“Well, look here. Your grandma started out with a neurologist at Sound Shore. An older gentleman by now, recommended, respected, you know what I’m saying to you. She gets dizzy sometimes. Dad tells you when she goes to the hospital.”

“…”

“They don’t always call me either when these things happen to the family. I couldn’t tell you why. Remember when your dad’s leg broke at the tendon and the whole crazy incident happened when we were in Florida and of course we have to wait to hear about it until we get back. They say we can’t do anything about it from Florida so why bother to tell us. Of course—why should parents deserve to know… But the doctor—let’s call Doctor A—says Grandma’s issue is this TIA, Transient Is… Ic… I-something Attacks, a loss of blood-flow similar to a stroke, a mini-stroke.”

“…”

“Which is exactly why it was a problem when she stopped taking blood thinners.”

“…”

“I don’t understand your question. The doctor prescribed blood thinners to help with the mini-stroke-TIAs. But then he says that he’s done everything he can for us. That we should go to a doctor at Columbia where they have an MRI and more doctors and someone good that he referred us to.”

“…”

“Something with their availability—you only get an MRI if you can demonstrate enough need. Then again Sound Shore is bankrupt and bought by this other hospital whose name I can’t really remember… Which is that one up in the Bronx…? Starts with an M or an N… [struggles trying to remember, frustrated by increasingly frequent forgetfulness] Not important, anyway. So we drive down to this Columbia doctor and he runs all these fancy kinds of tests, you understand. And he decides it’s not these TIAs. So we say to him, ‘Look

Doctor, we know you’re young and intelligent and don’t think it’s these mini-strokes, but Doctor A back over at… um… Sound Shore has been giving us pills for this problem for a long time and now you tell us Doctor A was wrong?”’

“…”

“Well yes, he did call. Or had his office call, you know, the secretary and such who calls us back and says this Columbia doctor now agrees with the first doctor and I get on the phone and I say to him, ‘Is this because of a seniority thing? Not being able to contradict your superior?’ So he doesn’t really answer my question and just says something else: ‘I’m going to refer you to this other doctor at Columbia, my colleague, very well respected, deals with dizziness…’ He explains something about imbalance caused by the ears, the deep inside-ear drums and such that help you balance as you walk. But he didn’t answer my real question at all—you know what I’m saying to you.”

“…”

“Well we haven’t met this third doctor yet who still needs to give us new tests—I mean give Grandma the tests. But she is still getting dizzy sometimes and I need to drive down to Maryland to meet this client, see he’s important, you know, pays a lot, but Grandma doesn’t want to be alone for a night, you understand. And I wouldn’t tell this to her, but the doctors can’t diagnose the problem and who knows what it is, you know what I’m saying, we have no idea and she doesn’t want to be in the house alone and you see how hard it is for me to even walk—could you imagine if we didn’t get the wheelchairs in the airport last year?—how fast could I even get upstairs across the house anyway, but I’m still on the right side of the grass if you know what I mean and I’m so happy I stopped on the way back home and we could get dinner together. Here, call your grandmother to say hello it’ll mean a lot to her.”

[ — #2 — ]

10:12 // 09-08-13

Walking across campus

“My mom packed it all. Well I unpacked a lot that she packed actually.”

“…”

“I don’t know—stuff I don’t need: a flashlight or duct-tape or… whatever. I had to fight with her over a bunch of it. She’s more nervous about me starting college than I am. Or more nervous that I will need something and she will be stuck across the country totally helpless. Well technically I will be the one less of the help that I would have otherwise had.”

“…”

“I wouldn’t say ‘overbearing’ necessarily. Is ‘concerned’ more appropriate? I guess you don’t know her and can’t confirm that. But almost in a misguided way. Errr… actually more in an overwhelmed and ignoring-bigger-problems-by-focusing-on-very-minor-details way. These little things are easy for her to handle and consider “important” because she has a hold over them. What she is more deeply or accurately worried about is out of her control. She’s just helpless when it comes to me dealing with college.”

