Please don't murder me

Plus God

Hello, my friend! Let me start off by saying how sorry I am for how long it’s been since I wrote anything new here. I am aware that this delay has instilled in you no small degree of anxiousness, worry, and what by now has surely grown into a profound and unshakeable depression. Unmoored by my apparent abandonment, you have struggled to—

What’s that?

You haven’t given it a moment’s thought?

Oh.

Rude.

Well anyway, if you happen to be burdened with a prodigious memory (lucky for me I am not; thus am I always content with myself), it’s possible that you recall that what I was supposed to write, lo these many days now gone by, is the concluding piece of a three-part series.

Part One was My Wife Chose My Death; Part Two was I’m Not Leaving, my wife’s response to that harrowing saga.

At the end of I’m Not Leaving I wrote, Next time: Forty-five years later, I realize I’m not alone.

And here we are. And here I’ve been, lo these many days now gone by, trying to conjure the words to describe something so profoundly personal and (to me) psychologically phenomenal that I should have known, going in, that I would never even come close to finding the words to express it.

What I should have done, right away, was write a post that went like this:

Hello, friends! So, what did I learn when, despite my desperate pleading for her not to, Cat decided to stay by my bedside every second of the whole five days I was intensely busy in the intensive care unit trying not to die and peeing into this thing fourteen freaking times an hour?

Well, it turns out that Cat forced upon me the ultimately transformative realization that beking nurrpe flurrberdurrber. Csjoos!! (Drudipian manaforknitapoo pinkerd! Beenk. Furrder mcdormentater beeking.)

Spinkpinkerdink barcanomous portimionous blervato. Bornorpoken? Morrflivian ef ernok! Parlaomenon fickaminum sciediver.

And then just kept that gibberish up, for pages.

Man that would have been so funny. Don’t you think?

Oh.

Well, we already know you’re in a mood today.

And we know why!

Writer’s block or not, there are two crucially important words that I have very much been wanting to write to those of you who showed Cat so much love for I’m Not Leaving.

Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Cat, the very definition of an introvert, was touched by your kind responses to what she’d written.

A few of you even went so far as to buy her a coffee (through Buy me a coffee).

More of you did that, in fact, than ever bought me a coffee.

Now, did I take that as conclusive proof that we live in a cruel and unjust world?

Of course I didn’t.

But did your altruistic largess inspire Cat to make a truly insufferable number of jokes along the lines of, “Let’s have some coffee—oh, wait, you don’t have any," and, “We’re out of coffee. Should I write something on your blog that people actually like?”

Of course it did.

Why this is here will soon make sense. As much as it ever could.

Oh how I wish that, in the protective cocoon that is our home, Cat were a little more introverted.

But, alas, she ain’t. Which leaves me with little more to say than how lucky it is for that girl that she recently became a U.S. citizen. Because one more, “Can I get you a cup of hot water?” joke out of her, and I’d be on the phone with Homeland Security faster than you can say, “Constitution? What constitution?”

Kristi Noem herself would probably pick up the phone (because DOGE cuts).

“Homeland Security hotline. If you’re not white you’re a blight. Kristi Noem speaking. How can I help?”

“Um, yes, I . . . did you just say if you’re not white you’re—”

“Of course I didn’t. How can I help you, citizen?”

“Yes, I want to report an obnoxiously unfunny woman who—”

“Do you know why we call this a hotline?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Do you know why we call this a hotline?”

“Well, yeah, I—”

“It’s because I’m so freakin’ hot, that’s why. You’ve seen how amazing I look in my HS cap, right—holding a rifle, wearing a BPV?”

“BPV?”

“Bullet-proof vest. You wouldn’t understand. But even in that hooters-hider I’m a stone-cold knockout. Right? I make Pam Bondi look like Sidney Powell, don’t I? Say it. Say I’m hotter than Pam Bondi.”

“You’re hotter than Pam Bondi.”

“You got that right. Now say that Karoline Leavitt is about two years away from looking like Lindsey Graham. Say it!”

“Um—sorry, I dialed the wrong number,” I’d say, and hang up.

Three minutes later a black SUV would run over our mailbox as it skidded to a stop outside our house.

Immediately Cat would turn to me. “What have you done?”

“Nothing! You’re the one who thought it was so funny to bring me an empty coffee cup this morning!”

Okay, I have to get to my job at Home Depot selling doors and windows to people who, without me, would be stuck living inside giant closed cubes.

This is Joe Minton. He installs a lot of the doors I sell to people. Joe is a true craftsman. I’d rather have a $35 entry door installed by Joe than a $2,000 door installed by . . . well, me.

So, before I go to get Joe jobs: What I learned in the hospital is that I am, in fact, not alone. I didn’t think that I thought that I was: I have, after all, been married some 45 years. So I always figured that, you know, I . . . well, wasn’t alone in the world.

But it turns out that deep down inside, for all of this time, I have been going through my life with a kind of core conviction—an understanding that was simply hardwired into my entire system since ‘ere the day that wiring began—that, when push comes to shove, I very much am alone.

One of the (many, many) manifestations of my intractable isolation/ferocious independence is that I keep myself . . . and I really don’t know how to say this . . . defended. I keep myself defended.

I orchestrate all of the interactions I have with people in such a way that, as quickly as possible, they laugh. They enjoy themselves. They like me.

I do this—extremely instinctively, and with a virtual lifetime of practice at it—because people are disinclined to murder someone whose company they happen to be enjoying.

And if there is one thing that I invariably want from another person, it’s that they not murder me.

So I try my best to make that not happen.

But that’s the level of fear I’m dealing with here. Always.

If you happen to have read my novel (Everywhere She’s Not), you have some understanding of how I got to be as I am.

(Also, though, I very much want to say that humor is more than just a means of defense for me. I believe in humor. It’s . . . I mean, everything to me. It’s what I’m designed to make happen, all the time, in my head, just about any time I want to, by simply looking at whatever is before me. The thing I’m looking at will, in essence, talk to me, and say something so insanely funny I can barely ever stand it. Anyway, it’s a whole thing. But it’s my most precious interior thing, by far. And I think everyone has that same thing inside of them. When I make other people laugh, it’s because I’m connecting with them that humor thing that everybody has. It’s a sharing thing. And what on this earth is better than sharing a laugh with someone? Nothing. It’s the absolute best.)

Anyway, for now, lemme just say that having to endure the indignity of having Cat fucking empty my pee plastic thing while I lay helplessly tied up to a bunch of wires and IV drips and all that literally forced me to . . . let her in, frankly.

To a place she’s always been anyway. But a place that I didn’t even know existed.

You can say a lot of things about me, but one of them isn’t that I’m terribly bright. I barely put out enough light to be able to see my own way down life’s path, much less to realize that I have someone—a friend, the best friend anyone could possibly ask for—walking right beside me.

Anyway, I’ve got to get to work.

Do you know the main thing I wanted to say in this post is that for the last three or so months the only thing I’ve been thinking about is that if I don’t start writing about God again, I may simply never write again.

So God: whatever, however you or I or anyone else might conceive of him/her/it. Even the God that is no God at all. All of it.

I can either stop writing, or I can go back to my most basic thing, and write about that.

In these times, with what we’re all going through right now, that’s the only thing that I find I care to explore and talk about. I know I’ll lose subscribers by doing so. But I hope you stick with me on it. Because God is a subject about which I have a lot to say, and I do have the words for it.

Talk to you soon. Thanks for reading/sharing. John