Monthly Archives: September 2012

9/11

Eleven years ago today I was a senior in high school. I sat down for Mrs. Bolton’s first period Spanish class. There were only three minutes in between the bells for class, so it was always this mad rush to get to your locker and then navigate your way to class with sixteen hundred other boys trying to do the same exact thing. I sat down and the kid in front of me, J.R. Hancock – every class had alphabetical seating so I always sat around the same few guys – leaned around and told me he had heard something about a terrorist attack.

It didn’t even register in my mind what he was really talking about. As a teenager I never went to bed before midnight. I had my own room and I’d stay up late watching WWF or Star Trek. Getting up at six in the morning was all but impossible. Every single morning my parents would have to scream me out of bed, and I felt like I was perpetually just making it to school at the very last second.

So I’m still half-asleep and J.R. drops this bomb, but, like I said, I didn’t really get what he was saying. I kind of looked at him and said something like, “What? Really?” and he, having no further information just kind of repeated himself again, but this happened within the course of maybe fifteen seconds, because the bell rang and class came to session almost immediately.

Mrs. Bolton started in on her Spanish lesson, no mention of anything that J.R. was talking about, and so that feeling that I had, that feeling that J.R. wasn’t really making sense, that this news he told me didn’t really connect with anything in my brain, this feeling persisted for about ten more minutes. And then the P.A. system came online and Fr. James, the school’s president, made his 9/11 speech.

It was maybe half a minute long. He told us that there had been an attack on the World Trade Center, but at this point the best thing to do was go about our day. As if there were no terrorist attacks. As if it were just a regular school day. Throughout the course of the day, this “let’s ignore it” approach got stronger, teachers encouraging us not to talk about it, forbidding us to turn on the TVs mounted on the walls of each classroom to watch the footage that by now everyone’s seen over and over again. It doesn’t need any more describing.

People always talk about how during moments of national importance, everybody can tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing. When JFK and MLK got shot. When the Apollo crew landed on the moon. And yeah, I guess it’s a pretty accurate description. I can still vividly recall everything, but only what I wrote down above, the five minutes before and after the P.A. announcement. Everything after is kind this collection of memories, some are definitely mine, some are probably more of an amalgamation of actual experiences but also of popular stories.

For example, and I don’t know where I read this, or when, but it was in the Times, definitely years after the attacks, about how the author will forever associate the color of a clear fall sky as “9/11 blue.” For whatever reason, that’s part of my memory too, even though it’s not mine, it’s not my description. It’s not even my memory of that sky. My memory of the sky was what it looked like for the rest of the day. It was like this orange, this rust color. All of that explosion just kept exploding, kept burning up downtown, just half an hour without traffic from where I grew up.

I still kind of resent my high school for not letting us at least watch what was going on, participate in the day’s unfolding. You’d see later on TV, high schools around the country watching the news, students holding hands, having this shared mourning experience. For us it was just math problems and religion classes all while every once in a while some secretary from the principal’s office would come to the door, whisper something in the teacher’s ear, and the teacher would just kind of look at that one student who’s dad worked downtown somewhere, that kid who had been on the edge of his seat, already waiting for a call like this, and they’d slip him out of class. My dad worked in midtown, so I wasn’t worried. Or at least I don’t remember being worried. I wasn’t really feeling anything because it was this weird sort-of school day, nobody allowed to talk about anything.

And it just didn’t feel real. School let out and I drove home. And I walked inside. My mom didn’t really have anything to say. My little brothers and sisters didn’t know what to talk about. My friend Dan and I drove over to the hospital to see if we could donate some blood, but some nurse turned us away, told us there was nobody around to take any blood. Everybody with any type of actual medical credentials was already downtown.

It was either that day or the next day that I went to work waiting tables after school. Somebody that worked there had a sister that was a nurse or an EMT and she came in after volunteering downtown, sifting through all of that rubble. I think. Even that isn’t a vivid memory.

At the restaurant, I remember some lady came in and asked my boss to give her some food so she could drive it down to the volunteers. And my boss started packing up trays of meat and salad. Some other guy came with a giant sign, like a banner, with an American flag across it. It said something like God Bless the USA. But the guy handed it over with his business card on top, his sign-making business card. And I remember as soon as the guy left, my boss threw it in the garbage and let out a string of curses about such vulgar opportunism.

