The Discovery of Air

First the breathing:

Ever since I started pouring warm salt water into my nose with the Neti pot, it’s like I’m finally breathing through the goddamned thing. My nose, not the pot. (I must have been stopped up for decades.) Tonight I told my wife, “Hey wow, I can actually take a deep breath through my nose!” She looked at me like I’d just told her the sky was blue for the tenth time today. It had been a long few hours with me.

“That’s how I always take a deep breath,” she said after a bewildered pause.

“Really?” I replied, wondering if all Iowa girls did this. Probably, I thought. “Whenever someone tells me to ‘take a deep breath,’ I almost always breathe in through my mouth,” I said. ” Like this!” Whereupon I gave a fair impression of a drowning man about to be pulled under by a shark.

She was not impressed.

Perhaps it was the timing. I’d just finished a long speech–with many great pauses that made her bang her head against the bar–about an astounding discovey of mine involving Web 2.0, social networking, and how I’ve been doing everything completely wrong. Besides the fact that she knew little of the subject, epiphanies involving future hallelujahs were a specialty of mine and wearing rather thin. “Isn’t there someone else you could talk to about this?!?” she pleaded, knowing that she couldn’t win: “Oh all right, go on…”

And this was good. In the course of trying to explain what I was thinking, it came together much more clearly in my mind. I immediately thought of an obscure metaphor that described my insight perfectly and left three sentences hanging unfinished in mid-air to pursue an entirely different line of exposition.

(This was bad.)

“AAAGHH!!”

But I persisted, for I knew the end was near. The reason it had taken me so long to recognize how the rest of the world did things in this new digitally connected world of ours and everywhere else, I went on, was because of my dysfunctional socialization at the hands of neurotically depressed farm animals who never lived in the same place longer than six months. To wit, I didn’t understand what “social” meant and only knew how to be a stupid fucking jerk. She looked at me like I had less sense than a stump.

“And this is NEWS to you??” she retorted, with that air of female finality that makes men shut up and kill bears. I noticed her wine glass was empty and decided to back off.

“Better late than never!” I said, knowing that was true, feeling nailed but confident and brother to all manly men…

This settling back into my body reassured her, and she went off to cook the organic basil chicken sausages. I had a little more tequila and found an Internet radio station from Algiers. The air was filled with wailing, drums, and ululation. I meditated on my sins.

Always crowing like a rooster, putting on a show and waiting hungrily for my reward. This is what you do outside of confidence, yelping in the void. Who knew anyone actually needed friends and gained from helping others? Always the last to know, it seems. My tombstone should probably read, “Am I dead yet?”

So much work to do, but oxygen to spare.

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