Jeremiah's School of Levitation

I was watching the assassination of President Kennedy the other day and I see that we are the most fragile things, aren't we? We go on through our days, and we hate and love, and we say funny things and we think awful things, and we trap ourselves in routine and we come home and sleep, thinking we've actually lived a day when, in reality, we've merely let a day have its way with us. Sometimes we win, sometimes we eat the bear, but sometimes the bear eats us and, sometimes, someone has a camera and gets to see us get the side of our heads blown off.

So, then what? I was riding the elevator in my office job prison unit and I noticed that they've now installed some video screen in there that gives me news as I ascend, telling me the state of the Dow Jones and the latest news about American Idol, and I get the weather report about weather that I just stepped out of and, suddenly, I'm at my floor and I realize that I couldn't even hide from the world in an elevator and that, if we thought about it, we were just thrust through a dark shaft on hydraulics that we trust and we have some sort of respectful silence that is either a reflection on our mortality, and how fragile we are against the strips of whatever that is hauling us up the floors, or we are embarassed to turn to the person next to us and say something like "What the hell are we doing?"

Don't be a nut, though. Stay shut up. And watch the damn tv in the elevator instead of the LED indicator telling you what floor you're on. I think the little TV should show, over and over, JFK's head getting peeled off, and that would make you grasp the moment a little more tighter. That's really the secret. How tightly are you holding this moment? The moment that you are still alive.

I know. That's exhausting. But, that's what you got TWO lungs AND a heart for.

I went to Dallas a few years ago and my hosts took me to the spot where Kennedy was shot. The grassy knoll. The white painted "X"s in the middle of the busy street where the bullets met their mark. I shook in my sneakers.

I want to go home and kiss some bodies right now. Life in a cube farm is no life.