Nothin's new. I sleep all day. Life is work, sleep, work, with an occasional 'eat' thrown in. No suck no more. You know, 40 was not the end of my youth (youth is defined as that period in my life in which sex came easily—and so did I), the end of my youth came at 43. My gut expanded, my breathing became gasping, my shoelaces moved out of reach, and I became entirely invisible to everyone under thirty. It seems like it all happened in the space of a few months, but it actually happened in a single instant. I turned old. It is not a chronological condition, it is a choice. You, for example, are still young. However, at a finite moment in November of 2001, while halfway up Belmont Hill laboring on my bicycle, I gave up. I chose to become old. I stopped trying to fight the inevitable evolutionary process of Darwinian selection, and I stopped pretending that youth is permanent. I got off my bike to breath.

Today I am fighting with the phone company (I hate authority) and pleading with the weakest of all possible champions—state government—to intercede on my behalf. I fantasize of other interventions; there is something to be said for learning how to fly and not how to land. But the truth is that it probably doesn't matter at all. It is not about getting a good internet connection, and it's not about them being wrong, even if they are. It's about letting go and entering the flow, like a red leaf drifting down on the crystal surface of a mountain stream. This is life, and while many bitter circumstances seek to exclude, many others are waiting for me, urging me to go another way, offering to include me with them in an entirely different thing.