Phlebotomy

One hundred and one degrees; on a swing, leaning all the way back, one leg folded under the other. Today’s sky is frustratingly blue. The birds are emitting sounds that qualify as neither chirp nor song, harsh noises that remind me that their ancestors used to eat mine. The tree directly in front of me is bent double with nectarines, or some similar fruit. The sun illuminates the leaves in a cacophony of green light shattered by shade and shadow. And it’s so, so hot. One could evaporate in this heat. Gradually at first, then suddenly - poof! - scattered in the unlimited sky.

A little later, the sun dips behind the trees. I can feel the concrete echoing the heat of the day, blazing in thermal colors that I don’t have the eyes to see. For the first ten minutes of the afternoon I was reading Camus, and since then I have been daydreaming, allowing my eyes to scan pointlessly over the same two pages. Half of my daydreams tend to resemble browsing Wikipedia, and the others are splendid fantasies about the other sex; but today’s is different. I imagine that the sun never sets on this blistering day, that this patch of shade never moves, that even the birds continue their accursed squawking. I imagine that this afternoon finds the magnanimity to last forever.

But afternoon gives way to evening, and I go for a run. I puff and pant up the trails, breathing air the way rocket engines don’t. Sometimes, though, there are effortless moments, moments when the Earth says, fine, you earned this one—and gravity eases, I take the hill at triple pace, hitting every beat of the K-pop playing out of the phone in my hand (Lisa, can you teach me Japanese, I say はい はい)¹ and as I reach the crest I feel kind of nauseous and my vision blurs a little with each heartbeat but who cares about that? I’m so fast. On the way home I stop next to a police car at a red light and the officer raises his eyebrows because I’m not wearing a shirt and he probably can’t tell if I’m wearing anything at all. But I’m nodding my head to the music and my mind is still in the hills so without thinking I give him a broad grin. He just looks away.

I sit and start writing as soon as I get home and this turns out to be a mistake because my Achilles’ tendons stiffen and now I can’t walk or really bend my ankles at all. Something about electrolytes, so I swig some soy sauce (we make do with what we have) and take a shower. Another song comes on:

In Japan my old friends and I sang ourselves hoarse on the chorus—ima Friday night wa moeru²—and now I do it again, because that’s what voices are for.

I always hesitate to say that things are improving—you never know when a new species of catastrophe is going to spill your drink—but life is pretty good. I read four excellent books in September³. I’ve been doing programming challenges for fun. I got a blood test, every number was between normal and excellent, and I was seized by a mad joy: my diet, the one that I developed through a combination of reading literature on metabolism and analyzing my food cravings to find missing nutrients, works perfectly. And if a phlebotomist could put my spirit in a vial and send it off to Labcorp, for the first time in years I bet that every single number would come out green.

1. Does it still count as K-pop if the singer is Thai and the lyrics contain no Korean whatsoever

2. This Friday night is on fire

3. Letters to a Young Poet, Ever Since Darwin, Ender’s Game, The Palliative Society