I wasn’t planning on writing anything about 9/11. I don’t feel like I should. I don’t feel like it’s my right. There are so many other people who were closer to it, more directly affected, people who helped out, people who made serious sacrifices. A big part of me still feels exactly the way I did in high school, the non-feelings. The kind of emotional vacancy. Like when I heard the news the first time, when J.R. turned around and started blabbing about some attack, like this core part of me just walled up and refused to accept it. Because it is ridiculous when you think about what happened. So out of synch with the rest of regular life.

I never planned on writing about 9/11, because I never write about anything seriously, and I thought it would across as forced, or worse, disingenuous. But I went for a run just now, and it’s nighttime already, and I after maybe ten minutes or so I turn the corner and I saw those 9/11 lights, the big giant memorial lights that they light up from ground zero every year, and I got this unexpected chill, not just down my spine, like every hair on my body tightened, a very rare sensation of goosebumps on every square inch of my body.

And I started thinking all about 9/11, all about what it was like that day, all about the days and the weeks and the months after. Everybody put their own spin on it. Every news network had graphics and stories and there were two major 9/11 motion pictures and Marvel Comics made a special 9/11 comic book, and it was bigger than all of the other comic books, and all of the comic book stores had a limit, like you can only buy two which, whenever there’s a “limit two” policy, what they’re really saying is, “Why buy just one? Buy two.”

Of course I bought two. You felt like less of an American if you only bought one. Buying zero was out of the question. You might as well have just given up on going to the comic store all together. And these comics were oversized, so the stores also sold special oversized bags and boards to store your 9/11 comic books in. And this was right after 9/11, so we were still a few years away from 9/11 collector’s coins and 9/11 commemorative kitchenware and last year’s 9/11 NFL Budweiser commercial.

And let’s not forget about the inconveniences of modern plane travel, of not being able to bring a bottle of water on a flight, of massive government wiretaps and an aggressive foreign policy, of torture and Guantanamo Bay, about radical Islam and ground zero mosques. Listen, I’m not trying to make any points here, I’m really not. I’m just observing. Everybody’s still dealing with this in one way or another.

But remember a couple of years ago when Glenn Beck started his whole “9/12 Project?” It was something about going back to how we all felt that day after 9/11. The national unity. The sense of shared loss, of communal mourning. Politicians coming together. America united.

But to me that’s the exact opposite of what I want to see. I want to see a 9/10 Project. I want it to be like it was before 9/11. We’ve been dealing with this for eleven years now. It’s been over a decade of 9/11. Sure we were all united after the attacks, but we were all united in fear, in being terrified, of everything, of everybody else. People took advantage of that fear. The government. That sign-making guy. Collectable coin companies. Hollywood, Marvel Comics, and Anheuser-Busch.

I’m not a huge fan of Mayor Bloomberg, but he made a lot of sense a year or two ago when he suggested that maybe sooner or later we’re going to have to stop with the elaborate memorial ceremonies every year. It’s not about forgetting. It’s about getting along and moving on from unspeakable tragedy. You can’t just keep reliving it, over and over again. It’s not healthy. It’s just this big collective case of PTSD.

Eleven years is a big deal. So was ten years. Every year is a milestone. I hope maybe we can at least start to turn the page. 9/11 is never going to go away, and it’s always going to be this stain on our national consciousness. But let’s just all hope and try to make sure that we can build even more decades of peace, of prosperity, of goodwill, and use these decades to distance ourselves from what happened on this day ten years ago. I think that it’s the very best that we can do, for ourselves, for the future, and for everybody involved in all of the senseless chaos and loss.

TV Review: Breaking Bad Season Four

I just finished watching Breaking Bad season four. I really hate to do this, but spoiler alert from here on out. For anybody who doesn’t watch the show, you really should. So stop reading this, watch the show, all of it, and then as soon as you’re done with the season four finale, come back and read this. Seriously, get to it, it’s going to take you a couple of weeks, dedicated only to watching Breaking Bad, back to back to back, just so you can catch up to where I’m at. I’m not even caught up fully. I think season five is on the air right now. Whatever, I hate watching TV shows as they air, because I always forget what happened the week before. And then things will be getting really interesting and the episode will end and you’ll want so much more, so you stick around past the credits hoping they’ll do one of those, “next time, on Breaking Bad,” type teasers, but every once in a while it’ll be like, “In two weeks, on Breaking Bad,” and you’re like, goddamn it, two weeks? What the hell? And you go online to find out what’s the deal with the holdup, and it’s Labor Day or Arbor Day and AMC doesn’t want to risk losing any viewers who might be out celebrating whatever minor holiday might be getting in the way. But I’m not going anywhere. Just play it!

