My life right now: feeding a microwaved mix of canned food and sliced “deli-style” turkey to a cat that cycles through days of sneezing blood and mucus interspersed with days of just-plain gargled breathing; I type with my left hand on the keyboard while in the right arm cradling my little velveteen feline buddy as he falls asleep into the cat dream world of his, sawing branches with his snoring.

Thus, I am not alone.

I eat leftover popcorn and watch “The Giant Mechanical Man.”

I ruminate on stories about PE ratios and declining middle class wealth.

I masticate.

I expectorate.

I do not like deciding the fate of others but I go ahead anyway, stirring the pond’s waters and redirecting the pebbled waves I quietly dropped in my monklike meditation.

It — the mysterious two-letter word that commands attention at the beginning of this sentence — is no easier now to order the elimination of labeled beings we train ourselves to see as the Others, “them,” as it was the first time I let peer pressure push me to end the life of a being that could not live in the hustle and bustle of so-called modern society.

I is one letter less than it.

I am this artificial label for a relatively dense set of states of energy we sometimes say is a human being.

A head concussion in high school split my brain apart.

Ever since then, I have reconstructed the universe in small quantities and big ideas.

Something about my corpus callosum bothers me.

Gray matter matters, too.

I have stopped drinking alcoholic liquids/beverages.

I have dedicated at least one book each to my parents, my wife, Monica, Ann P., Maggie and who else?  I have not finished the book I plan to dedicate to Jenn.

I can say what a book is not but can I truly, really say what a book is?

Twenty-one days since I last checked the Mars countdown calendar.

My next book to read: Sagittarius Rising.