It worries me somewhat that my friends and colleagues are more concerned than I am that I experienced my fourth cardioversion Sunday.
“Experienced” is the wrong word. I experienced, and have a clear memory of, the 150 beats-per-minute irregular jangle in my chest, alternately exhilirating and tiring; the two ER trips, one for pink pills and one for (and this is why I love the emergency-responder sense of humor) “Edison Medicine;” the quiet peopling of “my” ER bay with what now seems in retrospect an awful lot of medical personnel; the partial deforestation of my chest so the defibrillator contact won’t arc; the smell of IV-administered chemicals in my nasal capillaries; the slow drop into warm unconsciousness from a ring of too-casual faces. I’ve seen it before, twice in succession five years ago and once three years after.
But of the cardioversion itself, the targeted electrocution which Ann tells me is always difficult to watch, I have absolutely no memory. And therefore, the seriousness of the situation — the potential for blood to clot in and shoot out of my atria toward my personal brain — somehow has never sunk in. Except for those around me.
All I seem to carry away with me (apart from the deep stretchy scorch in my chest, and a somewhat longer life) is a sense of the Universe’s fragile tensity — mine, yours and everyone else’s, all sideways in space and forward and backwards in Time); a sense that paints with echoing joy and terror everything it touches. (Synesthetics intentional.)
So maybe I shouldn’t be bothered by not being more bothered. Kissing the face of your sweetie can be intoxicating enough — how much more so to kiss the face of Reality, or of God?
You Can't Stop The Signal:
Age is weird. I mean not as weird as being alive, which seems too weird for much consideration, but having time pass and then to appear at a given age where, years before, there was some notion that this age meant “adulthood” or “old-man-hood” or whatever. The weird comes from being stranded with the reality that this ain’t much different than “childhood.”
This means that time must necessarily also be weird, which brings me within spittin’ distance of the point. The geometry of time is symmetric to that of energy in our universe (c.f. Noether’s thorem, gauge theory etc) and what Neal experienced, whether aware or not, was the injection of a bolt of energy so that the time he could experience would be extended. As my longest standing friend, it kinda freaks me out, but from the perspective that this is all just so weird anyway, I dunno. It’s just weird, right? And that’s the point. Not real sharp, is it?