Circles are White. eight.

Ai Lun
Ai Lun
Jul 21, 2017 · 6 min read

It’s Friday and I’m supposed to be happy and proud. Proud cause I forced myself to grieve for my friend in an appropriate not over-the-top way without talking myself out of it. I hugged his fiance who totally wasn’t even teary just cause I think most of the people there had been at the funeral and had already finished grieving.

Hypothetically I could be proud just cause I’m on less medicine than I was this time around last year (anti-anxiety meds not anti-psychotic meds) which means less side effects, less ruining my health, less Carrie Fisher factor to my life. Check box.

I’m still too abnormal to justify comparing my life to other peoples’ lives or career goals to their goals. This week was all about maintaining, regrouping, and spoon-feeding my child-toddler self in ways I don’t usually do. It was all about lowering my standards and not being paranoid I’m getting cancer. (If there was a pee test that could screen cancer I’d be doing that daily. I think about cancer multiple times a day.) I know it’s a fake thought that’s just a re-occurring one that has the potential to steal my joy but it pops up all the time. It pops up about as often as guys think about sex. That’s way to frequent. Now you could see how that could become debilitating.

Being in a low place was a natural side effect from taking 2 broad-spectrum anti-biotics. Anti-biotics kill all the nice flora and fauna in your gutt and other places and no amount of yogurt and kombucha will immediately revivify a clear cutting of that forest. Technically, we’re the first species anywhere in all of history that’s had access to these kinds of drugs so we don’t have an accurate timeline of the pros and cons of pill popping over the course of millennia. I’d say it’s not looking good for humankind but I could just be jaded cause my friend died.

The problem is a good guy didn’t just die. In order to die that young and randomly you “probably” had to have done something to yourself. I knew in my heart my friend wouldn’t have pulled the plug intentionally cause his younger brother did that and he didn’t believe in that. But then what? Hard to imagine drinking yourself to death. Course in California we have a lot of fraternity problems and pretty much annually someone gets talked into doing 21 shots on their 21st birthday. Pretty hard to imagine my friend doing 21 shots. So I mention this line of thought to his intimate jewish friends who tells me the truth. He just settled a big case. He got the payout on a wednesday night and unable to contain himself he bought something he could OD on. No one was with him. He wasn’t acutely missed until Saturday night when his girlfriend went over to the apartment and found him. No one wanted to deal with it until Sunday.

I feel horrible like I could have prevented it somehow. Maybe I didn’t know my friend well enough. If only I’d made time to attend the jewish community functions I at least would have had more time to spend with him. I would have shared some more recent memories or known how close he was to buying a house. I would know how many cases he had or have a copy of his new business cards that now have to have his name removed from them. So unfortunately I’m playing the guilt game. The family seems to be handling everything their own way without the help of his best business partners so that’s a kind of slap in the face to his loyal friends but the backlash is that we’re all united over it. We all really made time to know eachother and support eachother. If there’s a way to make an unbreakable bond I’m sure it involves picking up the torch and carrying it onwards of all the good work / Tikkun olam that his lifes’ work represented.

I’m not sure what to do and now I’m questioning everything. Is being a librarian a good enough outlet for my soul and my lifes’ work? If I do know even a little bit about the law and legal system in Philadelphia shouldn’t I be using that knowledge to better the world? Otherwise I’m just depriving society of my gift. Isn’t that why anyone bothers to do anything? Not just to survive but to not deprive society of what we’re capable of contributing?

It brings up the unique-ness of human character. If I were to die right now I wouldn’t be replaceable. No one would bike around to all the events I go to. No one would work my three jobs or even want to. No one else is too bored and too ADD to look for a cable to charge their wifi hotspot. Mostly I think no one would bother to take the medicine I take to try and make it all happen. Most people only want to work so hard. I guess I feel like for the majority of my 20’s I worked hard; but I didn’t really manifest anything in a way that I had something to show for that effort. Now I’m 35 and I have an ego and I want something to show for that effort. I want to sign the letters behind my name that come after it, whatever they are. More importantly I want to have the right name. I want my identity to be a singularity. I want to know that I’m 100% me and a good enough jewish girl who happens to also be a christian. And righteous. If I could I would be more righteous. But maybe I already am since I’m not the one who just overdosed. I’m left with a paradox I can’t solve similar to Zenos’ ….I don’t want to consider the fact that there could be righteous drug addicts out there. That would mean there’s righteous prostitutes out there too; that just doesn’t compute.

Not being able to control your impulses enough and killing the Opus of your life over a drug addiction isn’t something I can get behind. It’s a terrible ‘made-in-america’ societal problem: drug addiction. You do something once in your life when you’re young and it changes you forever. Trust me I know I feel that way about orgasms. If I could find a way to O.D. on orgasms I probably would; but I digress. We don’t just lay in bed and orgasm or do coke or smoke ourselves to death; if we did we’d be the most unsuccessful biological phenomenon ever, which wouldn’t make sense. We spent all this time being engineered to greatness and now we’re going to shoot ourselves down?

I’m too naive and shizo to know how to deal with death the right way. I recall doing some sort of identity transmogrification when my childhood friend Zoe Nutter died. She died in South America on a trip while hiking Macchu Picchu trail; fell off the face of a cliff and never came back. It was a really bad way to have closure. Not being able to see Avi or hear him tell me ‘wow you’re tall’ and roll my eyes at him one last time is super annoying and I feel cursed by this sort of ‘no closure’ loop. I’m not too focused on death I’m more focused on living and planning my life but if I were going to go how would I go ? I’d go to Niagara Falls and throw myself in. I figure the 5 seconds of panic before the water crushed me would probably give me a heart attack. I hear alot of people including but not limited to Native Americans have gone that way. Who would I leave my money to? Probably a womans organization; whatever the feminist equivalent of the Nobel prize is but there isn’t one. I would have to get rich and create one. I’d better get busy living or get busy dying. Dying is so passe and lets face it despite being schizo I really do have great friends so living God willing it shall be.

)