give thanks
1. Physically clear of infirmities, except myopia, and they tell me spectacles are back in.
2. Mentally, escitalopram oxalate keeps the devil in check.
3. My family, who have always conducted themselves well, with love and care. Even my parents' divorce was more amicable than most. And they're still alive.
4. This is sort of a blanket amnesty to girlfriends and lovers from 1998 forward. You're all good people. We had some fun.
5. This good old "Inter-Net," without which I would presumably be xeroxing flyers about my Sturm und Drang and stapling them to telephone poles.
6. My improbable luck in being born into such a particular stratum of such a particular nation-state as to avoid famine, armed conflict, schistosomiasis, illiteracy, persecution of all sorts; further improbable luck in having—I still don't know what to call it. Aptitude, I guess.
7. Sun, air, rock, sky, I don't discount you.
8. Chaucer and Keats, Beethoven and Shostakovich, Eliot and Joyce, Cézanne and Pollock and Pixies and Radiohead, the good Lord knows I've needed all of you.
9. Siddhartha Gautama, Bodhidharma, Dogen, St. Francis, you no less.
10. Readers and friends, you above all.
