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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The one thing those who have been sick really know, which thousands of people are learning from covid every day now, is that ultimately you have no control over your body. I will try not to get covid, but I might get it. If I get it, I will try not to die, but I might die. That’s what having a body is. Only when you get sick, or maybe have a child, do you realize what a half-familiar mammal you’ve wound up living inside—that you can no more tell it to stop feeling horrible than you can order your stomach to be flatter or your eyes to be bluer.
Maybe no one wants to be reminded that most of us have nothing to do with the military—that its enlisted membership consists of the financially desperate and uncomfortably zealous. Maybe we elect draft dodgers because we’re a nation of them.
Irony is built into all plagues—built into death, perhaps, because irony is based on partial knowledge, and death is the thing we do not know.
Inside I feel a yearning for something I have never understood, god probably, and I wonder the usual things, which is who we are, and why, and why it ends. I change the album, roll a neat joint, and watch as eventually the last light goes. And so the days glide forward, into a future we have to hope other people haven’t already made for us.
