The first sound I remember hearing as I regained conciousness was my grrl, deriding me in her sadness and rage for getting that messed up in the first place. "Asshole!" I could hear her muffled screams about me to some people in the other room. I felt it, all the emotions implied and collected in the expletive, like a knife through the ribs, adding insult to the injury. I wished I could swim back down through the layers of conciousness, back into the blackness of not knowing. But I was more or less awake now, beginning to slowly recover.

I convalesced for weeks ... months more likely, slipping in and out of various states of awareness, surrounded by fever dreams of what was, trying to comprehend the things that really were, right then. With me constantly was the maddening itch and ache of healing tissues and the stink of decay. Next time you floss your teeth, smell the string afterwards. You'll get an inkling, the stench of corruption, the constancy of your own mortality, dying every day just a little bit. Use that when you begin to tire of it all. Maybe then you can remember how fleeting this all is and find something to be thankful for yet.

I had been been a pretty serious druggie before the accident, and mixed with the pain and confusion of my healing head were the delirium and symptoms of coming down cold turkey. I had fucked up one of my eyes as well, and all this chaos I was trying to process, through amnesia, nausea, and stretching pains moving thoughout me, was not any easier to take in with only one window looking out of to make sense of it all.

One day someone brought me some soup. After all the retching, all the wrenching, searing nausea and cramps, I never thought I would eat again, but the thin aromatic steam wafted through my nose into me and I felt almost invigorated by the scent itself. It was so hard to hold the spoon at first, my hand was so shaky. I probably spilled more than I swallowed. I still remember that taste, the salt of it, the tang of it, the warmth going down. I was never more grateful for, or energized by food. I was so satiated by the warmth in my belly that I fell into the first untroubled sleep I had since this all began.

I'm not really all that religious a guy, I should tell you. I have my little Shinto stuff I do when I remember to. And, of course, like most boys who grew up in Smalltown, USA, I was raised Christian. If you met me you would not percieve me as a Hallmark card, a "happy" kind of guy. Even now I have this cynical, myopic, misanthropic, scowly look to my face. My eyes frighten people. My default expression, the one your face goes into when its set in neutral, tends to draw my mouth into a pout. But ... I learned a crumb of optimism after that event and I'd really like to pass it on. Since the epiphany brought on by that ordinary bowl of Campbell's soup, I've been able to put myself into that state of saint - like bliss at will. I see every little thing before me magnified, glorified, made more perfectly and purely REAL. Brandon Lee once said, "Nothing is trivial" and believe me, he's right. Maybe it takes a little taste of your own mortality before you can really taste, see, feel everything else, but then, maybe it just takes a little bit of effort, you know? Life is fuil of everyday little miracles an attentive person can grasp and rejoice in. If you feel yourself slipping away into a long blue funk, or numbing out, think on this. Look, REALLY look at everything around you. So much can quicken a life; a baby's smile, the glint of a raindrop, the perfect symmetry of a leaf, laughter, the pathos of advertisements and Jerry Springer dramas cropping up around you ... You could split your sides realizing the extreme irony of it all.

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