Ftrain, by Paul Ford

On the couch this morning, immobilized by panic. [Wife] sleeping. I am going to shake her awake.

Listen, I will say. Grab the cats. We can be out of here in two days. Just go to Taos.

There's something about New Mexico. It seems hollowed out. Very 1970s-movie. Hats and boots. Lots of stores at the roadside selling handicrafts. No lawns. O'Keefe sunsets, shades of brown. Small apartment, tortillas in the iron pan. Vegan tacos.

We can live on the bank account. A year easy. I'll write a novel and sell it.

I could; I could write enough to live and do some software installs, write some code, etc. Ratty carpet and white walls.

Imagine--seeing stars out a window.

Doing all the exercises in the textbook.

Saw some pictures of myself on Facebook. A year ago, probably 50 lbs over where I am now. The great, chair-shattering, ovoid self, chin and neck together. Always scared. Of the cost of a lifetime of bad decisions, of losing [Wife] to swooping monsters, of bus crashes, cancer, heart disease, bunions, rabid otters, other rabbits, the disapproval of fools, of risking a diet only to find that weight loss is not O(n) complex but rather O(n!). And I am in the anxiety business, dispensing dosages of despair in as elegant a package as I can.

Went for my haircut, crouching down so Vera could reach my head. Managed to keep looking at my face in the mirror the whole time, instead of closing my eyes until it's over. An accomplishment. I used to squint at mirrors. (The new Macintosh screens with their high reflective gloss were a great disappointment to me. The last thing I wanted to see staring back upon boot is me.) Now I seem able to stand the sight of myself for minutes at a time.

In college--so 15 years ago--I used to tutor this older student, a dyslexic guy, help him with his papers. He was getting an MA in counseling; he was maybe 35. A big black dude from Queens, but of course I didn't know what most of that--dyslexia, Queens, being a 35-year-old graduate student--meant. I just knew I'd make $10 an hour typing his papers. We became friends. I saw his driver's license once. "Look at that ugly sumbitch," I said.

"No," he said. "But that's a beautiful motherfucker right there. Get me a mirror, that is what I will show you."

Yes, self-esteem, yes, etc. But I was shocked out of something right then. One can, if one chooses, if one is not so invested in irony and detachment as to make the very act impossible, stride to the mirror, nod, and say, that there is a beautiful motherfucker. I have done it many hundreds of times since. Indeed at some level thereafter it was impossible to look in the mirror and not hear that that right there was a beautiful motherfucker.

My dyslexic friend also told me that Michael Jackson was a sweet bitch and that he'd love to fuck him slowly. He'd be kind to him, take him out, treat him real nice. I kept trying to get him to tell me he was kidding but he didn't budge. "Michael is just so beautiful," he said. "Just such a sweet bitch."

Maria Bamford: "I never really thought of myself as depressed as much as paralyzed by hope."

We are out of cereal.

Weight: 328 lbs