A history

Waring: This may not be edifying.

Long shot: Louisville, Kentucky. Suburb. Focus on a manicured house. Cut to: closed bathroom door. Pathetic whimpers coming from inside. That's me--I'm on the bowl. I'm moaning because I've having a bit of trouble, you know, getting it out. That's normal. What is not normal is the pain. It's in my head, which feels like a balloon ready to burst. I stop pushing, grab a hold of the towel rack, and take a series of deep breaths. The pain fades quick as it came. I push again--some things are stubborn--and there's the pain again. Someone's taken a plumber's wrench to my temples. I breathe, pain goes, I push, it comes, and it's getting worse as we go. This lasts a very long and memorable twenty minutes.

My girlfriend, Trudi, stands outside the door and calls my name, wants to know if I'm alright. She's afraid. I feel this with the cracking of her voice. It sounds fragile. I hold the wall for balance and look at myself in the mirror, gasping, flush and weary. I tell her that I am fine, but as the words come out of my mouth I do not know if they are true.

Let me be clear. I am not a man with a history of excessive self-preservation. With the aid of the wondrous array of chemical products available to the modern youth, I have--in my past--enthusiastically propelled myself to the brink of physical and mental decay, despair and despondence. I've even snorted enough powder of various sorts to wrack my nose out of shape (I needed surgery to complete my clean-up). But even at my worst, lowest and most depraved moments of ruin--I've never felt how I feel in this bathroom right now. *Destructible*.