. It is a painful way to live.

Better to pick raspberries with my niece and swim in rivers with my lass and her black lab than to be a litigious and contentious Ebenezer dropping more turds into the universe. My point is the small things that comprise the bulk of life too often go neglected when we are always engaged with the garbage safari on the internet.

The loveliest and rawest and best days of my life were spent in a remote valley of Wyoming where everything smelled like sagebrush and musky horses. I woke most days with bits of hay in my sheets. There were the sounds of wind and rushing waters and of horses shearing grass in their teeth, and many hours there was the sound of nothing. In the middle of nowhere I tuned wire fences tight and plucked them like guitar strings and heard only the soft crunching of gravel beneath my feet as I walked among the rabbitbrush and the brave little sego lilies poking up through the volcanic soils. It was heaven. Better than heaven.

There were grizzly bears and wolves and deadly flashes of lightning out there, one of which struck the ground a few feet from a colleague of mine as we ran out of the high country in a battering hailstorm. I’ll never forget looking up the long sloping hill of bentonite toward him as out of a black roiling cloud the bolt shot and concussed the air like the whole cosmos was contained within it and the way it stove into the dirt behind him missing him by a hair as if it was after him specifically and he yipping and hawing like a young man breaking jail, GAWDDAMN I WLL NEVER FORGET THAT!

That was living, right there on the edge of death, and it united us as much as did our shared love of wild country. Though he is a red-blooded conservative and all my life I’ve called him Red Nick instead of just Nick the way his mama baptized him and we don't always see eye-to-eye and he has told me that for a “lib” (which I’m not) I’m not “unreasonable” or “so bad” or “even that annoying” and I’ve told him that he “needs a library card to save his soul” and he’s told me that I couldn’t “mount a horse if it was buried to its withers” and I’ve said to him “say what” and never mind that he’s wrong when I’m right and I’m right when he’s wrong, the thing is we worked together and we got along just fine because come to war or come to peace it takes all kinds.

The weekend is gone, and nobody but me is to blame for poleaxing it to splinters because I’m the one who got too caught up in grinding the gears of the nation. These brains of ours default to worst case scenarios. When I woke up on Sunday, my lass was there. Dutch with his stank breath was there. The little New England village with its ivory towers was there. The coffee shop was there. In the fridge the Pineland Farms triangle steak was there, marinating in freshly grated ginger, soy sauce, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and cinnamon. The Covid was there too and so was the Utah Senator Mike Lee, doing his damnedest to give away the public domain where Red Nick narrowly escaped getting fried like a piece of calamari.

I had to fight both the virus and the depraved Senator, and the effort stole my mojo. But at least America wasn’t—yet—at war, and I wasn’t alone trying to prevent dumb, short-term pseudo-solutions to fiduciary problems from gutting the soul of the country while simultaneously fattening the pockets of the already fat-pocketed. Fighting takes a toll, especially on frail poets like me who enjoy books, hay in the sheets, the sweet odor of horses, the small hands of my niece, and the kind and wide smile of my lass.

Once I’m abstracted by all the vitriol available for consumption online, it takes a few days for me to return to earth. To facilitate the healing process, I needed to eat or die. I fired up the charcoal grill and flash grilled the triangle steak, then set it far away from the banked coals until it was done through. Before I brought it inside to rest, I peeled some of the charred parts off and placed them on my tongue. It tasted like no meat I’ve ever eaten, juicy and complex. The lass came outside to gather data and I stuffed a pinch in her craw. She closed her eyes and moaned.

I didn’t tell her I was fighting anything, neither real nor imaginary. I didn’t tell her the bombing unnerved me. I didn’t tell her I could ring the neck of Senator Lee or that if General Sherman had bunker buster bombs the entire southern United States would be remnant islands floating in the Atlantic. I didn’t tell her the thing good men fear most is harm done to their loved ones they can’t make right. I didn’t tell her any of all that. I just let that meat made with care and with love and with patience and with intention as well as attention work its magic on her and bring her joy.