“…”

“Scared? I don’t know… That’s a hard thing for me to address. In my thoughts, I mean. Like to confront. I just don’t think about it. There are times when I’m meeting people on my floor or in the dining hall or something and I’m smiling, but I have this moment and think, ‘Wait why am I smiling?’ But that’s only when I notice it. Obviously. I smile but my mind or heart or whatever isn’t, y’know?”

“…”

“Not that I miss home per se. Because I don’t want to be there either. Usually it’s only the first few nights or whatever people call this ‘transition period.’ Just going to sleep at night and not feeling like it’s my bed. It is my bed, I know, but not my bed.”

[ — #3 — ]

14:43 // 09-16-13

New York, NY

“I need to start with a little background. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment, the long-awaited long-prepared-for never-ending services featuring my quite lengthy speech about our people’s longevity and the everlasting reign of He On Mighty and I was in the middle of speaking to my congregation and a thought—so temporal, such a blur of immediate light, in, out, gone—struck me.”

“…”

“It’s not so important—well I pray of its importance to them—the worst feeling is that of uselessness …But hard to summarize also I suppose. If I were forced, as you force me now, to restrict its entirety to a catch-phrase motif I would regurgitate ‘Reward and Punishment.’ But even that classification isn’t so fair because of this momentary seemingly out-of-body instant… Oh, interesting parallel…’

‘…’

‘No, see one classic kindergarten Yom Kippur fable is that of the Chassidic Master, the leader of his congregation’s services for the most important section of prayer, and the alarming pause in his prayer, for extended seconds, minutes after minutes that he would not blink or breathe or flinch even when the nearest of his Chassidim tried to snap his possessed gaze to no avail. They anxiously awaited his return to consciousness from the silent, motionless seizure when at once he continued with no motion of acknowledgement until the service concluded and he could relate the story of his ascension to Heaven and pleas on behalf of the world’s future.’

‘…’

‘I’m not saying that was me this year—no very much the opposite in fact. I merely draw a comparison to the well-known out-of-body experience documented on previous holidays, but mine was of a rather different content for my vision challenged this life, this certainty. It was a simple recognition of the secular calendar’s coincidental overlap of Friday the Thirteenth and Yom Kippur which sparked an alternate life-vision before me. The details aren’t important—’

‘…’

‘So I was not clear. The specifics are inconsequential—can you picture your dreams in which faces are unintelligible, yet the characters’ identities and the context of their actions, although obscure visually, are discernible nonetheless? The details of my vision are wholly unimportant in the face of a more palpable knowledge that this day, in an alternate, yet equally possible and plausible reality, could thematically stand in complete opposition to my experience of it now. Yom Kippur could have so easily and arbitrarily been Friday the Thirteenth. Which, as you can imagine, has a slew of unsettling ramifications. I don’t need to get into that.’

“…”

‘Well in brief… I’d say it’s about the paper-cut feeling, the immediate reaction to some stupid meaningless paper-cut that prompts the existential challenge of “Why me?” because it is so damn random, but then you acknowledge how inevitable that quick slice is considering the number of pages you handle daily. When you say, ‘I don’t understand how this tragedy could befall such a good guy.’ I’m focusing on the alleged lack of understanding here that is indicative of a moral confidence and expectation which totally ignores the likelihood—despite how many pages you handle every damn hour—of pure randomness.”

“…”

“No, let me finish this point—that’s exactly the irony of it. It’s the moment where you find meaning in the stupid assumed-to-be-meaningless paper-cut. But then—here’s the ironic terror lacing my vision—you realize the content of the event, what actually transpired, is actually meaningless because that same meaning can be found in any nameless event. You stare at the stars over the lake and meditate on the blurry light and the implications of that moment’s importance, contextually, in that specific moment of your life. But who cares? It could be any moment at any time in any place for any person with any back-story and future and present, the crucial present—that meaning is just my arbitrarily invested meaning. What’s the point in that?”

“…”

“I just finished the speech—kept on going, no indication of lapse in thought or commitment. It was easy because I was just about to read a famous quotation from the prayer liturgy: ‘Angels will hasten, a trembling and terror will seize them—and they will say, “Behold, it is the Day of Judgment… [of] who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst.’ But what if there is no Plan?”