Thursday, October 27, 2011

“You have great veins,” declared the lab technician after drawing some of my blood on Monday, and all I could muster was “thanks.” I was at a loss for words. Was this a standard thing to say? A come-on, perhaps? I simply didn’t have a ready reply to compliments directed at my innards, you know? “You should see my spleen” would’ve been the snappy rejoinder, now that I think that about it, but it’s too late. The train has left! But I’ll be ready next time.

Usually, on most Mondays, I refrain from sharing my hemoglobin with other people. Call it a vestigial survival instinct, if you must, but I like to keep the red stuff inside. It’s been about three years since my last health screening, though, so I figured it was time to bite the bullet and make the trip to the doctor’s office. I believe I have an internal clock specially calibrated for unpleasant things like this, because I’ve also started reading recently.

That’s probably unfair. Reading itself isn’t a chore, once I get into a rhythm, but the prospect of cracking that first book open is daunting. At well under 100 pages, I thought Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet would be an easy read, kind of like season one of The Walking Dead in the literary world, punchy and economical with just six episodes. I still haven’t finished it. There are some profound sentences, obviously, but the back cover had gushed about how generations of writers felt like Rilke was speaking to them. Utter horseshit. The book is a compendium of what people did before the Internet. It’s like witnessing a one-sided e-mail chain, and even the mystique of paper could not hide the fact that these letters were never meant for me.