I always imagine the worst. The other day I was driving on the highway in the car pool lane with Mary. The center divider was whizzing by. I imagined the car flipping. The accident had killed us both. It’s not like I make an effort to go there. It just seems sometimes to be where my mind wanders. I run through these scenarios to their horrible ultimate conclusion.

At work, I spend hours on the phone cataloging the hardships of strangers. The woman who’s mother died has been left with a house in foreclosure. A husbands wife was hospitalized with a mental disorder after she went on a two week spending spree. He’s now over $60,000 in debt. Meanwhile, I’ve got my rent check. I’ve got Mary. I tell myself I’m lucky.

I just finished reading Joan Didion’s book ‘The White Album.’ In it she writes this fragment…

“Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment’s high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams…”

Didion starts the book by saying, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Only, she’s writing about a period of time where she ‘began to doubt the premises of all the stories’ she had ever told herself. I’m not there yet. I still cling to the narrative that I impose on the disjointed and incongruous events of my workday, as well as to the images of my bad dreams. I end up writing the moral. I tell myself a story in order to live. I tell myself I am lucky.

(Photography and digital painting in Photoshop)