go ahead, ask me...

"Look at you," a long time friend said recently, "you're wasting away! Don't they feed you around here?"

"If," I would've retorted had I been a bit quicker on the draw, "you knew what I know about our foreign policy, could you eat?" Nothing like that surfaced at the time, so I just turned away to somehow stop the flow of disappointment, but the poison was already in my bloodstream. Great. Another issue with which I'll probably never deal.

Look at you ... look at you ... look at you. Over the next few weeks I often found myself apologizing to a god in the mirror, a god who'd blundered in the way I was made. Slowly, I came to like what I saw, but those moments of grace, it seems, were the climb to the top of that first big hill. Hang on, the rest is a zooming roller-coaster.

Then I turned a corner and made for anger as swift as I could get there. That's where I've been ever since. I don't know what to do with it. The roots are too many, too deep. Why bother?

Somedays I just want a t-shirt that says, "Ask me if i give a fuck." Seems like that would save me a lot of grief.