OK, wow, I’ve gotten myself way off course here. I really wanted to talk about the season four finale. I’m going to try to do this with as little in the way of explaining as possible, but there’s a lot, so bear with me while I completely butcher four year’s of great storytelling into about three or four mediocre sentences. The main character, Walt, is a high school chemistry teacher who starts making crystal meth in order to pay for his lung cancer treatment bills. Over the course of the series, he winds up working for this big time drug distributer. But by season four, the boss wants Walt dead. Walt wins, by hiding a pipe bomb under a wheelchair at a senior center where the boss has come to visit/euthanize one of his old elderly rivals. The bomb goes off, and you see the explosion from outside the old guy’s room. And then the drug boss just walks out.

And you’re like, what the? How could he have survived that? But then the camera pans around and you realize that he didn’t, not really, because you were at first only looking at the boss from one side. As the camera rotates around, you’re shown that the other side of this guy’s face has been completely blown off, like much, much worse than Harvey Dent’s was in Dark Knight. He straightens his tie, and then drops dead.

My point is, the whole season was so good, so carefully written, without a single hole in the plot. Why did they feel the need to add such a gruesome little twist to an already great show? It didn’t need to be done. All it did was freak me the hell out. Just go to Google images and type in “Breaking Bad Gus face” and you’ll immediately see what I’m talking about. It’s the stuff that my nightmares are scared of. And why? It didn’t really add anything. Just the fact that Walt got this guy was good enough. They might as well have had him walking out of the room holding his own intestines falling out of his stomach. And you know what the title of the episode was? “Face Off.” Get it? Because it’s the final confrontation between Walt and Gus. And also, because his face gets blown off.

It’s a pretty lame critique, but I love good stories, and I hate how they are often peppered with unnecessary scenes of overly gratuitous violence. Jesus, I sound like an enraged PTA member here. I’m not trying to make any broad points about society or violence or anything other than, from a purely personal point of view, I get these gross images in my head and they’re hard to shake. It’s why I stopped watching Boardwalk Empire. It’s like, OK, we need to make a show. Period piece, cool. Interesting characters, awesome. Compelling stories, fantastic. OK and let’s throw in a really long scene of some guy getting his throat sliced open, but he won’t die instantly, he’ll hold his hands to his throat to try to stop all of the blood from falling out immediately, and so it’ll be this long, protracted struggle, and he’ll keep gurgling and making all these terrible I-just-got-my-throat-cut-open sounds, and then he’ll falls to his knees, but just before he dies, he’ll take out a knife and stab some other guy right through the knee, not the leg, but specifically the knee, and you’ll hear the other guy’s kneecap crack in half, and all of the fluids underneath the kneecap will just pop, and now this guy will be bleeding too, and everyone’s bleeding, and I don’t even remember what this episode was about in the first place, because I’m too busy trying not to throw up.

I’m not saying don’t have the violence, but maybe just don’t get so graphic in how you show it. With violent scenes in great movies, there’s ways of doing them without zooming in on bones popping through flesh. Isn’t it an old trick to pan away from the violence, and so you only see the shadow of the violent act on the wall? That’s not so bad. It’s like sex scenes. Movies can do sex scenes without getting past a certain level of being too graphic. In fact, I think they have to, because if it is too graphic, it’s porn, and they won’t let you show it in a regular movie theater. And it takes away from the movie anyway. The Dark Knight Rises had a sex scene, but it was like two seconds long. It would’ve been ridiculous to see Bruce Wayne getting it on with Talia al-Guhl for any longer than we already did. What? I told you there were spoilers. So yeah, I guess violence has a similar threshold. Anything too graphic, and to me, it’s like violence-porn. I’m imagining somebody making movies of just crazy gross gruesome nonsense, like a slow motion shot of somebody’s hand going through a meat grinder or something. Maybe somebody would like that, I don’t know. But don’t put that stuff on regular TV shows, especially not the last episode of a really great season.

Medium-rare

You know what I believe in? I know it’s a personal preference, but I believe steaks are at their absolute best when cooked medium-rare. It’s the perfect temperature for a nice piece of meat. The steaks should start out at room temperature. I can always tell when somebody’s cooking a steak right out of the fridge. It never really cooks as evenly, the center taking just a little longer to get to that sweet-spot, the exterior drying out while the middle takes forever to come down from the cold. I’ll still always say, “Wow, great steak,” but I’m really just being polite.

