Peeping Expirations

I regret never having attempted to conquer statistics, or demographics. These probability and percentages and median averages are black holes crushing my intellect in a supernaturated gravitation field, upon which I speculate that the number of westerners intimate with death must run into the thousands, with adjustments for anomalies. I am familiar with the threat of my own mortality, and that even before cigarettes shortened my lifespan. I was not supposed to survive my birth, did, nearly died from pneumonia numerous times before my twelfth birthday, was nearly murdered, tossed on my skull a few times, and that can kill you; it makes me feel like Houdini Cripple, but I have yet to experience someone dying on me (nodding off pause) in terms of going *through* the loss curve common to our agrarian roots. I have seen death lurking in the inner city violence paradigm, watched paramedics work on a public housing tenant like Mr. Morton, collapsed in his doorway, a black male old enough to remember segregation, and too old not to have been scored upon by whatever denigration that amounted to; neither he nor his wife saved themselves, due to the beliefs of an obscure sect that may have been a corruption of Christian Science. I found them to be unpleasant ignorant people, and it was my fault, after all, that I have seen so much of the black community, the gay lifestyle, up close. Had I listened to my parents. Scratch that.



I did not listen, and the American underclass has scored on my intelligence, destroyed me; my cardiovascular system is not functioning properly, and whether it significantly impairs me in the short term is an open question. I do not have much in the way of confidence with Hahnemann diagnostics, to repeat myself. They take my blood to check my cholesterol, but neither the medical students, their attending, the technicians, none of them see the vascular constriction in my legs. Next to my full brother's graphic physical decline from AIDS, Joey dying in my bathroom was the first time death entered into the rhythm of my life. The rest, like most of the pedestrian American left, I get from PBS, and I think the Frontline episode was titled Facing Death. It is filmed in Mount Sinai, and we have all seen countless programs like it, we voyeurs of dying pornography, and we are all revolted by what medical technology can do, but I was struck by the corrections officer in the end stage of his battle with melanoma. To me he was not rational, his struggle obscene, even though Monica, a white fat Catholic with lupus who I intensely dislike, one time said my emotional pain wasn't rational. She feared me in the past, and today she has taken over Frank's life, my ex, since I am firmly out of it. She gets her succor from infantile male invalids.
Some theists see illness as an affirmation of faith. Not I. We suffer and vanish, or suffer positively and vanish, in the States to the tune of 2.5 million a year, and sometimes we are important enough for historical footnotes in the process of that traffic passing.