Why Are You So Sad? Read Online Free PDF Page A

proposal to farm their organs. “Let’s give these people a purpose,” a Southern politician was heard saying on the Senate floor.
    Brenda held a spoonful of cereal by her mouth, waiting until she had finished digesting an important point in one of the editorials before finally rewarding herself with the oat rings. She moved on to another section of the paper, scooped up more cereal, and chuckled at a cartoon.
    â€œDo you think it is strange that we now gladly eat things that are so uniform?” I asked my wife. “Don’t you think we take too much comfort in the unnatural?”
    â€œThere is a funny piece about body bags in the Living section,” she said. Her jaw was making those noises while she chewed: another postmatrimonial discovery. She swallowed and said, “I filled out this little joke of yours,” passing the survey across the table like it was some dirty thing she had found on the street.
    â€œOh,” I said. I must have left a copy out on the table. A mistake. She was likely to dismiss my concerns. To discourage my project. To threaten me with practicalities.
    â€œOh?” She said it like a stern teacher.
    â€œMaybe I got carried away.”
    She started saying other things, a lot of things, but I couldn’t hear her. Or at least a central part of me resisted hearing her. She might want to categorize this behavior as not listening, but that sounds more willful than the way I experienced it. For me it felt like I was being held captive by an instinctively dissociative response to her words. Certain words, like
remember
and
before
and
again
, or phrases, like “we’ve been through this” or “you need to let go,” were triggering sensations that distracted me from the very same words that were initiating the response, and this reaction, this disconnection, had a distant familiarity to it, like hazy memories of feelings falling down to me out of time from a well-traveled place. I know this doesn’t appear to make much sense. The best way I can describe experiencing this echo from somewhere else in time is if you imagined a roller coaster that did a full 360-degree loop, and either it was moving so fast or gravity was so weak that you could somehow drop something from the top part of the loop, when you were upside down, and it would defy the rules of time and fall into your lap at the point in the past when your car was only just beginning to start the loop. Or maybe it wasn’t the past. Maybe you took the loop so fast that you were actually on your second time around when you caught the thing you had just dropped. You lost count. You were turned around. Down was up. Before was after. Past was future. See, it’s confusing, which is probably why I don’t bother describing it to people anymore. But just in case, here’s another way I have attempted to explain it: As a child you say something to your grandfather and it doesn’t make sense to either of you, but you’re a child and therefore less rooted in language, which frees you up to say things that are poetic, if also gibberish. And your grandfather kind of laughs at it, because it is meaningful in its amusing, nonsensical way, and the laughter makes you feel good, because it is a form of recognition. And then seventy years later, your grandson says the same thing to you, at least to the best that your tired memory can verify, and it still doesn’t make sense, but it does effectively make you wonder which event came first. So, anyway, this happens to me sometimes. Certain words may result in a kind of sizzle in my head, or maybe it’s a resizzle. I have come to think of it as a bird with rare markings that keeps showing up at notable moments in my life—funerals, warm nonverbal connections with strangers on a bus, blind dates gone wrong, traffic accidents. The bird is a silent witness to that cousin of the epiphany where you feel a deep awareness of a moment