That inhale / gray vision / snap back into color thing: that’s a perfect description of this thing Dan Granata did in Touch, every night. You could see it, and feel it in your gut as it happened. Fwap –> Eyes Snap open –> Hsssssshhhh. Having worked on that play this year – god, with him, with the director Jess, with freaking Toni Press-Coffman the author, which was truly unexpected – all of these people and these stories have definitely helped pave a way for me to deal with the hideous unfairness of early mortality, and realize that all it means is that it’s time to live.

Obviously, understanding that is a journey, not a destination. thanks.

(nice tie / shaving photoset BTDubs. A delightful, revealing stare into your character. Sure you don’t write for Homestarrunner.com?)

I keep writing and rewriting my second paragraph here. I can’t figure out how to say the other bit I want to say. I’ve been at it for, like, 20 minutes now.

Watching precarious things tumble does punch the breath out of me. And there’s this pause at the end of the exhale, where there’s just no movement, no breath, no air, no thought. Just empty ache.

When the inhale happens, and the blood gets a fresh load of oxygen, and the brain sucks on that oxygen and the vision that went gray with the exhale snaps back into color, I find myself looking at…something. Whatever is in front of me: a piece of now, a piece of here. Not to be thought about. Just to be seen. And the echo of that moment, as I slide back into my normal mind, is a reverberating awe.

I don’t really know how to deal with mortality. It scares me. I can’t honestly say it doesn’t.

But wow: my life coincides in time with an artist named Nick Keenan, a dude who makes things in this same world I’m in. I get to trade ideas with him over an electron net. And wow: turn my head and I’ll see a thousand more humans, none of them exactly the same, but all of them–all of us–vibrating the same piece of the human timeline.

I’m not a religious guy, but that fact feels so sacred it gives me shivers.

So here’s to Will, and here’s to Travis and Jim, and here’s to Nick, and here’s to sharing a moment in time together, and doing something good with it.

Maybe you should add a second link to “Buy Me a Beer”. For when a coffee just don’t quite cut it.