Ideally, whoever is cooking is going to want to heat up their grill or frying pan or whatever, get it really, really hot, almost smoking, so that way the outside will have that nice char, that crisp brown. And then when you cut into it, man, it’s great. Red to the center, warm interior.

So I always order my steak medium-rare. Unless, of course, I’m sitting at a table in a steakhouse with a large group of people. In that case it’s not so simple. I’m a gentlemen, so I never just go ahead and order first. I’ll hold off for somebody else to start, and then I’ll wait until it’s my turn to order. Chances are, somebody else is going to order their steak medium-rare. I’m telling you, it’s the best way to have a steak. But then the waiter will come around to me, “And for you sir? How would you like your steak prepared?” I can’t say medium-rare now. I’ll look like I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ll look like I’ve never ordered a steak before, and now I’m just copying everybody else.

This is why it’s great to order first at a steak place. Everyone else is definitely going to get their steak medium-rare. So when you order first, you look like you’re in charge, like everyone else is following your lead. Then the second person also says medium-rare. “Very good, sir.” And maybe he really did want his steak medium-rare. It all depends on how fast he said it. If there was even a second’s hesitation, it would be perfectly obvious that he was probably going to go for medium, but he didn’t feel like being outdone by the first person. “I’ll take mine medium … rare. Medium-rare.” A classic rookie I’ve-never-eaten-in-a-steakhouse-with-a-large-group-of-people mistake.

And then it goes down the line, medium-rare, medium-rare, medium-rare. But now everybody ordering, the fifth, sixth, seventh, even if they wanted medium, medium-well, it’s just not happening. Nobody’s going to stick their neck out like that. By the third or fourth person, the waiter is only even asking because he has to, because it’s part of his job description. Bosses always gets really pissed when waiters try to save some time, try to cast out a blanket, “medium-rares all around?” question to the table.

Every once in a while the waiter will start off with a person who clearly doesn’t know how to eat steak and they’ll say medium or medium-well. And the next person will order theirs, extra loud, medium-rare, as if to say, please don’t confuse me with my idiot friend to my left, I’d like mine medium-rare. Please. And it’ll go down the line, medium-rare, medium-rare, and after two or three people, that first guy will realize his mistake, and he’ll get really embarrassed, and he’ll just shout out to the waiter, who’s already passed him, and he’ll say, “Excuse me, you know what? I’m going to go for that medium-rare also, thanks.” And the waiter will say, “Very good, sir,” and he’ll pretend to cross out something on his pad and write in something else, but it will all be an act, because he’s not writing anything at all. It’s always medium-rare. The first person always changes to medium-rare after everyone else orders medium-rare. It’s a science.

But then it gets to me, maybe I’m like the eighth or ninth person ordering. And I’m no follower, I’m no nameless face in a crowd. So I’ll say “rare, please.” And everyone drops their fork and stares. I learned this trick at my friend’s wedding in Iowa last summer. The rehearsal dinner was at this steak place, and the specialty was rib-eye. Delish. Of course I was going to order medium-rare, but the first person ordered rare. I was like, what? Rare? Crazy. But then the second person ordered. Rare. Third, fourth, fifth. Rare, rare, rare. There was definitely a pattern here and it became clear to me how I’d have to order my steak.

It was good. I liked it. It’s a little chewier than I was used to. You have to cut the pieces really thin so it’s somewhat manageable in your mouth. But it’s nice. I still like medium-rare better, but I’ll never tell that to anybody. I’ll only order that if it’s just me and somebody else, or if I’m cooking the steak myself. From now on, when I’m at a steak restaurant with a lot of people, rare it is. I’m a one-of-a-kind kind of a guy. I just love it, sitting there. Medium-rare. Medium-rare. Medium-rare. Medium-rare. And, rare. Bam. I always stand out from the pack.

I really hope that someday I’m out to dinner with a bunch of guys and for some reason it’s my turn to order first. And I’m definitely going to order rare. And I know that that second person is just going to have to order rare also. And it’ll be like dominoes, everyone falling in line, everyone getting a rare steak. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened in Iowa. I think.

Just do me a favor and never order a steak well-done. I have it on good authority that whenever a chef at a steak restaurant gets an order for a well done steak, he walks over to a nearby trashcan where, under all of the trash, he keeps a stockpile of some of last week’s worst cuts of meat. After he pulls the nastiest one out, he spits on it a few times, and then he throws it on the grill until all that’s left is a charred blackened piece of coal. Then he puts on some parsley and sends it out to be served. It’s true, I swear.

