Skin

deep

I have eight Excel sheets open on three monitors and two tabs of Google. Each time I open any damn thing on the internet another thing pops up inviting me to buy something or open something else and I have to close that box before getting to the thing I may or may not be searching but not before accepting the cookies and rejecting the offer of an AI summary. I have developed floaters in both eyes. The air I cannot feel between me and the real window is still, the sky gray. I’m tired of myself today. And I’ve said “I” now in every sentence here (do I matter?Idontcaredou?) while thinking about how weird it is that most of us live in a wrapper called skin our whole lives without seeing much else of us at all. The integumentary system. That sounds both slimy and severe. If I lost all my skin, I’d shed less than 10 lbs. And would immediately die before I could behold the bloody cogs in this body, those zipped-up victuals that I call “mine,” and in fact, I’m not even sure that I could name them all (looking at you, spleen). And then there’s the brain. If my kidneys or bladder or heart acted like my brain all of these years, I would have been dead long ago. If my heart acted like my brain and just was given meds that might help but let us know, well, that’s a ticker gone. It’s all Chemistry, isn’t it? What controls what, who can see what, and how some people have seen that whether a spleen or a brain is blasted out of the body, neither looks more important than the other. Too many people have seen that, and that is also another chemical problem for the brain, and probably the heart, too.

(Three hours later)

Too many things pop up. All of those internet boxes or text chimes or the New York Times alerts that greatly affect my Chemistry at least eight times a day now. I want kids off my lawn and the moon off my cul-de-sac. If I wanted kids off my lawn, I might be happier. People who live small as postage stamps probably sleep better. I may be grouchy because my brain has never worked right and now it doesn’t matter if I read my horoscope or Michael Pollen’s research on Psilocybins but also because I think I’m just lazy. That’s enough of the navel-gaze, with apologies. I miss lust. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to say, tonight, below a no-moon sky and glorious thunder not popping up but opening the night black and wide with tenor growls. Yeah. Maybe it’s just that I want.