the problem is that writing takes time. It takes a toll. It isn’t just a stream of brilliance, effortless and meaningful, although for some reason, always in hindsight of course, I remember it differently. But seriously, that’s the number one problem with writing; it takes time: it takes time to do, it steals time away from living to do it well. While writing you cannot live (shamelessly maligning Blanchot here), but in order to write you have to live sometime (i.e. ‘Write what you know…’). And I hate it taking me away from this distraction of a life I am living.
A funny little man showed up my door today. I had been expecting him although at the time, I had completely forgotten. A little old man was at my door and I knew he was Jewish before looking at him because his name had all the right vowels and hiccuping consonants that Jewish names sometimes have. And when I opened the door, my mother was peaking through the shutters whispering, ‘Who is that man?’ And he shuffled in muttering his name, asking which way he could go in, either up the stairs to our apartment or into my parent’s home. I pointed into my parent’s kitchen and he shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘well that’s as good place as any.’
He was going to give me a ‘paramedical’ exam: draw a little blood, take my blood pressure, ask for a urine sample. It was for the life insurance policy I had taken out, given that my wife and I were going to soon be buying a home. He set up his tools, a cardboard box of plastic paraphernalia, a pair of rubber gloves, a cup and a smaller cardboard box with postage. No little black bag, no chit-chat, nothing to drink thank you. He asked for my arm and he handled it rather weakly, not out of embarrassment or even that he couldn’t manhandle my arm into the position he needed it to take my blood pressure, but rather he resigned to some unknown fact about the situation that I was not privy to. He noted my BP (120/70, not bad at all), then fiddled around with the short nosed needle and the vials he was going to hook up to it. He asked me to make a fist repeatedly, he tightened the tourniquet, tapped the inside of my elbow just like they do in those old WWII movies. And I don’t know why I remember it that way, but it seems that this tired old man in front me, sticking a shunt of a needle into what was obviously not a vein, was somehow connected to that time, even if he would have been just a boy.
He didn’t talk, just sighed as he snapped off one vial and snapped in the next. And when he was done with drawing blood from my not-vein, he asked me to put my finger on the hole as hard as I could and even took the finger of my other hand to show me where the hole was. Meantime he took little bar code stickers off of my application I guess and labeled each vial. Then he fiddled with the urine cup, which turned out had one little nip on its edge, like a spout and handed it to me and placed two other bar coded vials into it. ‘If you don’t mind,’ he said, as if it was all obvious, which I guess, it must have been. I had been nervous during the whole time that I wouldn’t be able to ‘perform’ this part of the show, as the old man was drawing blood I tried figure out where my bladder would be at.
But it went alright, almost too well, and as I was handing him the urine samples, I noticed he had already taken off his gloves. ‘Is that it?’ I asked. ‘Yes, yes,’ he got up and shuffled into his coat on the way out, ‘stay well…’ And the little man who I had been expecting but forgotten was gone with all my blood and piss in a box to be dropped off at the nearest post office.