P.S. I hate it when people order “medium to medium-well.” That’s not a temperature. Pick medium or medium well. There are five temperatures, that’s it. You can’t just go around making up your own weird non-existent styles of preparing steak.

Nothing better than an ice cold Coke

I’ll grab a cold drink out the fridge. I’ll open a bottle of soda or beer and just as the cap makes that pop sound I think to myself, how totally ridiculous is it that I can have cold carbonated beverages on demand? I don’t think like this all the time, just once in a while. Usually I’m thinking about or how crazy it is that we all have the Internet, how we have all of this information and media at our disposal, how we don’t have to buy CDs anymore, how we don’t have to buy stamps. How we’re the first generation being this close to instant material gratification. I’ll be really thirsty and I’m just enjoying a nice ice cold Coke Classic, and I’ll stop and think about all of this, and it’s equally absurd to think about even all of the small stuff, like a bottle of Coke, that I have at my fingertips.

What did people drink a hundred years ago? Water? That’s it? Juice maybe? What goes into carbonating stuff? How did it become so commercially successful to add bubbles to everything? I know that if you make beer from scratch the bubbles are produced naturally. But soda? How did the first sodas get bubbly? And beer now isn’t even made from scratch, it’s made in these big vats and then they boil it to kill all the active yeast and then they add all of the CO2 artificially.

That’s really not important though. It’s just when you consider progress, and I’m considering it right now, I wind up thinking that we’re so special, that we’re this pioneer generation, the first ones to benefit from all of the stuff available now, the first this, the first that. But soda is a pretty recent invention. So is refrigeration. When Coke came out didn’t it cost like a nickel a bottle? I have no idea. My grandfather always used to talk about stuff that cost a nickel when he was a kid, so I just have all of these sepia colored imagined memories of the past where everything’s five cents, and people are still complaining about it being too expensive.

But imagine you’re living back in the day when Coke first came out, and it’s super cheap. Everyone must have felt like a king. Or a queen, you know, if you were a lady. But it must have felt great to walk into a drugstore and buy a bottle of Coke. And you could stand outside and find some empty milk crate or some box and you could put one leg up on that milk crate and you could rest your arm, the same arm that’s holding the bottle of Coke, you could rest it on your raised knee and take a big sip of ice cold Coke and think to yourself, Jesus, this has to be the pinnacle of human development. And that first year that Coke was available, like really available, to every single person, it must have been such a great year, everyone really appreciating every sip of ice cold carbonated soft drink.

But then Sprite probably came out and maybe it was still kind of exciting, but it definitely couldn’t have been as exciting. And then even though soda was available, there were plenty of other things that weren’t available, like penicillin, or modern dental care, and the buses were still segregated, and maybe you’d get drafted into a war and maybe you’d run out of nickels and you wouldn’t even be able to buy a Coke, you’d just be back to plain old water.

And when I think all of this is so great, all of our modern technology, am I truly loving it? Am I really appreciating everything that we have that generations past have not had? Or is it not about the actual innovations, but just about that feeling, that feeling of having what once did not exist. Like when I first got an iPhone, man, that was something special. After a couple of years, it’s still somewhat special, but at the same time, it’s just my cell phone. I don’t have that better, superior feeling. And I get so wrapped up in my life, my world, I forget about all the stuff that’s comparable today to no penicillin and inequality and I don’t want to list the specifics of all of the negative aspects of the modern age, because I wouldn’t really be making any new or significant insights, and it would all be such a bummer, such a negative letdown.

I just can’t imagine what it’s going to be like towards the end of my life, how different the world is going to look. And how am I going to feel about the Internet in the future? Will it still seem so cool in comparison with whatever technological marvels the future will surely bring? Or maybe society will collapse and I’ll be telling my grandkids about the Internet, how it was the best thing our species had ever created, but civilization collapsed and now there is no Internet, and nobody knows how to get it back because we’re all too busy raiding these boarded up grocery stores, trying to sneak in and carry out cases of Coke and Sprite and Fanta without getting caught, because the Coke factory closed down when society closed down, and nobody knows how to carbonate the Coke, and you save all of your soda for wintertime, when you bury it under the snow, because there aren’t anymore refrigerators, well, there still are, but no electricity to run them. Some people have generators, but nobody’s refining oil into gas, and maybe there is no more gas, and so the snow trick is the only way for the average person to enjoy an ice cold Coke, and I think that, if I had to live in the burnt out remains of what was once a great civilization, no Internet, no TV, I think that an ice cold Coke would do just the trick, it would be just what I need, to close my eyes for a second, rest one of my legs up on some chair or stool, and just let it all wash down, the bubbles, the cold, the taste more than anything else of who we are and what we once had.

