Clinic.

The porch was crowded. We sat in the dark with forms to fill out and idle evening conversation. I waited to be called inside for a treatment for my ear, a minor, chronic condition that took nothing more than water and a few minutes to remedy. While trying to ignore the loud amazon in a large America! t-shirt talking into her cell phone and making others around her inexplicably embarrassed, I treaded in David Foster Wallace's Oblivion:

...a certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy ... had enabled him to understand that his professional fantasies were not in the main all that unique, that a large percentage of bright and young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful-- what else could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives?-- and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence in it....

It was a full moon, chilly but pleasant for a mid-November evening. The sky was clear for the first time in weeks. I'd filled out the paperwork at the free clinic, watching as the others did the same. I imagined they probably had much greater ailments than mine, knowing that one day I would have insurance and the ability to receive health care at a facility with indoor waiting rooms. The patients here were women and black men, the nurses white women, and the two doctors white men. An African-American woman sat across the porch next to her husband, who was receiving the flu shot. "I'm just happy ya'll are here," she told the nurse. "Hopefully one day we'll all have healthcare," she replied. "Maybe Obama will make it happen," I offered, and the woman smiled at me; our president is now a magic word. "He's got the weight of the world on his shoulders," said the nurse.

In the hallway, Mary Ann, RN, took my blood pressure. "Beautiful. That's only possible when you're ...23," she said, glancing at my chart. These women, with their short hair and glasses, tapered jeans, comfortable shoes and genuine kindness, are unmistakably motherly; its tempting to crumple before them, as they would calm, and assure, and fix. My own sense of personal-and-professionally-related despair, and the deadly, deadening notion that ruins us all was slowly ruining me. That is, the notion that we are not unique, that we were wrong to ever think so and that the world wants us to consume plastic and perishable items, not to create anything beautiful or universal but to buy something large, lots of large things, and spend the rest of our lives working to pay them off.

Maybe some notion of that sort is what consumed and killed Wallace a few months ago.

After treatment, I hopped on my bike, rode home, brewed some tea and then impromtuly got drunk at a Chinese karaoke bar and sang Boston and the Eagles and the Spice Girls before going to bed alone, because no one is perfect. The moon was still full, and somehow seemed old like our own roughened skin, because now we crawled into bed with people who were never as much as we wanted when we had yet to discover more truths about the world; we were resigned to it all and barely repentant, taking what we could get and writing it off as experience, as being young and fearless, when in reality we were just being very old and very scared.