Why so shaken?

It’s so easy to get discouraged, at anytime with anything really. I could be having a great day, walking down the street, not a care in the world, maybe a nice tune is playing in my head, my posture is great, a little spring in my step, nothing too bouncy, but just a little extra kick, a little extra something, and then maybe I look at somebody across the street and I get it in my head that that person is giving me a funny look. Maybe, but maybe not. Probably not. I’m probably crazy. But still, the good mood is shattered and now I’m all self-conscious, so I throw my hands in my pockets and I clench my shoulders a little, and I don’t know why this happens, like my body is preparing itself for some sort of a physical assault. And try as I might to stand up tall and straight, my shoulder blades are pushing upward, out past my back, up and over my neck, and my head has nowhere to go but down, and I’m hunched over a little, just feeling like this curve of nervous energy, and then I’ll try to walk faster, to get where I needed to be going a little quicker, to get off the street, get my hands out my pockets, but, and this always happens, I think it happens because I have big feet, but I’m spending so much energy on the upper part of my body, the shoulders, the clenching, I’ll all torso right now, even my abs are getting a pretty good workout here, so when I try to pick up my pace, I’m figuring, I’m automatically not thinking about the fact that I should have enough reserve energy or concentration or whatever to not only increase the speed of my walking, but, and I’m forgetting this part, or I’m not forgetting it, but I’m not thinking about it, not consciously anyway, that where am I going to get this extra leg energy from if the majority of my body is being held up, locked up in my neck, in between my neck and my stomach? My core is off. People talk about cores a lot, core strength. But I just press on, and like I said, this always happens, and I don’t know how, I said it was because my feet are so big, but probably also because I’m so tall, and because there will always be some part of the sidewalk, you know, assuming that all sidewalks are the same, somewhat the same, basically just a collection of square pieces of cement, all joined together, but there are always one or a couple of squares that don’t line up just exactly, like maybe at one point they did, but there are so many things that can over the years push them out of synch. There’s ice, which is a perennial problem, assuming that I’m using the word perennial correctly. I’m not going to look it up. I never do. But water gets in those cracks, expands when it freezes, and then melts, contracting, and the cement squares can only take so much of this change in volume and pressure before something gives, and it’s always the cement that gives, which I never really understand, because if the water dripped in these cracks in the first place, why wouldn’t the ice just expand back in the same exact direction, outward, like how it dripped in in the first place? There’s obviously a path in, why doesn’t ice form backwards in the path out? Why does the cement have to crack? I thought, honestly, that cement would be stronger. Stronger than a little ice anyway. Like if I threw an ice cube at the cement, I’d think the ice would shatter, not the other way around. But ice isn’t the only problem. There are roots. Everywhere. Trees get bigger, roots twist and turn underground, and all of the sudden trees get so big that the roots are pushing up the sidewalk one square at a time. This is all besides the point, a very long, drawn out way of getting to a very minor point here, that there’s going to be a gap, a little ledge, maybe an inch or two high, and I don’t know how this happens to me every time, because my feet have to be in just the right position, the part of my step usually so in tune with how the sidewalk should be, that I don’t notice that one inch, those one or two inches, and my toe just hits the lip of the raised cement so perfectly, and my speed, having been upped from when I got all nervous and clenched, I just hit it too hard and I stumble. And like I said, my head is already hunched over from my shoulders being so tight, so why wasn’t I prepared? I should have been looking right at it, anticipating the change in level. I catch myself. But it’s still a dramatic trip. My hands outward, preparing for impact with the ground. This I never understand also, this automatic human response to an impending fall, to thrust out your hands, like what happens if you really do fall? What are you going to have two broken wrists? How is that a human instinct? It would be hard enough to survive in the twenty-first century with two broken arms. What were our ancestors supposed to do? It could have been a death sentence. If I were to take a sudden fall, which I do a lot, I’d prefer to have my body automatically twist slightly, so I could land on one shoulder. Worst case scenario, I get a dead arm. That’s not a big deal, a bruise really. And my shoulders are probably already clenched. They are, I just described it at length. So I feel like I’m wasting all of this natural preparedness by wildly thrusting out my arms in no direction whatsoever. And usually I catch myself, but all of this goes through my head. Why did I trip? Why didn’t I see that? I was just in such a good mood but now I’m all upset, visibly shaken, so easily discouraged and really embarrassed.